Two, Three, Many McCarthyisms

Review of: Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, Jay Feldman, Anchor, 416 pages

By Clark Stooksbury

Ex: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/

 

“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me.” The oft-recorded folk standard tells of a misty encounter with the legendary labor activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Hill was executed in Utah in 1915, after a dubious trial, for a double murder he most likely did not commit. In Manufacturing Hysteria, a wide-ranging history of sedition panics and government repression in modern America, journalist Jay Feldman uses Hill’s execution as an example of fear run amok.

Feldman begins with the administration of Woodrow Wilson. The 28th president was an authoritarian who began stoking fears of “hyphenated-Americans”—whom he claimed “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life”—before the United States went to war with Germany. After entering the Great War, the Wilson administration and a compliant Congress enacted the Espionage Act of 1917, which gave the government vast powers of repression. Senator William Borah of Idaho, one of the few legislators to vote against the act, stated that “a more autocratic, more Prussian measure could not be found in Germany.” The legislation apparently wasn’t Prussian enough and was soon joined by the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”

Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs became the most famous free-speech prisoner during the Great War. He was indicted in 1918 for declaiming at a Canton, Ohio Socialist picnic that, inter alia, the “patriotic duty” of the ruling class “never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.” The prosecuting attorney called him “the palpitating pulse of the sedition crusade.” The jury agreed, and Debs received a ten-year sentence, served until it was commuted in 1921 by President Harding.

The Sedition Act gave Postmaster General Albert Burleson power over every publication in the country. Burleson directed local postmasters to “keep a close watch on unsealed matters, newspapers, etc.” The Post Office then proceeded to ban numerous, mostly Socialist publications. When an issue of The Masses was censored, editor Max Eastman protested to Woodrow Wilson, as did Amos Pinchot and John Reed. Their complaints went unheeded, and Burleson added insult to injury by revoking the second-class mailing permit from The Masses and other publications that had had an issue banned, on the grounds that they were no longer periodicals.

Manufacturing hysteria is much easier with the aid of a compliant press. Feldman documents the leading role played by the New York Times in stoking fear of “hyphenated-Americans” and immigrant radicals. When the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported, the Times practically spat nails at them. “With the general American gratification at the departure of these unclean spirits may well be mingled something of shame to remember how long they suffered to afflict us.” It wasn’t  just the Times—Feldman quotes papers from the Seattle Times to the Washington Post supporting the deportation of, as the Post put it, “bewhiskered, ranting, howling, mentally warped, law-defying aliens.”

Elite newspaper editors used words, but angry mobs often resorted to bloodshed. Manufacturing Hysteria begins with a prologue describing numerous examples of mob violence, including the 1918 lynching of Robert Paul Prager, who was suspected of being a spy. “On April 3, a group of miners seized Prager and, employing the ritual widely practiced on anyone suspected of disloyalty, compelled him to kiss the flag.” Collinsville, Illinois officials made feeble attempts to save Prager’s life, but the mob broke him out of custody and hanged him from a tree. Eleven defendants were eventually acquitted of his murder in a trial described as a “farcical patriotic orgy.”

After the war widespread paranoia fostered several attempted or successful terrorist bombings, allowing the federal government to keep the heat on socialists and anarchists. A series of mail bombs caused explosions that rocked seven cities on June 2, 1919, including at the home of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. A leaflet found near the Palmer residence spouted incendiary rhetoric: “There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder; we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction…” The crimes were never solved: evidence suggested that the federal government suspected a small band of Italian-American anarchists known as the Galleanists, but it chose instead to fan fears of a national conspiracy.

The 1919 Red Scare helped advance the career of a young J. Edgar Hoover at what was then the Bureau of Investigation (BI). In 1921, he was elevated to its assistant director under President Harding. After a Justice Department house cleaning in 1924, the new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, promoted Hoover again. Feldman notes Hoover’s cynicism in portraying himself as a “champion of civil liberties and tolerance” to please the new regime. The cynical ploy worked so well that Hoover won the endorsement of the American Civil Liberties Union after he convinced ACLU founder Roger Baldwin that he had not been a supporter of the Palmer Raids and repressive tactics of the BI. Once ensconced, Hoover gripped the reins of power so tightly that they could only be pried from his cold, dead hands nearly 50 years later.

