Jornadas
Actualidad de Carl Schmitt a 30 años de su muerte.
18, 19 y 20 de noviembre de 2015, Santiago del Estero 1029, CABA.
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA.
Para consultar el programa, hacé click aquí:
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Jornadas
Actualidad de Carl Schmitt a 30 años de su muerte.
18, 19 y 20 de noviembre de 2015, Santiago del Estero 1029, CABA.
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA.
Para consultar el programa, hacé click aquí:
12:34 Publié dans Evénement, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmitt, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, philosophie, théologie politique, philosophie politique | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
par Stéphane Montabert
Ex: http://www.lesobservateurs.ch
"Les familles chinoises pourront avoir plusieurs enfants: une révolution pour la 2e économie du monde." C'est en ces termes que le site d'information belge RTL évoque la fin de la Politique de l'Enfant Unique en Chine le 29 octobre, selon un communiqué du Parti communiste rapporté par l'agence Chine nouvelle. Et je vous passe les majuscules.
La Politique de l'Enfant Unique a droit à sa page Wikipedia, convenablement actualisée ; elle se décrit donc comme une "politique publique" de "contrôle des naissances" et courut de 1979 à 2015. Les termes diplomatiques employés par l'encyclopédie en ligne ne peuvent évidemment pas transmettre la violence de cette politique. Tout au plus évoque-t-elle des "méthodes autoritaires"...
Le contexte de la Politique de l'Enfant Unique est lié à des idées en vogue: malthusianisme (il y aura trop de bouches à nourrir), hausse du niveau de vie (transmission du patrimoine à un plus petit nombre d'héritiers), et même multiculturalisme (les minorités ethniques ne sont quasiment pas concernées). La Politique de l'Enfant Unique est donc une barrière totalement artificielle dressée sur le chemin de la plus grande ethnie de Chine par le Parti Unique qui contrôle le pays.
On a coutume de dire que la domestication désigne l'état dans lequel la reproduction des animaux est contrôlée par un maître humain ; de ce point de vue, le Parti Communiste Chinois a formellement réussi la domestication de l'Humanité sur son territoire.
Après trente ans, les ravages sont indiscutables. L'indice de fécondité est aujourd'hui de 1,4 enfant par femme. Le nombre de personnes en âge de travailler ne cesse de diminuer, cette population perdant 3,7 millions de personnes l'an dernier. Quant aux personnes âgées, elles représentent désormais plus de 15% de la population.
La démographie est une science lente, mais exacte. En 2050, un Chinois sur trois aura plus de 60 ans. Cette tendance, qui ira croissant, rendra impossible toute forme de "solidarité" intergénérationnelle telle que celles conduites à travers les politiques étatiques de redistribution. Aucune classe active n'arrivera à assumer le fardeau d'un tel entretien. Pour assurer leur retraite, les Chinois ne pourront compter que sur la générosité des enfants qu'ils n'ont pas eu.
Après des décennies de complaisance et malgré leur imperméabilité dogmatique à toute réalité, les autorités communistes ont malgré tout, peu à peu, saisi l'ampleur du problème. La Politique de l'Enfant Unique a donc été progressivement "assouplie" - pour les couples dont les deux, voire un seul membre, était lui-même issu d'une famille soumise à la Politique de l'Enfant Unique ; pour les campagnes, lorsque le premier enfant était une fille ; et aujourd'hui, pour la Chine toute entière, sans restriction.
Malheureusement, c'est trop peu, et trop tard.
Le problème n'est pas dans le raz-de-marée de personnes âgées auquel la Chine devra faire face dans les prochaines décennies. Il n'est pas non plus dans le déséquilibre des sexes où les filles moins "prestigieuses" étaient régulièrement tuées avant ou après la naissance, laissant des millions de mâles sans compagne potentielle. Il s'est logé dans la psyché la plus intime d'un peuple entier.
On ne peut tout simplement pas être soumis à un lavage de cerveau de trente ans et en sortir indemne. Pendant des décennies, l'école, les politiciens, les médias, les lois, les élites ont façonné l'esprit des Chinoises et des Chinois pour leur faire comprendre que l'idée d'une descendance était néfaste. Les enfants étaient décriés jusque dans des campagnes publicitaires. Les couples enfreignant la Politique de l'Enfant Unique étaient sévèrement punis et dénoncés publiquement.
