TBR News January 9, 2017

 

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. January 9, 2017:”In reading through various media reportage, we noted that on Reuters it was said that Mr. Trump acknowledged that the Russians had attacked Clinton.

They cited an interview with an aide. But on every other site checked, Mr. Trump ridiculed the attribution and the aide denied ever having made such a statement.

Either Reuters is wrong or Mr. Trump and his people are wrong.

The former is much more likely, given the very evident animosity Reuters has consistently shown for the Trump people.

And it is also interesting to note that the Muslim fanatics, IS, have never attacked anywhere inside the United States.

They have attacked Germany, Russia, France, the UK and even Israel but not the United States or Saudi Arabia. The reason for this shyness is because the Saudi people set IS up in the first place as their arm militant for the establishment of a Greater Sunni Empire and the United States has assisted this by letting the CIA and the Special Forces train and arm the IS groups.

Believe that if there is another power shift in the Middle East and the Saudis lose influence and the United States efforts to dethrone Assad fail due to Russian support of him, we will see acts of terrorism erupt domestically.”

Chinese state tabloid warns Trump, end one China policy and China will take revenge

January 8, 2016

Reuters

State-run Chinese tabloid Global Times sounded a warning to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday only hours after Taiwan’s president transited Houston, saying that China would seek to “take revenge” should Trump renege on the one-China policy.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met senior U.S. Republican lawmakers during her stopover in Houston en route to Central America, where she will visit Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Beijing had asked Washington not to allow Tsai to enter the United States and that she not have any formal government meetings under the one China policy.

“Sticking to (the one China) principle is not a capricious request by China upon U.S. presidents, but an obligation of U.S. presidents to maintain China-U.S. relations and respect the existing order of the Asia-Pacific,” said the Global Times editorial. The influential tabloid is published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily.

Trump triggered protests from Beijing last month by accepting a congratulatory telephone call from Tsai and questioning Washington’s long-standing position that Taiwan is part of one China. He has said that he will not meet with Tsai.

The Global Times said Beijing did not need to feel grateful to Trump for not meeting Tsai, but added: “If Trump reneges on the one-China policy after taking office, the Chinese people will demand the government to take revenge. There is no room for bargaining.”

China is deeply suspicious of Tsai, who it thinks wants to push for the formal independence of Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing regards as a renegade province, ineligible for state-to-state relations

Tsai will travel through the United States again on her way back from Latin America on Jan. 13 with a stopover in San Francisco, according to her presidential office. The second stop over will occur before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

The Global Times, whose stance does not equate with government policy, also targeted Tsai in the editorial, saying that the mainland would likely impose further military pressure on Taiwan, warning that “Tsai needs to face the consequences for every provocative step she takes”.

“The mainland should mobilize all possible measures to squeeze Taiwan’s diplomacy as well as deal a heavy blow to Taiwan’s economy,” it said.

“It should also impose military pressure on Taiwan and push it to the edge of being reunified by force, so as to effectively affect the approval rating of the Tsai administration.”

(Reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Michael Perry)

 Iraqi forces reach Tigris for first time in Mosul offensive

Iraqi special forces battling ‘Islamic State’ in Mosul have reached the Tigris for the first time since the three-month offensive to recapture the city began. The militants have responded with bombings in Baghdad.

January 8, 2017

DW

Units of Iraq’s elite counter terrorism service (CTS) fought their way to the eastern bank of the Tigris River on Sunday, a military spokesman said.

While the push marks a symbolic victory for Iraqi troops, the “Islamic State” (IS) militants they are fighting against still control some neighborhoods in Mosul’s east, as well as the entire western half of the city. It was the first time Iraqi troops had made it to the Tigris – which divides Mosul down the middle – since the launch of a US-backed campaign to rid the city of jihadists last October.

The CTS units are not expected to advance across the river without first securing control of the rest of the eastern districts. But having access to the river’s shores could make it more difficult for “IS” militants to resupply the eastern front with fighters and weapons from the west bank.

Big gains

Iraqi forces backed by US air power have made significant progress in and around Mosul over the past week. The city is the last major center in Iraq still controlled by “IS.”

Brett McGurk, Washington’s envoy to the US-led coalition backing the Iraqi offensive, said in a tweet that the militant’s defenses in eastern Mosul were “showing signs of collapse.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had promised that his forces would rid Iraq of “IS” by the end of 2016 but later said that eliminating the jihadists would take several more months. Iraqi forces in Mosul have met with fierce resistance from extremist fighters, estimated at up to 7,000 before the start of the offensive, as well as sniper fire, car bombs and booby traps.

Market bombings

Under pressure after recent losses in Mosul, “IS” militants have stepped up their bombing attacks in other parts of the country. In Baghdad, a suicide attacker killed 13 people when he detonated an explosive-laden car in a market in the mainly Shiite Muslim eastern Jamila district, police said. “IS” later claimed responsibility for the attack.

Hours later, a second suicide bomber blew himself up at a market in another mostly Shiite neighborhood, killing seven people. The militant group claimed that attack as well, according to the US-based SITE Intelligence Group.

The attacks were the latest in a spate of similar bombings that have killed nearly 100 people in Iraqi cities over the past week.

From ally to scapegoat: Fethullah Gülen, the man behind the myth

Turkey’s purge against dissidents continues and its state of emergency is extended – all allegedly because of one man: Fethullah Gülen. Who is Turkey’s public enemy number one, and what do we know about his organization?

January 8, 2017

DW

Within the first week of 2017, the Turkish government has fired another 6,000 people – including police officers, justice ministry officials and health ministry employees. This is in addition to another 110,000 individuals who since the coup attempt in July 2016 have been dismissed and more than 40,000 who have been incarcerated, pending trial.

The vast majority of them are accused of having links to the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government has branded a terrorist organization called “FETÖ.”

Turkey says that FETÖ is out to topple the government, prepared to step in and run the country once its leader, US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, manages to rise to power using whatever means necessary.

Is all this an elaborate conspiracy theory or is there evidence to support the Turkish government’s crackdown on so-called Gülenists under the recently extended state-of-emergency measures

What do we know about Gülen?

Born in 1941, Fethullah Gülen was a simple imam for the first half of his life. After retiring from preaching in 1981, his focus shifted from religious to social activities, many of which involved launching new enterprises, particularly media ventures and educational projects, areas which at the time were opening up to privatization. His influence grew steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s – as did his following: Many of those whom Gülen promoted in his organizations or whose education he funded with his schools feel a personal debt to the preacher.