Stone instituted reforms to reel in the BI and refocus it on law enforcement instead of tracking subversives. The rise of organized crime during Prohibition helped to give the bureau new purpose for a time. President Franklin Roosevelt—whom Feldman notes possessed an “often cavalier disregard for civil liberties”—uncorked the bottle again when he met with Hoover in 1936 to discuss the subversive activities of suspected Fascists and Communists. FDR was particularly concerned with the German American Bund. The result was an FBI back in the business of domestic intelligence gathering.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Roosevelt administration issued a proclamation restricting the activities of Japanese aliens in the U.S., and shortly thereafter he would do the same regarding German and Italian aliens. Only people of Japanese ancestry, however, were placed in internment camps on a large scale. Feldman writes that “a cloud of suspicion hung over all three communities, based in large part on the assumption and fear that aliens’ loyalties were necessarily divided between the United States and their countries of origin.” German and Italian aliens avoided large-scale internment because they were too great in number and were protected by the administration’s fear of angering the sizable German-American and Italian-American communities. Feldman quotes two very different columnists supporting the internment of people of Japanese ancestry:

Such disparate and influential syndicated newspaper pundits as the measured liberal Walter Lippmann and the acerbic conservative Westbrook Pegler both came out in favor of removal. In a piece called ‘The Fifth Column on the Coast,’ Lippmann argued for ‘a policy of mass evacuation and mass internment,’ and three days later Pegler fulminated, ‘The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now—and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.’

The aftermath of World War II saw the country embroiled in a second Red Scare. In the 1940s, former spies Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers publicly admitted to having been Soviet agents and exposed, among others, high-ranking officials like Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss as being spies as well. White denied the charges and died of a heart attack within days of testifying before Congress. Hiss also denied the charges under oath and was later convicted of perjury. Both were implicated by the secret Venona Project, which tracked Soviet espionage in the United States. One weakness of Manufacturing Hysteria is that Feldman gives too little credence to these charges and neglects to mention the Venona evidence.

 After Republican gains in the 1946 midterm elections, the Truman administration began a series of anticommunist loyalty investigations within the federal government, establishing the Employees Loyalty Program by executive order in 1947. The fear of communism set the stage for the rise of Joseph McCarthy, who gave his infamous Lincoln Day speech in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950, just days after Hiss was convicted of perjury. “McCarthyism” would become a byword for second Red Scare.

With his explosive charges of Soviet spies in high places, McCarthy became a dominant force in American politics before sawing himself off of the limb he sat on. The Wisconsin senator ceased to be a significant force after he was censured by his fellow legislators in 1954, but the hunt for subversives continued. The FBI instituted a series of “Counterintelligence Programs”—COINTELPRO—during the 1950s to entrap real and imagined subversives. The most famous target of Hoover and the FBI was Martin Luther King. The investigation of King was based the assumption that some of his associates were Communists, but the FBI’s level of attention suggests a more personal motivation. Hoover intervened to keep Marquette University from granting King an honorary degree and was especially agitated at King’s winning a Nobel Peace Prize. The bureau’s most egregious abuse of power in this case was a crude attempt to wreck King’s marriage by sending him illegally recorded tapes of his marital infidelities, accompanied by a crudely forged letter encouraging him to commit suicide before his “filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

The harassment of King and other COINTELPRO abuses came to light toward the end of Hoover’s career as the level of trust Americans had in their government was collapsing.  COINTELPRO was exposed by a group styling themselves the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI, whose members broke into a federal office in Media, Pennsylvania and began mailing pilfered documents to reporters and legislators.

Feldman calls for vigilance in the wake of continuing assaults on civil liberties, and there are plenty of areas of to be concerned about, from the national hysteria that followed the 9/11 attacks to the trend toward militarization of law enforcement. There have been notable civil-liberties successes, however, in the last century: if the Bush administration had had the same level of authority in 2002 as Woodrow Wilson did in 1917, the feds would have strangled The American Conservative in its crib, and the war critics who filled its pages would have gone to prison.

Clark Stooksbury writes from Knoxville, Tennessee.

Governo Globale

Governo Globale

La storia segreta del Nuovo Ordine Mondiale

Autore: Enrica Perucchietti  Gianluca Marletta 

Prezzo: € 10,03 (invece di €11,80)

 

Vuoi scoprire cos'è il Nuovo Ordine Mondiale?

Crisi economiche, rivoluzioni, guerre. Che cosa si cela dietro il rischio di crollo dell’Eurozona, la cosiddetta “Primavera Araba”, l’uccisione di Osama bin Laden, la guerra in Libia, i cablogrammi di Wikileaks, l’attentato di Oslo e Utoja e l’insediamento del governo Monti? Che cosa lega l’omicidio di John Kennedy all’assassinio di Olof Palme? Come fanno eventi in apparenza così diversi e distanti ad avere un’origine comune?