S'il est bien un domaine dans lequel les communistes excellent, c'est le lavage de cerveau. Ils y ont mis les moyens, et ils ont réussi. Nombre de Chinois ne veulent plus d'enfant - du tout. Enfants uniques choyés par leurs parents, ils ont été pourri-gâtés depuis leur premier jour et ne conçoivent plus l'idée du moindre sacrifice matériel pour la génération suivante. L'égocentrisme absolu ne s'autorise pas la concurrence d'une éventuelle descendance.
Même les couples cédant à leur désir d'enfant ne s'imaginent pas avec une fratrie à gérer. Leurs parents se sont sacrifiés pour leur donner un niveau de vie décent ; comment imaginer parvenir à atteindre des résultats identiques en devant gérer non pas un seul mais deux, voire trois bambins? Comment mener une carrière, céder à ses caprices consuméristes et se livrer en même temps aux sacrifices qu'implique une famille? L'hypothèse est totalement impensable, d'autant plus que nombre de couples chinois doivent déjà soutenir des parents âgés.
Pourtant, il les faudrait, ces fameuses familles avec deux ou trois enfants. Il en faudrait des centaines de millions.
Avec une certaine ironie, on peut espérer que le talent des communistes à laver le cerveau de leurs concitoyens marche tout aussi bien dans l'autre sens. Mais même ce talent a des limites. Il faut vingt ans pour bâtir une nouvelle génération. Le travail de désendoctrinement commence à peine. La Chine n'a plus assez de temps. De plus, la mission est autrement plus délicate: il est plus facile de supprimer des enfants jugés surnuméraires et de clouer des familles au pilori que d'inciter les êtres humains à se reproduire, ce qui implique des valeurs positives de continuité et de confiance dans l'avenir... Pas vraiment le genre de partition que savent jouer les nervis du Parti Unique chinois.
Comme le résume une formule limpide, la Chine sera vieille avant d'être riche. Le socialisme l'aura anéantie avec plus de certitude que n'importe quelle catastrophe naturelle.
Il y a des raisons de s'attarder sur l'abandon de la Politique de l'Enfant Unique. Il relève de l'événement planétaire de par l'importance du pays. Mais il permet également de jeter un regard en arrière sur des décennies d'ingénierie sociale et leurs conséquences, un aspect du problème qui rebute quelque peu des éditorialistes européens peu enclins à transposer ces questions à nos contrées. Cette approche est pourtant nécessaire.
On notera ainsi un terme totalement absent du débat démographique en Chine: l'immigration. On ne peut affirmer que les dignitaires du parti soient hermétiques à l'idée, mais elle n'a tout simplement aucune viabilité: quel pays du monde pourrait, en pratique, fournir les cohortes infinies des millions d'immigrés productifs nécessaires à l'entretien des générations chinoises vieillissantes? A travers son seul poids démographique, la Chine est arrivée au terme du jeu de l'avion immigrationniste que d'aucuns plaident pour l'Europe.
La Chine montre que les politiques d'ingénierie sociale étatiques mènent invariablement au désastre. Dans un dernier sursaut de lucidité, elle indique finalement le chemin à suivre: s'il faut assurer l'existence de générations futures pour la population d'un pays, les autochtones sont probablement les personnes les mieux placées pour le faire.
Stéphane Montabert - Sur le web et sur Lesobservateurs.ch
00:05 Publié dans Actualité | Lien permanent | Commentaires (1) | Tags : actualité, démographie, chine, asie, affaires asiatiques, politique internationale | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
par Daniel Pardon
Ex: http://www.tahiti-infos.com & http://metamag.fr
00:05 Publié dans Histoire | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : histoire, australie, océanie, grandes découvertes | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Pour le commander en ligne cliquez ici
Bulletin de commande cliquez là
Pour le commander en ligne cliquez là
00:05 Publié dans Livre, Livre | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : georges feltin-tracol, maurice bardèche, padraig pearse, irlande | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
“We will strike out against Bulgakovism!”[i]
And Bulgakov returned fire.