In 1999, Gülen moved to the US state of Pennsylvania and has been living there in self-imposed exile ever since.

While his supporters cite health reasons for the septuagenarian’s residence in the US, the truth of the matter is that Gülen felt he had to flee Turkey in 1998 as he was under investigation for undermining the state, which at that point was still firmly under control of Turkey’s secular elite and backed up by the military. In 2000, he was found guilty, in absentia, of scheming to overthrow the government by embedding civil servants in various governmental offices – an indictment that would come back to haunt him later.

Two years later, however, the face of Turkey began to change. Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister with his recently established Justice and Development Party (AKP) despite only getting one-third of the overall vote. Secularists, in their many millions in Turkey, were unhappy with this, but still welcomed the exponential growth of the Turkish economy thereafter, while the AKP’s Islamist ideas became increasingly commonplace in the country. Against that backdrop, Erdogan and Gülen decided they could embark on a partnership.

What is Gülen’s history with Erdogan?

After being re-elected in 2007 with even a stronger mandate, the AKP under Erdogan’s leadership became more outspoken with its Islamist ideology. Within a year, it would reverse the charges against Fethullah Gülen, signaling a willingness to cooperate with the cleric and his movement.

For Gülen had built up an impressive business empire in the years since his self-imposed exile. His network of media outlets in Turkey and abroad had become increasingly powerful; his schools were grooming the next generation of pious yet entrepreneurially minded followers in Turkey; and his banks facilitated the movement and transfer of funds between the Western world and the Middle East, where some countries’ financial affairs are governed by Islamic principles.

His ties also extended to central Asia, where former Soviet republics like Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and other nations with Turkic languages welcomed any kind of aid, while feeling a particularly strong sense of kinship with Turkey.

All the while, Gülen already had thousands of devout followers in government positions in Turkey itself – and that network was growing.

Journalist Ahmet Sik tried to warn the public of what he saw as Fethullah Gülen’s dangerous influence by penning a book entitled “The Imam’s Army” in 2011. The government stopped the publication of the investigative work and imprisoned Sik for almost a year. Sik has been detained several times again since while trying to unearth the full extent of the collaboration between Erdogan and Gülen.

How could Gülen benefit the AKP?

Doing business with Gülen was not necessarily an optimal choice for Erdogan, but in the face of the preacher’s influence in Turkey and beyond, it was becoming an obvious marriage of convenience. Gülen had the right infrastructures in place for Erdogan’s growing ambition. Meanwhile, many of Gülen’s dealings were less than transparent, so a partnership to protect his business interests seemed equally opportune to him.

Details of the extent of the collaboration between the two are somewhat imprecise; however, it has been noted that high-ranking Turkish government officials visited the cleric at his compound in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, on multiple occasions after Gülen’s official acquittal.

Gülen’s publications and television stations were suddenly seen supporting Erdogan’s 2011 election bid – despite the fact that his organization had always maintained that it didn’t seek any political activities. With Gülen’s support, the AKP managed to win yet again that year, with a result that was just shy of an absolute majority in terms of percentage.

The secular classes residing in Turkey’s main cities could do nothing but stand by helplessly as the nation they knew morphed into a state that clearly favored religion over “laicite” – the French brand of separation of religion and state, which the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had enshrined in the constitution. The rest of the world even seemed to welcome this development in the hope of Turkey rising to become a true bridge between Islam and the West – a new “Ottoman Empire,” as Erdogan had started to propagate.

To realize his vision, Erdogan removed powers from the military, either by parliamentary mandate or by force, jailing many generals who were a thorn in his side. Those that took over the now-vacant military positions typically tended to be more lenient and welcoming toward Islam, with many having reportedly been influenced by Gülen’s teachings.

The face of Turkey was changing too fast for anyone to truly keep up, changes facilitated by Gülen’s support of the AKP government. But by 2013, the Erdogan-Gülen empire would begin to collapse, driving deep divisions through the entire country.

What brought about the split?

Despite winning the greatest mandate yet in the 2011 elections, Erdogan’s AKP suffered several setbacks just over a year into its third consecutive government. Having stamped out corruption in old government structures, the AKP itself was embroiled in a corruption affair all the way to the top, including Erdogan’s own family. That scandal, however, had allegedly been masterminded by Gülen, after Erdogan decided to curb the preacher’s boundless influence by closing down his network of university prep schools in Turkey. That, at least, is the government’s version of events.

The 2013 corruption revelations, one of the biggest scandals in modern Turkish history, inspired the Gezi Park protests, which Erdogan quelled with an iron fist. Not only did he fight protesters with violence, resulting 22 deaths, but he also turned on his erstwhile ally Fethullah Gülen, accusing him for the second time of trying to infiltrate and overthrow the government. The image of Gülen as a subversive Islamist was thus cemented – an enemy of the state, whom Erdogan accused of fashioning a “state within a state” or “parallel state.”

Erdogan meanwhile kept himself from being touched by the corruption scandal by becoming president; once in power, he could pit himself against Gülen as part of a classic good-versus-evil narrative.

Why did things grow quiet around Gülen?

The events in Syria determined much of both domestic and foreign policy issues in Turkey between the elections of 2011 and 2015. The huge influx of millions of refugees in Turkey and the war at its borders shifted attention away from many internal problems. The role of Kurdish fighters against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria also became a domestic worry, as Turkey was reluctant to have a Kurdish state at its doorstep.

By the first round of elections in 2015, Turkey had therefore abandoned peace talks with the Kurdish minority within Turkey. As a result, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK’s) insurgency, which since the mid-1980s had resulted in more than 40,000 deaths, was rekindled. The so-called “Islamic State” also started attacks on Turkey. The country could barely cope with its own day-to-day affairs and was more divided than ever.

Nevertheless, Erdogan was to make sure that the government would flex its muscles against Gülen, whose news outlets had by now turned against the AKP government; several of Gülen’s enterprises in Turkey have been shut down over the years.

How does Gülen factor in with the regards to the failed coup?

On July 15, 2016, a group of about 10,000 renegade soldiers launched a coup attempt, claiming to fight the lack of leadership in this state of crisis. It was badly organized and failed within 12 hours. More than 250 people died that night.

The government apparently knew immediately that Gülen’s movement was behind the failed putsch.

Some of the soldiers captured after the coup attempt have confessed to taking orders from Gülen, though it is unknown under what conditions those confessions may have taken place, with allegations of torture amassing since the events.