In questo saggio si svela per la prima volta in modo chiaro, completo e documentato, la storia segreta del Nuovo Ordine Mondiale, dalle sue origini a oggi: la genesi, l’ideologia e le tappe storiche, dalle origini della modernità all'attuale sfida militare che vede come terreno di battaglia il Medio Oriente. Chi ha coniato il termine e chi perpetua in segreto il disegno di instaurazione di un governo globale? Quali interessi si nascondono dietro questo progetto? Che ruolo hanno i membri di affiliazioni e gruppi occulti che riuniscono i protagonisti della vita politica, economica e finanziaria globali? Quale disegno si nasconde dietro la diffusione della tossicodipendenza di massa, fenomeni inquietanti e criminali come il satanismo, certi movimenti “culturali”, o di “controcultura”, come la “rivoluzione” psichedelica? In questo gioco di equilibri, quale obiettivo nasconde il progetto di instaurazione di un Governo Globale che lungo il suo cammino assoggetta i Popoli, fa cadere nazioni e governi come pedine di un complesso domino di cui non si riesce a vedere il disegno complessivo?

Anteprima - Governo Globale - Libro

Sull'ondata della profezia Maya in merito all'imminente fine dei tempi, la sensazione che la fine della nostra civiltà possa coincidere con l'instaurazione di un governo globale di stampo totalitario si è trasmessa a gran parte della popolazione mondiale. Le catastrofi naturali, le crisi economiche e il disincanto delle masse nei confronti della politica hanno insinuato il dubbio che qualcosa di tremendamente drammatico stia per accadere. I segni di una trasformazione generale della società e del mondo, così come lo conosciamo, vengono di volta in volta individuati nei più disparati settori.

Continua a leggere: > Anteprima - Governo Globale - Libro

Indice

Introduzione

• Che cos’è il Nuovo Ordine Mondiale?

Parte Prima

• Alle radici di un’idea: dalla Riforma protestante alla “missione” della stirpe anglosassone
• Messianismo e Nuovo Ordine Mondiale
• La questione dei “poteri occulti”
• Dal popolo alla “massa”: tecniche e strategie per un dominio globale
• La creazione del Mondo Nuovo: droga, sesso, de popolazione e “nuova spiritualità”

Parte Seconda

• Come abbattere un regime: da Wikileaks alla “Primavera araba”, il sogno di un Nuovo Medio Oriente
• Signoraggio e crisi economica: da Kennedy a Obama
• Il “trattamento” Milosevic e le guerre dell’Impero: dalla Serbia alla Libia
• 11 settembre 2001: le menzogne dell’Impero e la dottrina della guerra “preventiva”
• Guerra al terrorismo, ovvero gli interessi delle lobby in Iraq e in Afghanistan
• Le nove vite dello Sceicco del terrore: Osama bin Laden
• False flags e scandali di corte: dalla strage norvegese all’Eliseo
• Italia, Stato di banchieri: dalle profezie di Tremonti al tecnogoverno Monti
• L’ombelico del Nuovo Mondo: USA o Cina?

 

 

Acquista online su Macrolibrarsi

Le Qatar démasqué

Financement de la droite israélienne, soutien au terrorisme, déstabilisation des pays arabes et … achat de la Coupe du Monde

Ex: http://mediabenews.wordpress.com/

 

 

Selon l’ancienne chef de la diplomatie israélienne, l’Emirat a financé les campagnes du Likoud, du Premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahu, et Israël Beïtenou du ministre des Affaires étrangères, Avigdor Liebermann.

Qui sème la «révolution», récolte le chaos. L’Emirat du Qatar, véritable parrain des pseudos «printemps arabes», vient d’être piégé par ses propres manigances. Ce minuscule Etat, qui aurait pu s’appeler «Al Jazeera» – cette chaîne de télévision qui continue d’attiser le feu de la discorde dans les pays arabes – ne recule devant rien. Il est même prêt à s’allier avec le diable et à sacrifier les causes nobles pour s’arroger le leadership du Monde arabe.

Après le scandale de l’«achat» de la Coupe du Monde 2022, révélé il y a moins d’une semaine par le magazine France Football, c’est au tour de l’ancienne ministre israélienne des Affaires étrangères, Tzipi Livni, de jeter un autre pavé dans la mare, en soulevant littéralement le «Kamis» de l’émir du Qatar. S’exprimant sur une chaîne de télévision israélienne, juste après les législatives emportées par le Likoud de Benyamin Netanyahu, l’«amie» de Cheikha Moza, a affirmé sur un plateau de télévision, en Israël, que le Qatar a financé, lors des dernières élections législatives, les campagnes du Likoud du Premier ministre, Benjamin Netanyahu, et Israël Beïtenou du ministre des Affaires étrangères, Avigdor Liebermann.