I would have preferred a title more along the lines of “Bulgakov Against Little-mindedness.” “Narrow-mindedness” maybe? But it seems to me, and I believe it seemed to him, that atheism is sufficiently synonymous with either.
Mikhail Bulgakov is my favourite writer. My teacher—Headmaster of the school that I attend. I am assuming the reader will have read something by him. I won’t be providing a little biography of him of my own either. For that kind of a basic introduction, I confidently refer anyone interested to a good little article originally published in Russian Life entitled “Mikhail Bulgakov: A Wolf’s Life.”
Throughout the whole of his literary career Bulgakov thoughtfully engaged what was wrong in the society, and its thinking, in which he himself lived.
Where it went wrong in its thinking was official State irreligiousness, wishfully called “scientific atheism.”
Everything wrong in Soviet society stemmed out from there.
In his novels this is perfectly apparent. We’ll save the best known, Master and Margarita, for last. This will preserve an order both logical and chronological, as it was his final work and master-piece as well as his fullest attack on atheism and its allied ills.
In The White Guard the opinions of the Turbins over the table, with vodka and wine as encouragement, are very clear. The Revolution is destructive, idiotic and unwanted. The response in Kiev has been disgraceful, opportunistic and left it until too late. For free Ukraine “from Kiev to Berlin” there is only one option: “Orthodoxy and monarchy!”
Setting to one side Bulgakov’s feuilletons—written for bread, not to say something—we will look a little at the three major short-stories he wrote when in Moscow: Diaboliad, The Fatal Eggs and Dog’s Heart.
The Short Fiction
Diaboliad is best for its unique prose. It’s practice almost for the writer, the first flight, a getting used and accustomed to a new self-awareness and the exercise of a power not known prior. Margarita on her broomstick. Bulgakov before Diaboliad wanted to be a writer. When he wrote Diaboliad—he was.
Its protagonist loses his job, at the Main Central Base for Matchstick Materials (MACBAMM), in unbelievable circumstances and ends diving off of a building—an open question whether it was insanity, supernatural or just Soviet.
The atmosphere established is eerie. Bulgakov has already here located the absurd fact that Soviet society actually embodied what it denied. It may have consciously rejected the existence of the demonic, but the existence of such a society was itself proof of it.
That is the major theme, tucked neatly under criticism of the housing situation and failures in economic policy. He is already creatively careful not to aim too openly at the target he really wants to hit. He will eventually have to summon up history, demonology, feign blasphemy and employ luxuriant symbolism to say everything he needs to.
Next came The Fatal Eggs. [Quick aside: it was originally published together with Diaboliad in May 1925]
A professor single-mindedly dedicated to his work has made a remarkable discovery. A ray that fantastically increases the rate of reproduction and the size of their off-spring in amphibians. A local journalist, with stereotypical sensationalism, publishes an article that misrepresents the discovery in a way most likely to hold the interest of his readers.
At just that time a disease decimates the poultry population of the USSR. An idiot has a bright idea—use the ray to produce excess, giant chickens to make up for the losses. The ray is taken from the professor and relocated to a rural area for the purpose.
A postal worker does his proverbial poor job and confuses two different loads of eggs. One has harmless chicken eggs and is intended for the ray. The other has a variety of unhatched serpents and is meant to arrive at the Institute where the professor works. It instead arrives at the farm.
The ray is then used to unintentionally produce an invasion of giant snakes that devastate the countryside. The civil authority and military are incapable of stopping them as they slither toward the capital. Humanly-speaking, all hope is lost.
But during the Dormition of Mother of God on the Orthodox Calendar (which Bulgakov continued to use even after the Soviet authorities had changed to the Gregorian), an unheard of frost, with no comparison available in even the oldest people’s memories, happens to kill them off. What a curious coincidence it was. And the reader’s attention is drawn to the dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour at just that moment in the narrative when Moscow is saved.
Here again we see the development, the birth and beginning of ideas which will find fuller expression later on in his work.
Isn’t this man imagining he can control his own life without reference to any higher order outside of himself? But Bulgakov has Providence provide a miracle that saves Moscow. Later on his mood has changed. Berlioz beheaded by a tram will serve to make the same point.