The state-run Anadolu news agency quotes Lieutenant Colonel Levent Turkkan, for instance, as saying: “I am a member of the parallel state, or FETÖ. I have served this community for years voluntarily. I have obeyed the orders and instructions of the big brothers exactly.”

In the ensuing days, Turkey declared a state of emergency, which has since been extended twice to “eradicate” any so-called FETÖ influence in the country. Ankara has also tried to have the cleric extradited from the US.

Gülen has denied any involvement in the coup attempt. His followers claim that he is being made a scapegoat so that President Erdogan can unite extraordinary powers in his position. They claim they are the victims of a government ploy against freedom of speech and religion, while Erdogan maintains that any supporter of Gülen is a terrorist.

How do Gülen followers like to present themselves?

Gülen’s followers think of themselves as reformers, revolutionaries even. In the past they have welcomed benevolent comparisons saying that they are to Islam what Martin Luther and the Reformation movement were to Christianity 500 years ago. They say they seek interreligious dialogue and are devoted to serving others, hence their self-styled name, “Hizmet” – which translates as “service.” This is also how they explain their abundant presence in government positions.

They also claim that they value education above all else, pointing at their network of international schools and their initiative to spread literacy to all corners of the world. Y. Alp Aslandogan, who runs the Gülen-affiliated “Alliance for Shared Values” in New York, claims that all the movement wants is to create a better world through humanitarian work:

“It emerged as a small movement in the late 60s against the backdrop of a lot of economic dysfunction, poverty, a lot of politically and ideologically driven clashes and a lot of disenfranchisement among the people. Hizmet emerged out of the idea that through education a lot of these problems could be addressed,” he told DW in an interview.

Estimates on the size of Gülen’s fellowship vary, with conservative figures stating a following of 3 million people globally, while the international news website “Politico” states a support of 10 percent of Turkey’s population alone, or roughly 7.5 million people.

What else is there to know about Hizmet and Gülen?

There is a much more sinister side to the organization. For one thing, there is a major personality cult focusing on the role of Fethullah Gülen. The charismatic leader is venerated in some bizarre ways; a report in the “New Yorker” magazine states that Gülen’s followers fight over getting to eat his leftover food and that it is an honor to drink water from his shoe. The same report also quotes a former member of the movement as saying that his followers believe that Gülen is the Messiah.

Early attempts to establish Gülen’s role in the narrative of Turkey’s contemporary history included falsified documents to have his birthday coincide with the death of the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – in a symbolic bid to stress his political and spiritual significance.

Beyond these strange internal practices, Gülen’s political background also seems to be wooly and chimerical. Among other things, Gülen’s network of charter schools in the US has recently been accused of being part of an elaborate money-laundering and immigration fraud scheme, according to international law firm “Amsterdam & Partners,” whom the Turkish government has hired to investigate Gülen. There have also been allegations by a former Turkish intelligence official that some of the Gülen schools in Central Asia have served in the past as a cover for CIA operatives in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Is Gülen really after a government takeover?

The most damning piece of evidence usually presented against Fethullah Gülen is a sermon he gave shortly after his arrival in the US in the late 1990s. In it, he directs his followers to burrow into Turkey’s state structures and to await the right moment to rise to power as part of an extended bottom-up process:

“We invite our friends who hold high positions in the legislative branch of government and state institutions to master the skills of administration, so they could, when the time comes, reform the Turkish state and make it more fruitful at all its levels in the name of Islam. We have to be patient and wait for the right moment and opportunity. (…) You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey. Until that time, any step taken would be too early.”

With such statements in the public domain, it is perhaps no surprise that Gülen has been accused of attempting to subvert the government not once or twice, but three times now. Despite the speech being almost two decades old, it continues to cast a long shadow over Fethullah Gülen, discrediting any attempts by his powerful PR strategists to present the cleric as a genuine humanitarian.Whether he ever really held aspirations to overthrow the government in Turkey in such Machiavellian ways or whether Gülen’s statements were, as he alleges, taken out of context, may be a secret that the ailing preacher will take to the grave; the US is thus far not cooperating with Turkish requests to have Gülen extradited , citing a lack of evidence.

However, the thought of what Turkey might look like now if the coup had succeeded will continue to fuel the imagination of many, regardless of whether Gülen was indeed the mastermind behind the plot.

John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President

What Was John McCain’s True Wartime Record in Vietnam?

March 9, 2015

by Ron Unz

The Unz Review

Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.

The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs. But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.

Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

My earliest recollections of John McCain are vague. I think he first came to my attention during the mid-1980s, perhaps after 1982 when he won an open Congressional seat in Arizona or more likely once he was elected in 1986 to the U.S. Senate seat of retiring conservative icon Barry Goldwater. All media accounts about him seemed strongly favorable, describing his steadfastness as a POW during more than five grim years of torture by his Vietnamese jailers, with the extent of his wartime physical suffering indicated by the famous photo showing him still on crutches as he was greeted by President Nixon many months after his return from enemy captivity. I never had the slightest doubts about this story or his war-hero status.

McCain’s public image took a beating at the end of the 1980s when he became one of the senators caught up in the Keating Five financial scandal, but he managed to survive that controversy unlike most of the others. Soon thereafter he became prominent as a leading national advocate of campaign finance reform, a strong pro-immigrant voice, and also a champion of normalizing our relations with Vietnam, positions that appealed to me as much as they did to the national media. By 2000 my opinion had become sufficiently favorable that I donated to his underdog challenge to Gov. George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of that year, and was thrilled when he did surprisingly well in some of the early contests and suddenly had a serious shot at the nomination. However, he then suffered an unexpected defeat in South Carolina, as the large block of local military voters swung decisively against him. According to widespread media reports, the main cause was an utterly scurrilous whispering campaign by Karl Rove and his henchmen, which even included appalling accusations that the great war-hero candidate had been a “traitor” in Vietnam. My only conclusion was that the filthy lies sometimes found in American politics were even worse than I’d ever imagined.

Although in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I turned sharply against McCain due to his support for an extremely bellicose foreign policy, I never had any reason to question his background or his integrity, and my strong opposition to his 2008 presidential run was entirely on policy grounds: I feared his notoriously hot temper might easily get us into additional disastrous wars.