Les deux responsables israéliens auraient empoché, respectivement 3 millions et 2,5 millions de dollars. Selon la responsable du parti Kadima, certains hauts responsables «commettent une grave erreur, car nous apparaissons dans le monde comme des voleurs de grand chemin». Pour elle, «le Qatar est un pays ami et je suis personnellement très amie avec Madame Moza, mais il s’agit de notre Etat et de notre démocratie qu’il ne faut pas discréditer dans le monde». Le plus curieux dans tout cela, est que les deux formations sont connues pour leur hostilité au Monde arabe. D’autant plus qu’elles prônent une intense vague de colonisation, tout en s’opposant à la création d’un Etat palestinien indépendant. Quelle en est donc la contrepartie? Selon des sources concordantes, Doha aurait obtenu des deux partis d’extrême droite israélienne, la création, sous réserve de leur élection, d’une fédération jordano-palestinienne, présidée par le mouvement Hamas. Un vieux «projet» remis au goût du jour, à la faveur de l’éclatement du Monde arabe.

Ce qui est d’autant plus curieux c’est le fait que les autorités qataries n’ont pas réagi aux déclarations de Livni, alors que du côté de la presse occidentale, c’est le silence radio. L’objectif est donc, somme toute, clair: il s’agit pour l’Occident de faire de l’Emirat du Qatar un sous-traitant de ses desseins de déstabilisation et d’atomisation du Monde arabe. Leur principal objectif est la mise en oeuvre du projet du Grand Moyen-Orient, revu et corrigé, par l’installation, de petits États théocratiques, sans objectifs, ni assise démocratique.

De fait, la «bombe» lâchée par Livni, confirme les grands soupçons qui pèsent sur cet émirat de moins de 500.000 habitants, devenu ces derniers temps le financier de la mort de l’Occident dans les quatre coins du monde, notamment dans le monde arabo-musulman. Ce qui se passe aujourd’hui en Egypte, en Tunisie, en Libye, en Syrie… et même dans le Sahel, répond à un plan de déstabilisation prédéfini pour plonger ces pays dans les ténèbres du Moyen âge, avec des fetwas «grassement» financées par l’Emirat de Cheikh Hamad.

Sur un autre chapitre, et en plus des révélations de France Football concernant les «magouilles» ayant présidé à l’octroi de l’organisation de la Coupe du Monde 2022 au Qatar, le journal français, Le Canard enchaîné a révélé, il y a six mois, documents à l’appui, que le Qatar finance le Mujao et autres groupes terroristes au nord du Mali. Comme il l’a également fait en Libye en soutenant les rebelles islamistes qui continuent de mettre le pays à feu et à sang. L’émir Hamad n’a-t-il pas déclaré en personne que le Qatar finance les rebelles syriens et tous les mercenaires islamistes qui viennent de tous les pays arabes combattre en Syrie. Ainsi, et au lieu de venir à la rescousse des populations palestiniennes, notamment ces enfants de Ghaza victimes des raids meurtriers israéliens, le Qatar apporte son soutien à l’extrême droite israélienne, celle-là même qui affiche sa haine viscérale aux Arabes et à la création d’un Etat palestinien indépendant.

D’ailleurs, la visite du cheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa à Ghaza, quelques jours avant le raid israélien, a été mal perçue par le mouvement Fatah. «Cette visite n’est pas la bienvenue, parce qu’elle vise à consacrer la division et la séparation entre la Cisjordanie et la bande de Ghaza.»

Cette visite ne sert que l’entité sioniste selon le Fplp, qui rappelle que «le sang des milliers d’enfants syriens, libyens et yéménites versé à cause des fonds et des médias qataris ne permettra pas à ce visiteur de redorer son blason». Ce qui a conforté le deal relevé par Tzipi Livni, concernant la création d’une fédération jordano-palestinienne. Les masques sont tombés.