The main concern here is the belief, commonly held by people not Communists today, that science can essentially solve all problems. This simplistic idea tends to dangerous results when taken too far. We are slowly realising this. Bulgakov saw it in 1924. What disasters are in store if we don’t learn the lesson, God only knows.
And now we move onto the final major short-story —Dog’s Heart. Here the writer is too open, too incisive, his aim too obvious. It was never published for as long as he lived. And when at last it was, it was published abroad (in 1968).
It begins from the dog’s perspective, the stray Sharik. After lamenting his cruel fate, moments before having been scalded by a cook for stealing, an inordinate improvement in his luck follows. Professor Filipp Filoppovich takes him, takes care of him and treats him kindly. But there is a motive other than humane behind it all.
As an experiment Sharik’s scrotum and hypophysis are removed and replaced by human equivalents. He survives the operation and a most unusual result unfolds—he slowly becomes human.
He begins to speak, becomes bipedal and eventually his personality merges with that of the deceased man whose testicles and pituitary gland he possesses.
Sharik changes his name to Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov and gets a job in the Moscow Department of Communal Welfare (for the extermination of cats and other foul rodents). Eventually entertaining a proletarian dislike for professor Filipp Filippovich, he avails himself of the easy-going informing policy of the Soviet government (not unlike present-day Kiev) to try and get him arrested. The professor’s hand forced, he manages to reverse the operation.
Here again we have science taken too far without sufficient thought given to the consequences liable to follow. But unlike professor Persikov of The Fatal Eggs—Filipp Filoppovich is a type as well as a character.
He is everything Bulgakov wished he could have been. A practising doctor with private customers and a large flat—safe through influential patients from any sudden moods of the government.
Characterised by class and taste, the professor is the exact opposite of the new Soviet man embodied in comrade Sharikov.
Bulgakov’s point is double-edged. It cuts twice with one stroke. That a dog made into a man could succeed in Soviet society and that ultimately the stray dog was better than the man it became.
There is furthermore an important insight into the cultural impact of an atheistic mind-set. In a society where the greatest goods are not religion or art or the humanities but rather manual labour and material possessions and creature comforts—the consequence is crassness.
The spoken-language deteriorates. So too what interests and amuses people. The public attention span dwindles. Everyone looks out for themselves and selfishness reigns. We have a dense, insensitive society where even such basic things as that seniority dictates who gets the first glass of vodka are lost.
And isn’t this timely now? Is it not perfectly applicable to the modern and Western situation?
We live in a time where people cannot work out how to use the past tense correctly or navigate the “th” sound. “Wif” and “dis” and so on.
Anything short of practically pornography or violence won’t stand a chance of selling or being aired.
A fast-food quality of intelligence now exists. You look at your phone, supposedly know in a snap-shot everything about something long enough to insist on your opinion about it and then promptly forget what you might have learned, comfortable in the knowledge that you can just Google it again if need be.
Do I need to provide any examples of selfishness reigning? I’ll dare not to.
Master and Margarita
Finally we come to the masterpiece.
Mikhail Bulgakov was a priest’s son, a professor at Kiev Theological Academy—Afanasy Ivanovich.
His death when the future writer was only 15 years old shook the boy’s faith in that God is Benevolent and All-knowing. But for Bulgakov conscious disbelief in the God of the Orthodox Church did not entail an a priori atheism, least of all of the simplistic and materialist kind sponsored by the Soviet State.
Why should there be no soul or spiritual world even if God as traditionally defined (admittedly altogether imperfectly) didn’t exist? That, for Bulgakov, did not follow.
In the years after he renounced his baptism up until he regained his faith in the God of his father he pursued different definitions and looked in the opposite direction to materialism, into spiritism. He was convinced that there was more to the universe than bare sensory phenomena.
And what could possibly justify the opposite claim? Could constitute positive proof that all that is, is necessarily material? And what of the numerous immediately obvious instances where it fails?
Concepts are not material, but they do exist. Materialism itself being one of them.
Individuals as persons are not material. Were I to lose a limb I would not be less Martin Kalyniuk than I was before.
Time exists I think. It isn’t material.
And it is not only this metaphysical cage that materialist atheists lock themselves in and throw away the key to. A moral narrowness follows on the mental one.