Everything suddenly changed in June 2008 when I read a long article by an unfamiliar writer on the leftist Counterpunch website. Shocking claims were made that McCain may never have been tortured and that he instead spent his wartime captivity collaborating with his captors and broadcasting Communist propaganda, a possibility that seemed almost incomprehensible to me given all the thousands of contrary articles that I had absorbed over the decades from the mainstream media. How could this one article on a small website be the truth about McCain’s war record and everything else be total falsehood? The evidence was hardly overwhelming, with the piece being thinly sourced and written in a meandering fashion by an obscure author, but the claims were so astonishing that I made some effort to investigate the matter, though without any real success.

However, those new doubts about McCain were still in my mind a few months later when I stumbled upon Sidney Schanberg’s massively documented expose about McCain’s role in the POW/MIA cover up, a vastly greater scandal. This time I was presented with a mountain of hard evidence gathered by one of America’s greatest wartime journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times. In the years since then, other leading journalists have praised Schanberg’s remarkable research, now giving his conclusions the combined backing of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes, while two former Republican Congressmen who had served on the Intelligence Committee have also strongly corroborated his account.

In 1993 the front page of the New York Times broke the story that a Politburo transcript found in the Kremlin archives fully confirmed the existence of the additional POWs, and when interviewed on the PBS Newshour former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the document was very likely correct and that hundreds of America’s Vietnam POWs had indeed been left behind. In my opinion, the reality of Schanberg’s POW story is now about as solidly established as anything can be that has not yet received an official blessing from the American mainstream media. And the total dishonesty of that media regarding both the POW story and McCain’s leading role in the later cover up soon made me very suspicious of all those other claims regarding John McCain’s supposedly heroic war record. Our American Pravda is simply not to be trusted on any “touchy” topics.

I have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War myself nor do I possess expertise in that area of history. But after encountering Schanberg’s expose in 2008, I soon got in touch with someone having exactly those strengths, a Vietnam veteran who later became a professor at one of our military service academies. At first, he was quite cagey regarding the questions I raised, but once he had read through Schanberg’s lengthy article, he felt he could respond more freely and he largely confirmed the claims, partly based on certain information he personally possessed. He said he found it astonishing that in these days of the Internet the POW scandal had not attracted vastly more attention, and couldn’t understand why the media was so uniformly unwilling to touch the topic.

He also had some very interesting things to say about John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential campaign. Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar charges, and Schanberg had speculated that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious wartime broadcasts.

In late September 2008 another fascinating story appeared in my morning New York Times. An intrepid reporter decided to visit Vietnam and see what McCain’s former jailers thought of the possibility that their onetime captive might soon reach the White House, that the man they had spent years brutally torturing could become the next president of the United States. To the journalist’s apparent amazement, the former jailers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects of a McCain victory, saying that they hoped he would win since they had become such good friends during the war and had worked so closely together; if they lived in America, they would certainly all vote for him. When asked about McCain’s claims of “cruel and sadistic” torture, the head of the guard unit dismissed those stories as being just the sort of total nonsense that politicians, whether in America or in Vietnam, must often spout in order to win popularity. A BBC correspondent reported the same statements.

Let us consider the implications of this story. Throughout his entire life John McCain has been notable for having a very violent temper and also for holding deep grudges. How plausible does it seem that the men who allegedly spent years torturing him would be so eager to see him reach a position of supreme world power?

But what about the famous photo, showing McCain still on crutches even months after his release from captivity? In early September 2008, someone discovered archival footage from a Swedish news crew which had filmed the return of the POWs, and uploaded it to YouTube. We see a healthy-looking John McCain walking off the plane from Vietnam, having a noticeable limp but certainly without any need of crutches. After returning home he had eventually entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for corrective surgery on some of his wartime injuries, and that recent American surgery was what explained his crutches in the photo with Nixon.

It is certainly acknowledged that considerable numbers of American POWs were indeed tortured in Vietnam, but it is far from clear that McCain was ever one of them. As the original Counterpunch article pointed out, throughout almost the entire war McCain was held at a special section for the best-behaving prisoners, which was where he allegedly produced his Communist propaganda broadcasts and perhaps became such good friends with his guards as they later claimed. Top-ranking former POWs held at the same prison, such as Colonels Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have gone on the record saying they are very skeptical regarding McCain’s claims of torture.

I have taken the trouble to read through John McCain’s earliest claims of his harsh imprisonment, a highly detailed 12,000 word first person account published under his name in U.S. News & World Report in May 1973, just a few weeks after his release from imprisonment. The editorial introduction notes the “almost total recall” seemingly demonstrated by the young pilot just out of captivity, and portions of the story strike me as doubtful, perhaps drawn from the long history of popular imprisonment fiction stretching back to Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. Would a young navy pilot so easily develop and remember a “tap code” to extensively communicate with others across thick prison walls? And McCain describes himself as having a “philosophical bent,” spending his years of solitary confinement reviewing in his head all the many history books he had read, trying to make sense of human history, a degree of intellectualizing never apparent in his life either before or after.

One factual detail, routinely emphasized by his supporters, is his repeated claim that except for signing a single written statement very early in his captivity and also answering some questions by a visiting French newsman, he had staunchly refused any hint of collaboration with his captors, despite torture, solitary confinement, endless threats and beatings, and offers of rewards. Perhaps. But that original Counterpunch article provided the link to the purported text of one of McCain’s pro-Hanoi propaganda broadcasts as summarized in a 1969 UPI wire service story, and I have confirmed its authenticity by locating the resulting article that ran in Stars & Stripes at the same time. So if crucial portions of McCain’s account of his imprisonment are seemingly revealed to be self-serving fiction, how much of the rest can we believe? If his pro-Communist propaganda broadcasts were so notable that they even reached the news pages of one of America’s leading military publications, it seems quite plausible that they were as numerous, substantial, and frequent as his critics allege

When I later discussed these troubling matters with an eminent political scientist who has something of a military background, he emphasized that McCain’s history can only be understood in the context of his father, a top-ranking admiral who then served as commander of all American forces in the Pacific Theater, including our troops in Vietnam. Indeed, the alleged headline of the UPI wire story had been “PW [Prisoner of War] Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral,” highlighting that connection. Obviously, for reasons both of family loyalty and personal standing it would have been imperative for John McCain’s father and namesake to hush up the terrible scandal of having had his son serve as a leading collaborator and Communist propagandist during the war and his exalted rank gave him the power to do so. Furthermore, just a few years earlier the elder McCain had himself performed an extremely valuable service for America’s political elites, organizing the official board of inquiry that whitewashed the potentially devastating “Liberty Incident,” with its hundreds of dead and wounded American servicemen, so he certainly had some powerful political chits he could call in.

Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.

Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men had their breaking point. Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important patriotic narrative. Similarly, when McCain ran for Congress and the Senate a decade or so later, stories of his torture became a central theme of his campaigns and once again constituted a powerful defense against any possible rumors of his alleged “disloyalty.”

And so the legend grew over the decades until it completely swallowed the man, and he became America’s greatest patriot and war hero, with almost no one even being aware of the Communist propaganda broadcasts that had motivated the story in the first place. I have sometimes noticed this same historical pattern in which fictional accounts originally invented to excuse or mitigate some enormous crime may eventually expand over time until they totally dominate the narrative while the original crime itself is nearly forgotten. The central theme of McCain’s presidential campaign was his unmatched patriotism and when he went down to defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, the widespread verdict was that even the greatest of war-heroes may still lose an election.

I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not. However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.

John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in 1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.

His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year though certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.

As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once friendly New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New York, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a 2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one in the mainstream media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning Kerrey’s activities, just as the media has also totally ignored all of Schanberg’s remarkable revelations. I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have almost totally vanished from public consciousness.

We must always draw an important distinction between the actions of individual journalists and the behavior of the American media taken as a whole. I believe that the overwhelming majority of reporters and editors are honest and sincere, and although their coverage may sometimes be slanted or mistaken, they do seek to inform rather than to mislead. Consider how many of the explosive facts discussed above or in Schanberg’s massive expose were drawn directly from the New York Times and other leading media outlets. But after those crucial stories run, the facts they have established often seem to vanish from subsequent coverage, causing them to be forgotten by most casual readers. Thus, the detailed account of Kerrey’s apparent massacre of civilians received the greatest possible initial coverage—a huge cover story in The New York Times Magazine and a top-rated CBS News television segment—but within a year or so the history had seemingly been flushed down the memory hole by almost all political reporters. The facts are still available for interested readers to uncover, but they must do the work themselves rather than simply relying on the summary narratives produced by mainstream publications.

The realization that many of our political leaders may be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.

Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI. Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile, he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures. These days it is widely believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such deep personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate significant FBI resources to combat it.

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.

An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.

Such notions may seem utterly absurd, but let us step back and consider recent American history. Just a few years ago an individual came very close to reaching the White House almost entirely on the strength of his war record, a war record that considerable evidence suggests was actually the sort that would normally get a military man hanged for treason at the close of hostilities. I have studied many historical eras and many countries and no parallel examples come to mind.

Perhaps the cause of this bizarre situation merely lies in the remarkable incompetence and cowardice of our major media organs, their herd mentality and their insouciant unwillingness to notice evidence that is staring them in the face. But we should also at least consider the possibility of a darker explanation. If Tokyo Rose had nearly been elected president in the 1980s, we would assume that the American political system had taken a very peculiar turn.

European Snowstorm Kills More Than a Dozen; Hundreds of Flights Canceled in Turkey

January 8, 2017

by Ada Carr

Weather.com

Heavy snowfall and below-freezing temperatures continued to sweep across Europe on Saturday, contributing to more than a dozen deaths and disrupting transportation in Turkey and Italy.

A strong area of low pressure moved through parts of eastern Europe this week and very cold temperatures plunged southward behind this system as high pressure built in behind this system, according to weather.com meteorologist Linda Lam. This low-pressure system also blew snow and gusty winds through central and eastern Europe.

More than 600 flights were canceled in Turkey because of wintry conditions.

Heavy snowfall and below-freezing temperatures continued to sweep across Europe on Saturday, contributing to more than a dozen deaths and disrupting transportation in Turkey and Italy.

A strong area of low pressure moved through parts of eastern Europe this week and very cold temperatures plunged southward behind this system as high pressure built in behind this system, according to weather.com meteorologist Linda Lam. This low-pressure system also blew snow and gusty winds through central and eastern Europe.

In Poland, at least 10 people have died of the cold in the past days, authorities told the Associated Press. The deaths included seven men between the ages of 41 and 66 who died on Friday. A 51-year-old died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning heater. In Belgium, one man died Saturday when his lorry slid off the highway. In Italy, sub-freezing temperatures were blamed for the deaths of a half-dozen homeless people.

Heavy snow and high winds resulted in re-routed flights, delayed ferries, canceled trains and closed roads in Italy, the AP reported. With no indications of a let-up, some schools were ordered closed on Monday. In Rome, the fountains in St. Peter’s Square froze overnight and dripped icicles instead.

Heavy snow crippled Istanbul, and more than 650 Turkish Airlines flights were canceled. All flights in and out of the Ataturk Airport were stopped and hundreds of village roads were blocked in Turkey’s eastern provinces. One of the main highways in Istanbul resembled a parking lot after drivers deserted their cars Friday night to walk home rather than battle the snow, gusty winds and slippery roads.

Firefighters in Italy had a hard time cleaning up the debris of the earthquake-destroyed town of Norcia Friday after snow fell in the area, reports Al Jazeera. Snow also covered the quake-devastated city of Amatrice, which received the brunt of the temblor. Drone footage captured by Italy’s fire service showed the rubble of buildings coated with snow.

“This is the coldest weather we’ve had for 20 years,” meteorologist Edoardo Ferrara told the Telegraph.

Romanian authorities told AP that 90 people were rescued from stranded cars Friday, while 622 people who needed dialysis and 126 pregnant women had to be evacuated.

Wintry conditions caused a pileup in Serbia that left 22 people injured, including children, on the outskirts of the city of Nis.

California braces for flooding, avalanches as Sierra gets slammed with rain, snow

January 8, 2017

by Sage Sauerbrey, Angela Fritz and T. Rees Shapiro

The Washington Post

TRUCKEE, Calif. — A powerful storm blasted the Sierra Nevada with waves of torrential rain and heavy snowfall on Sunday, leaving a vast swath of California bracing for potentially disastrous floods, avalanches and mudslides.

The latest weather comes just days after the mountains around Lake Tahoe and Yosemite National Park received several feet of snow over the span of a week. At Mammoth Mountain, a ski resort bordering Yosemite, the 11,000-foot peak got 84 inches of snow in just two days. This week’s forecast calls for several more feet of snow, as well as heavy rain, part of a meteorological phenomenon known as the “Pineapple Express,” which brings an atmospheric river of warm moisture north from the tropics.

The conditions that accompany the latest band of moisture hovering over Northern California bear some semblance to those of a 1997 storm that flooded the Yosemite Valley and led to a years-long, $250 million recovery effort.