Source : lexpressiondz

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan: Rising Menace

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan:

Rising Menace

Aurobinda MAHAPATRA

Ex: http://www.strategic-culture.org/

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) has become a concern in Eurasian region. In January 2013 alone, the members of the extremist organization confronted security forces in Afghanistan on two instances during operations in Burkah district of Baghlan province. A government official in Tajiksitan declared on 28 January 2013 that police in Kubodiyen District in Khatlon Oblast detained six suspected members of IMU in past two months, while on 26 January 2013 another IMU suspect blew himself rather than surrendering to police. The Tajik Interior Minister, Ramazon Rahimov declared last month that the Tajik security forces killed one IMU suspect and arrested nine other suspects in the country’s north. One of the commanders of IMU, Abu Zar al-Burmi, a Pakistan national of Rohingya Burmese descent, called for jihad against Myanmar. Last year Myanmar witnessed violent clashes among Rohingya Muslims and Buddhists. Reports suggest that IMU has donned a new garb Islamic Movement of Turkestan in order to camouflage it earlier image.

IMU emerged aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its main aim was to establish Sharia based state and society in Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia. Its founders Tahir Yuldashev and Juma Namangani aimed at establishing a caliphate comprising former Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang region of China. They challenged Islam Karimov regime and played active roles in promoting violence. Namangani was later killed in Afghanistan, while Yuldashev has shifted base to Waziristan area of Pakistan. Central Asian states were averse to its radical ideology, but IMU found a ready acceptance in the circles of Al Qaeda and Taliban. IMU not only got shelter and sustenance in Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, but also contributed to proliferation of violent activities of these organizations.

As northern Afghanistan borders Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, it has become convenient for IMU to use porous borders and play havoc in Central Asia. Its cousins in Central Asia like Jundullah (soldiers of Allah) have recently been active in countries like Kazakhstan. Like IMU, the Jundullah has its base in border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan… As Afghanistan has populations of ethnic Uzbek and Tajik minorities, it has become convenient for these organizations to mobilize these people. Poverty and unemployment may have contributed to this rise of radicalism, but certainly propagation of extremist ideology plays a major role. Furthermore, the combination of these Central Asian organizations with international organizations like Al Qaeda, and Af-Pak organizations like Taliban and Haqqani network make them further lethal in conducting operations. Besides fermenting terrorist activities in Central Asia and Afghanistan, these Central Asian organizations have been alleged to have bombed Pakistani cities.

The departure of international forces from Afghanistan may help the war torn country to establish its own mechanisms of governance. But, it will be difficult to predict how far the indigenous government will be stable against the onslaught of the radical forces. The international forces have not been able to stem the rise of these forces. Taliban has already declared its plans of governance in its envisioned emirate of Afghanistan. In this venture of radicalization, forces like IMU come handy. Comparatively rich due to involvement in illegal poppy trade, Taliban and Haqqani network have used IMU operatives as surrogates and helpers. Reports suggest that IMU members, besides following the orders of Taliban and Haqqani, have also worked as bodyguards and helpers of top leaders of these organizations. There are also instances when members of these organizations interchange roles and perform activities for each other. If the return of the Taliban becomes an eventuality, the destructive role of IMU and Jundullah will certainly grow in Central Asia and surrounding regions.

International events of extremism and terrorism can not be completely separated. Radicalization of minorities in multiethnic and pluralistic societies is a core motive of Al Qaeda which, despite trumpets of its decimation, has raised its head not only in Afghanistan, but also in other parts of the world – in Libya, Syria, Mali, Myanmar and many other regions. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri was a key motivator of rebel activities in Libya and Syria. The collusion of Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan may emerge a bigger challenge to countries in Eurasia. Afghanistan is situated among many fault lines, and likely resurgence of Taliban will cause more harm than good. The current policy of Taliban is to hedge against the Karzai regime and buy time till international forces depart, so that it can with support of sympathetic powers seize Kabul. In such a scenario, the morale of IMU will not be boosted psychologically, but also materially. A Taliban government will have resources and foster IMU activities in proliferating ideology of radicalism through bombs.

As the IMU commander al-Burmi declared, the fire of extremism will spread like a forest fire if the Taliban returns to power. Afghanistan is surrounded by multiethnic and pluralistic states, which have ethnic based grievances. The ethnic minorities, currently under the regimes of secular democracies, will be easy targets of radical forces. The dreams of Caliphate of Turkestan or Caucasian Caliphate will be vigorously pursued with easy money coming from drug trafficking and charity money from some extremist regimes from different parts of the world.

The prospects of peace and stability in Afghanistan and its border areas do not appear bright in present scenario. This brings forth the urgency of international cooperation, which at present does not appear much in sight. Unless the rise of IMU and their patrons in Afghanistan is checkmated in time, the future war against extremism and terrorism will really be long winding for the countries of Eurasia.