I repeat—in the master-piece the Master’s mood has changed. The devil is coming to Moscow. Not a swarm of snakes but the Serpent himself. The ancient one that began by exposing the infidelity of humanity’s parents to the God that made them. And he is back to expose and punish modern materialist man, with his closed mechanist universe and narrow pursuit of personal gratification.
It’s instructive that he begins with Berlioz. Berlioz’s crime is atheism. His denial that Christ existed in history, that God exists since eternity and his insistence that even Satan himself, who Berlioz is speaking with (!), does not exist either. We have to laugh with the devil.
Well, now, this is really getting interesting,” he cried shaking with laughter, “What is it with you? Whatever comes up you say doesn’t exist!
His punishment begins in time by the separation of his head from his body by a tram. It culminates in eternity when the devil gives him his wish.
Speaking to his severed, conscious head,
You were always an avid proponent of the theory that after his head is cut off, a man’s life comes to an end, he turns to dust, and departs into non-being. I have the pleasure of informing you in the presence of my guests—although they actually serve as proof of a different theory altogether—that your theory is both incisive and sound. However, one theory is as good as another. There is even a theory that says that to each man it will be given according to his beliefs. May it be so! You are departing into non-being, and, from the goblet into which you are being transformed, I will have the pleasure of drinking a toast to being!
Berlioz didn’t believe in life after death. Berlioz believed man is essentially a very complex material object. His final retribution is to be made into one, though a very simple one, a goblet, out of which a toast is made to the immortality he denied so vehemently.
And everyone is punished.
Laziness and fakery—Likhodeyev. Fraud—Nikanor Ivanovich. Generally being an annoyance—Bengalsky. Vanity—basically the whole female population of Moscow. Greed—everyone to a man. Spousal infidelity—Arkady Apollonovich. Blasphemy and cursing—Prokhor Petrovich. Covetousness—Maximilian Andreyevich. Informing and betrayal—Baron Maigel. And, the worst sin of all according to Bulgakov, cowardice—the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate.
And what is most interesting above all, is that we feel nothing for them. Bulgakov has not invested any of them with pathos. They are not human beings. Not at all. Bulgakov has made them into what they wish to be—puppets. Mere material objects bumping into each other, with a pre-set selection of pursuits, wishes and desires as in a puppet-show.
They lack life. They have no depth. This is why Berlioz’s or Bengalsky’s head comes off and we don’t feel horror or revulsion. We may rather laugh. But we most certainly don’t bat an eyelid, leave aside shed a tear, between that occurrence and the sentence to follow.
And this narrowness of ideas and aims, shallowness of character and conduct, littleness of mind and heart are all the direct consequence and conclusion of the conviction that we are just finite, material toys trapped in time and space. Without purpose, without ultimate accountability and with no future beyond the short, uncertain span of our life on earth.
The ideas from the short-stories have been refined and sharpened. All the threads are drawn together, tight to breaking point—and Woland, Begemot, Koroviev, Gella and Azazello are here to cut them.
Man the material object meets spirit, even if evil. The atheist’s mechanical closed universe is invaded by beings that existed before it and who know of far more than it (the fifth dimension for example). And so far from being based on the empirical and experiential, so dogmatic is “scientific atheism” that Berlioz can try and convince the devil himself that he doesn’t exist.
This dogmatism of materialist atheism is the last point I should like underscore before closing this essay.
Fiction has the marvellous quality to it that you can’t argue with it. Like maths or a thought-experiment, you agree to play by rules. The cardinal rule is that what the narrator says is so. This gives the writer the power to make you think about things that you otherwise not for a single moment’s time would have entertained on your own.
Everything that has happened in Bulgakov’s Moscow—has happened. In the context of the novel, that’s a fact. “And” as the devil says to Berlioz’s head “a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.” What do puppets do when confronted with them? Exactly what they do in actual life.
As always when something is reported that would seem to compel us to broaden our understanding of the way the world works—psychology is called in.
One person saw something exceeding a narrow understanding of the laws of the universe? He’s schizophrenic. Several people? Mass hallucination. And who’s responsible for the seeming events that didn’t occur? For everyone saw them, even if not a violation of the laws of nature.