Park rangers closed roads into the Yosemite preserve over the weekend, and local officials in mountain towns handed out sandbags for residents to reinforce their homes against the possible deluge.

The storm will continue to pound the Sierra Nevada range this week. Weather experts predict that colder temperatures could possibly turn the moisture from rain into heavy snow, bringing the potential for up to seven additional feet of snow in the mountains.

At the highest elevations, the cold air could translate to as much as 20 feet of snow on the peaks, according to forecasts from the National Weather Service.

Such high snow accumulation could mitigate California’s enduring drought by building up the Sierra snowpack. Farming is a crucial facet of the California economy, and the dry conditions and water shortages in recent years have hurt the state’s agriculture industry. The snowpack, which begins to melt in the spring, helps fill the reservoirs that are critical for growing crops during the summer months.

Frank Gehrke, the chief snow surveyor for the California Department of Water Resources, said the storm cycle — though potentially dangerous in the short term — could help quench the region’s drought conditions.

“This series of storms that we’re experiencing . . . are certainly going to have an impact on water supply, but we’ve got to wait and see how things settle out,” Gehrke said. “The ongoing concern is how warm or cold any particular event is. Warm can bring flooding, and a cold event can build the snowpack. That’s one thing we’re monitoring closely.”

As the storm settled over the mountains during the weekend, roads were closed and resorts halted operations. Visitors had to be kept off the slopes, as extremely high winds and low visibility coupled with thunder and lightning made skiing too dangerous.

“We haven’t seen a storm cycle like this in the last five years of really heavy snowfall,” said Lauren Burke, a spokeswoman for Mammoth Mountain resort. “With the amount of rain that’s in the forecast, flooding is definitely on the forefront of people’s minds.”

In addition to flooding, the prospect of massive snowfall has experts concerned about catastrophic avalanches. The Sierra Avalanche Center issued a Category 5 warning and ranked the probability of hazardous conditions as “extreme,” noting that “due to significant loading from rain and heavy wet snow, natural and human triggered avalanches are certain in the next 24 hours.”

“We’re worried about infrastructure, roads, houses in avalanche zones, and potentially seeing some very large — up to historic — avalanches,” said Steve Reynaud, an avalanche forecaster at the center. “There’s high probability that things can slide big. Things that we haven’t seen potentially in a 10- to 20- to 30-year cycle.”

Brian Kniveton, a Truckee-area resident, joined volunteers at the Squaw Valley Fire Department to fill sandbags as the Truckee River swelled and carried chunks of floating ice.

“I just felt like paying it forward and trying to help do my part to keep North Lake Tahoe a community who can rely on each other,” Kniveton said.

This region of California has seen extensive flooding, but it has been quite a while since a system has come through with this kind of potential. Twenty years ago, Yosemite’s largest recorded flood was generated by a rainfall event not unlike what the park experienced this weekend. All of the park’s major floods resulted from a simple combination of warm rain falling on heavy snowpack.

In the 1997 storm, torrential rain melted the snowpack and the Merced River burst over its banks on New Year’s Day. Water levels in Yosemite Valley peaked at 16 feet, inundating park infrastructure. Electrical, water and sewer systems were ruined, according to the park’s recovery report. The major roads into and out of the park were washed out, leaving more than 2,000 guests and employees stranded as they watched the floodwater pour into the valley.

“Every cliff was a waterfall,” a Yosemite spokesman told The Washington Post’s Ann Grimes in 1997. “Yosemite’s cliffs put Niagara Falls to shame.”

It took three days — during which time the water continued to rise — for the stranded parkgoers and residents to be evacuated by convoy. Downstream, 100,000 people were ordered to evacuate California’s Central Valley. On Jan. 3, 1997, the Merced River reached a record 23.43 feet at Yosemite’s Pohono Bridge, where flooding begins at 10 feet. The resulting damage was so significant that park officials closed Yosemite to the public until March 14, and even then, it was only partially reopened.

The federal government allocated more than $250 million to recovery and flood prevention projects, which weren’t fully completed until 2012.

This week’s cycle of storms began when high pressure — which has all but dominated California weather for the past five years — shifted east. Its absence allowed waves of low pressure to wash onto the West Coast.

Wind flows counterclockwise around low pressure, and swirling air draws warm moisture north from the tropics; the result is what’s known as an atmospheric river. Due to this particular phenomenon’s origins in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii — and its ability to quickly beam storms toward the West Coast — meteorologists call it the “Pineapple Express.”

“We think of it as a fire hose, because that’s basically what it looks like,” said Jim Anderson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Hanford, Calif.

That fire hose of moisture poured down over much of California as rain and snow in two sessions — one at midweek and a second, stronger wave during the weekend.

Between New Year’s Day and Thursday, the Squaw Valley ski resort north of Lake Tahoe racked up 83 inches of snow on its peaks. Areas west of the peaks were inundated with nearly 10 inches of rain in 48 hours.

Highways through the Sierra Nevada, including Interstate 80 at Donner Pass, were closed during the heaviest snow. When they reopened, six-foot walls of snow towered on the shoulders, and traffic crept through the wintry tunnels.

Sauerbrey reported from Truckee. Fritz and Shapiro reported from Washington. Mayumi Elegado in Truckee contributed to this report.

 ‘Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 6

January 9, 2017

There have been a number of translations of Hitler’s seminal book. Most have been heavily editited so as to promulgate disinformation about Hitler’s views and remove passages that might offend the sensitive.

The Murphy translation is considered to be the most accurate and is being reprinted in toto here. Our next publication of this work will be the unexpurgated German edition. The Germans have released a highly doctored edition of ‘Mein Kampf’ that is selling well in Germany. Perhaps a free copy of the original would do better. ed

VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT

CHAPTER VI  WAR PROPAGANDA

In watching the course of political events I was always struck by the active part which propaganda played in them. I saw that it was an instrument, which the Marxist Socialists knew how to handle in a masterly way and how to put it to practical uses. Thus I soon came to realize that the right use of propaganda was an art in itself and that this art was practically unknown to our bourgeois parties. The Christian-Socialist Party alone, especially in Lueger’s time, showed a certain efficiency in the employment of this instrument and owed much of their success to it.