“It was the work of a gang of hypnotists and ventriloquists magnificently skilled in their art.” ?!
Bulgakov’s final stab is his hardest. The way he wraps up the novel by providing naturalistic explanations that explain nothing but satisfy everyone and parade about behind the banners of scientific terms. There can be nothing more idiotic than these explanations. But how many people, during Bulgakov’s time, and, I stress, in the West today would readily venture or accept them if (or when) confronted with the same thing?
Could you believe that the devil exists? If one hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, he sat next to you too?
[i] Ударим по булгаковщине!
(Title of an article published in a Soviet magazine during the writer’s lifetime and found among 297 other such collected articles in his private papers)
00:05 Publié dans Littérature | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : russie, littérature, littérature russe, lettres, lettres russes, mikhail bulgakov, mikhail boulgakov | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
AS I READ The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, a new book by Salon founder David Talbot, I couldn’t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club.
Dulles — the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived. And nothing about it appears in The Devil’s Chessboard. But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu.
Any normal person would likely hear the Safari Club saga as a frightening story of totally unaccountable power. But if there’s one thing to take away from The Devil’s Chessboard, it’s this: Allen Dulles would have seen it differently — as an inspiring tale of hope and redemption.
Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”
While there, Turki, who’d graduated from Georgetown University in the same class as Bill Clinton, delivered a speech at his alma mater that included an unexpected history lesson:
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.
Turki was not telling the whole truth. He was right that his Georgetown audience likely had never heard any of this before, but the Safari Club had been known across the Middle East for decades. After the Iranian revolution the new government gave Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, one of the most prominent journalists in the Arab world, permission to examine the Shah’s archives. There Heikal discovered the actual formal, written agreement between the members of the Safari Club, and wrote about it in a 1982 book called Iran: The Untold Story.
And the Safari Club was not simply the creation of the countries Turki mentioned — Americans were involved as well. It’s true the U.S. executive branch was somewhat hamstrung during the period between the post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence world and the end of the Carter administration. But the powerful individual Americans who felt themselves “literally tied up” by Congress — that is, unfairly restrained by the most democratic branch of the U.S. government — certainly did not consider the decisions of Congress to be the final word.
Whatever its funding sources, the evidence suggests the Safari Club was largely the initiative of these powerful Americans. According to Heikal, its real origin was when Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, “talked a number of rich Arab oil countries into bankrolling operations against growing communist influence on their doorstep” in Africa. Alexandre de Marenches, a right-wing aristocrat who headed France’s version of the CIA, eagerly formalized the project and assumed operational leadership. But, Heikal writes, “The United States directed the whole operation,” and “giant U.S. and European corporations with vital interests in Africa” leant a hand. As John K. Cooley, the Christian Science Monitor’s longtime Mideast correspondent, put it, the setup strongly appealed to the U.S. executive branch: “Get others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails.”
This all seems like something Americans would like to know, especially since de Marenches may have extended his covert operations to the 1980 U.S. presidential election. In 1992, de Marenches’ biographer testified in a congressional investigation that the French spy told him that he had helped arrange an October 1980 meeting in Paris between William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, and the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The goal of such a meeting, of course, would have been to persuade Iran to keep its American hostages until after the next month’s election, thus denying Carter any last-minute, politically potent triumph.
De Marenches and the Safari Club certainly had a clear motive to oust Carter: They blamed him for allowing one of their charter members, the Shah, to fall from power. But whether de Marenches’ claims were true or not, we do know that history unfolded exactly as he and the Safari Club would have wished. The hostages weren’t released until Reagan was inaugurated, Reagan appointed Casey director of the CIA, and from that point forward America’s intelligence “community” was back in business.
And yet normal citizens would have a hard time just finding out the Safari Club even existed, much less the outlines of its activities. It appears to have been mentioned just once by the New York Times, in a profile of a French spy novelist. It likewise has made only one appearance in the Washington Post, in a 2005 online chat in which a reader asked the Post’s former Middle East bureau chief Thomas Lippman, “Does the Safari Club, formed in the mid-70s, still exist?” Lippman responded: “I never heard of it, so I have no idea.”
The fallout from Watergate initially would have horrified him, with mere elected members of Congress placing restrictions on patricians like himself. But he then would have been thrilled to see the ingenuity with which his heirs escaped those bonds, and deeply satisfied that the club did its work while staying hidden from the prying eyes of History.
As Talbot points out, Dulles stated his worldview publicly and explicitly in 1938 during his only run for political office: “Democracy only works if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.” Unsurprisingly, homilies like this did not carry him to victory. But so what? He went on to wield far greater power than most elected officials ever have. And while Dulles is the star of The Devil’s Chessboard, he’s surrounded by an enormous supporting cast.
As Talbot explains, “What I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s.” It’s a huge, sprawling book, and an amalgam of all the appalling things Dulles and his cohort definitely did, things the evidence suggests they probably did, and speculation about things they might plausibly have done. More than a biography, it’s a exploration of well-organized pathology.
It includes detailed reexaminations of Dulles’s most notorious failures, such as the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the nightmarish mind control program MK-ULTRA, as well as his most notorious “successes,” the CIA’s overthrow of democratic governments in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954. Talbot notes that an internal CIA account of the Iran coup fairly glowed with joy: “It was a day that never should have ended. For it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.” According to a participant in an Oval Office briefing for President Eisenhower, Dulles’s brother John Foster, then secretary of state, “seemed to be purring like a giant cat.”
But by this point these events are fairly well-known. Perhaps most compelling is Talbot’s in-depth look at Dulles’s lesser-known yet still extraordinarily sordid projects. As the Swiss director of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Dulles — whose law firm had represented German corporations and many U.S. corporations with German interests — quietly attempted to undermine Franklin D. Roosevelt’s demand that Germany surrender unconditionally, going so far as to order the rescue of an SS general surrounded by Italian partisans. Dulles also led the push to save Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi head of intelligence on the Eastern Front and a genuine monster, from any post-war justice. Dulles then made certain Gehlen and his spies received a cozy embrace from the CIA, and helped push him to the top of West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service.
Also gruesome is the lurid story of how Jesus de Galindez, a lecturer at Columbia University, was kidnapped in Manhattan by U.S. government cutouts and delivered to Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo then had Galindez, whose exposés of corruption Trujillo feared, boiled alive and fed to sharks, and ordered the murder of the American pilot who’d flown Galindez there. All under the beneficent gaze of CIA Director Allen Dulles.
In a sense, however, all of The Devil’s Chessboard seems to exist to set the stage for the final chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. In the first 500 pages you are convinced that Dulles would have had no moral qualms about killing any politician, including Americans. You learn Dulles had a lifetime of experience in arranging assassinations, and apparent ties to attempts to overthrow or murder French president Charles de Gaulle. And you discover the depth of his grudge against John F. Kennedy, who dismissed him and several of his key underlings after the Bay of Pigs.
But were JFK and possibly Robert Kennedy killed by conspiracies involving Dulles? That’s the conjecture of The Devil’s Chessboard. There’s no question Talbot has pulled together a lot of suggestive old information, and uncovered some that’s new. Furthermore, he certainly proves there was a great deal of reluctance on the part of journalists and politicians at the time to pull on even the most obvious threads. But 50 years later, I don’t think there’s any way to say much for sure on this subject, except that it’s pretty interesting. (Given humanity’s history of catastrophic slapstick, I’ve always enjoyed the theory that a Secret Service agent shot Kennedy accidentally.)
In the end, whatever the reality of Talbot’s most sensational claims, he unquestionably makes the case that — unless you believe we’re governed by shape-shifting space lizards — your darkest suspicions about how the world operates are likely an underestimate. Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an American “deep state,” setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of line. They do collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their fellow citizens. The minions of the deep state hate and fear even the mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means available to them. They’re not all-powerful and don’t get exactly what they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open, discernible by anyone who’s curious and has a library card, if you don’t go looking you will never hear a single word about it.
Moreover, it’s still right there in front of us today. Talbot recently argued, “The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went.”
Or as a staff member of the 1970s congressional investigation of Kennedy’s murder said in an interview with Talbot: “One CIA official told me, ‘So you’re from Congress — what the hell is that to us? You’ll be packed up and gone in a couple of years, and we’ll still be here.’” According to The Devil’s Chessboard, the Safari never ends.
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