It was during the War, however, that we had the best chance of estimating the tremendous results which could be obtained by a propagandist system properly carried out. Here again, unfortunately, everything was left to the other side, the work done on our side being worse than insignificant. It was the total failure of the whole German system of information–a failure which was perfectly obvious to every soldier–that urged me to consider the problem of propaganda in a comprehensive way. I had ample opportunity to learn a practical lesson in this matter; for unfortunately it was only too well taught us by the enemy. The lack on our side was exploited by the enemy in such an efficient manner that one could say it showed itself as a real work of genius. In that propaganda carried on by the enemy I found admirable sources of instruction. The lesson to be learned from this had unfortunately no attraction for the geniuses on our own side. They were simply above all such things, too clever to accept any teaching. Anyhow they did not honestly wish to learn anything.

Had we any propaganda at all? Alas, I can reply only in the negative.

All that was undertaken in this direction was so utterly inadequate and misconceived from the very beginning that not only did it prove useless but at times harmful. In substance it was insufficient. Psychologically it was all wrong. Anybody who had carefully investigated the German propaganda must have formed that judgment of it. Our people did not seem to be clear even about the primary question itself: Whether propaganda is a means or an end?

Propaganda is a means and must, therefore, be judged in relation to the end it is intended to serve. It must be organized in such a way as to be capable of attaining its objective. And, as it is quite clear that the importance of the objective may vary from the standpoint of general necessity, the essential internal character of the propaganda must vary accordingly. The cause for which we fought during the War was the noblest and highest that man could strive for. We were fighting for the freedom and independence of our country, for the security of our future welfare and the honour of the nation. Despite all views to the contrary, this honour does actually exist, or rather it will have to exist; for a nation without honour will sooner or later lose its freedom and independence. This is in accordance with the ruling of a higher justice, for a generation of poltroons is not entitled to freedom. He who would be a slave cannot have honour; for such honour would soon become an object of general scorn.

Germany was waging war for its very existence. The purpose of its war propaganda should have been to strengthen the fighting spirit in that struggle and help it to victory.

But when nations are fighting for their existence on this earth, when the question of ‘to be or not to be’ has to be answered, then all humane and aesthetic considerations must be set aside; for these ideals do not exist of themselves somewhere in the air but are the product of man’s creative imagination and disappear when he disappears. Nature knows nothing of them. Moreover, they are characteristic of only a small number of nations, or rather of races, and their value depends on the measure in which they spring from the racial feeling of the latter.

Humane and aesthetic ideals will disappear from the inhabited earth when those races disappear which are the creators and standard-bearers of them.

All such ideals are only of secondary importance when a nation is struggling for its existence. They must be prevented from entering into the struggle the moment they threaten to weaken the stamina of the nation that is waging war. That is always the only visible effect whereby their place in the struggle is to be judged.

In regard to the part played by humane feeling, Moltke stated that in time of war the essential thing is to get a decision as quickly as possible and that the most ruthless methods of fighting are at the same time the most humane. When people attempt to answer this reasoning by highfalutin talk about aesthetics, etc., only one answer can be given. It is that the vital questions involved in the struggle of a nation for its existence must not be subordinated to any aesthetic considerations. The yoke of slavery is and always will remain the most unpleasant experience that mankind can endure. Do the Schwabing (Note 12) decadents look upon

Germany’s lot to-day as ‘aesthetic’? Of course, one doesn’t discuss such a question with the Jews, because they are the modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God’s image in His creation.

[Note 12. Schwabing is the artistic quarter in Munich where artists have their studios and litterateurs, especially of the Bohemian class, foregather.]

Since these ideas of what is beautiful and humane have no place in warfare, they are not to be used as standards of war propaganda.

During the War, propaganda was a means to an end. And this end was the struggle for existence of the German nation. Propaganda, therefore, should have been regarded from the standpoint of its utility for that purpose. The most cruel weapons were then the most humane, provided they helped towards a speedier decision; and only those methods were good and beautiful which helped towards securing the dignity and freedom of the nation. Such was the only possible attitude to adopt towards war propaganda in the life-or-death struggle.

If those in what are called positions of authority had realized this there would have been no uncertainty about the form and employment of war propaganda as a weapon; for it is nothing but a weapon, and indeed a most terrifying weapon in the hands of those who know how to use it.

The second question of decisive importance is this: To whom should propaganda be made to appeal? To the educated intellectual classes? Or to the less intellectual?

Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people.

For the intellectual classes, or what are called the intellectual classes to-day, propaganda is not suited, but only scientific exposition. Propaganda has as little to do with science as an advertisement poster has to do with art, as far as concerns the form in which it presents its message. The art of the advertisement poster consists in the ability of the designer to attract the attention of the crowd through the form and colours he chooses. The advertisement poster announcing an exhibition of art has no other aim than to convince the public of the importance of the exhibition. The better it does that, the better is the art of the poster as such. Being meant accordingly to impress upon the public the meaning of the exposition, the poster can never take the place of the artistic objects displayed in the exposition hall. They are something entirely different. Therefore. those who wish to study the artistic display must study something that is quite different from the poster; indeed for that purpose a mere wandering through the exhibition galleries is of no use. The student of art must carefully and thoroughly study each exhibit in order slowly to form a judicious opinion about it.

The situation is the same in regard to what we understand by the word, propaganda. The purpose of propaganda is not the personal instruction of the individual, but rather to attract public attention to certain things, the importance of which can be brought home to the masses only by this means.

Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of certain things and the just character of something that is essential.

But as this art is not an end in itself and because its purpose must be exactly that of the advertisement poster, to attract the attention of the masses and not by any means to dispense individual instructions to those who already have an educated opinion on things or who wish to form such an opinion on grounds of objective study–because that is not the purpose of propaganda, it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning powers.

All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach. When there is question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level, which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.

The more modest the scientific tenor of this propaganda and the more it is addressed exclusively to public sentiment, the more decisive will be its success. This is the best test of the value of a propaganda, and not the approbation of a small group of intellectuals or artistic people.

The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. That this is not understood by those among us whose wits are supposed to have been sharpened to the highest pitch is only another proof of their vanity or mental inertia.

Once we have understood how necessary it is to concentrate the persuasive forces of propaganda on the broad masses of the people, the following lessons result therefrom:

That it is a mistake to organize the direct propaganda as if it were a manifold system of scientific instruction.

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way.

Therefore, the greater the scope of the message that has to be presented, the more necessary it is for the propaganda to discover that plan of action which is psychologically the most efficient.

It was, for example, a fundamental mistake to ridicule the worth of the enemy as the Austrian and German comic papers made a chief point of doing in their propaganda. The very principle here is a mistaken one; for, when they came face to face with the enemy, our soldiers had quite a different impression. Therefore, the mistake had disastrous results.

Once the German soldier realised what a tough enemy he had to fight he felt that he had been deceived by the manufacturers of the information which had been given him. Therefore, instead of strengthening and stimulating his fighting spirit, this information had quite the contrary effect. Finally he lost heart.

On the other hand, British and American war propaganda was psychologically efficient. By picturing the Germans to their own people as Barbarians and Huns, they were preparing their soldiers for the horrors of war and safeguarding them against illusions. The most terrific weapons which those soldiers encountered in the field merely confirmed the information that they had already received and their belief in the truth of the assertions made by their respective governments was accordingly reinforced. Thus their rage and hatred against the infamous foe was increased. The terrible havoc caused by the German weapons of war was only another illustration of the Hunnish brutality of those barbarians; whereas on the side of the Entente no time was left the soldiers to meditate on the similar havoc which their own weapons were capable of. Thus the British soldier was never allowed to feel that the information which he received at home was untrue.

Unfortunately the opposite was the case with the Germans, who finally wound up by rejecting everything from home as pure swindle and humbug.

This result was made possible because at home they thought that the work of propaganda could be entrusted to the first ass that came along, braying of his own special talents, and they had no conception of the fact that propaganda demands the most skilled brains that can be found.

Thus the German war propaganda afforded us an incomparable example of how the work of ‘enlightenment’ should not be done and how such an example was the result of an entire failure to take any psychological considerations whatsoever into account.

From the enemy, however, a fund of valuable knowledge could be gained by those who kept their eyes open, whose powers of perception had not yet become sclerotic, and who during four-and-a-half years had to experience the perpetual flood of enemy propaganda.

The worst of all was that our people did not understand the very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda; namely, a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with. In this regard so many errors were committed, even from the very beginning of the war, that it was justifiable to doubt whether so much folly could be attributed solely to the stupidity of people in higher quarters.

What, for example, should we say of a poster which purported to advertise some new brand of soap by insisting on the excellent qualities  of the competitive brands? We should naturally shake our heads. And it  ought to be just the same in a similar kind of political advertisement.

The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting rights, giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right which we are asserting. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side.

It was a fundamental mistake to discuss the question of who was responsible for the outbreak of the war and declare that the sole responsibility could not be attributed to Germany. The sole responsibility should have been laid on the shoulders of the enemy, without any discussion whatsoever.

And what was the consequence of these half-measures? The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. As soon as our own propaganda made the slightest suggestion that the enemy had a certain amount of justice on his side, then we laid down the basis on which the justice of our own cause could be questioned. The masses are not in a position to discern where the enemy’s fault ends and where our own begins. In such a case they become hesitant and distrustful, especially when the enemy does not make the same mistake but heaps all the blame on his adversary. Could there be any clearer proof of this than the fact that finally our own people believed what was said by the enemy’s propaganda, which was uniform and consistent in its assertions, rather than what our own propaganda said? And that, of course, was increased by the mania for objectivity which addicts our people. Everybody began to be careful about doing an injustice to the enemy, even at the cost of seriously injuring, and even ruining his own people and State.

Naturally the masses were not conscious of the fact that those in authority had failed to study the subject from this angle.

The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Its notions are never partly this and partly that.

English propaganda especially understood this in a marvellous way and put what they understood into practice. They allowed no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt.

Proof of how brilliantly they understood that the feeling of the masses is something primitive was shown in their policy of publishing tales of horror and outrages which fitted in with the real horrors of the time, thereby cleverly and ruthlessly preparing the ground for moral solidarity at the front, even in times of great defeats. Further, the way in which they pilloried the German enemy as solely responsible for

he war–which was a brutal and absolute falsehood–and the way in which they proclaimed his guilt was excellently calculated to reach the masses, realizing that these are always extremist in their feelings. And thus it was that this atrocious lie was positively believed.

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda is well illustrated by the fact that after four-and-a-half years, not only was the enemy still carrying on his propagandist work, but it was already undermining the stamina of our people at home.

That our propaganda did not achieve similar results is not to be wondered at, because it had the germs of inefficiency lodged in its very being by reason of its ambiguity. And because of the very nature of its content one could not expect it to make the necessary impression on the masses. Only our feckless ‘statesmen’ could have imagined that on pacifists slops of such a kind the enthusiasm could be nourished which is necessary to enkindle that spirit which leads men to die for their country.

And so this product of ours was not only worthless but detrimental.

No matter what an amount of talent employed in the organization of propaganda, it will have no result if due account is not taken of these fundamental principles. Propaganda must be limited to a few simple themes and these must be represented again and again. Here, as in innumerable other cases, perseverance is the first and most important condition of success.

Particularly in the field of propaganda, placid aesthetes and blasé intellectuals should never be allowed to take the lead. The former would readily transform the impressive character of real propaganda into something suitable only for literary tea parties. As to the second class of people, one must always beware of this pest; for, in consequence of their insensibility to normal impressions, they are constantly seeking new excitements.

Such people grow sick and tired of everything. They always long for change and will always be incapable of putting themselves in the position of picturing the wants of their less callous fellow-creatures in their immediate neighbourhood, let alone trying to understand them.

The blase intellectuals are always the first to criticize propaganda, or rather its message, because this appears to them to be outmoded and trivial. They are always looking for something new, always yearning for change; and thus they become the mortal enemies of every effort that may be made to influence the masses in an effective way. The moment the organization and message of a propagandist movement begins to be orientated according to their tastes it becomes incoherent and scattered.

It is not the purpose of propaganda to create a series of alterations in sentiment with a view to pleasing these blase gentry. Its chief function is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.

Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. In this way alone can propaganda be consistent and dynamic in its effects.

Only by following these general lines and sticking to them steadfastly, with uniform and concise emphasis, can final success be reached. Then one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a persistent policy secures.

The success of any advertisement, whether of a business or political nature, depends on the consistency and perseverance with which it is employed.

In this respect also the propaganda organized by our enemies set us an excellent example. It confined itself to a few themes, which were meant exclusively for mass consumption, and it repeated these themes with untiring perseverance. Once these fundamental themes and the manner of placing them before the world were recognized as effective, they adhered to them without the slightest alteration for the whole duration of the War. At first all of it appeared to be idiotic in its impudent assertiveness. Later on it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it was believed.

But in England they came to understand something further: namely, that the possibility of success in the use of this spiritual weapon consists in the mass employment of it, and that when employed in this way it brings full returns for the large expenses incurred.

In England propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, whereas with us it represented the last hope of a livelihood for our unemployed politicians and a snug job for shirkers of the modest hero type.

Taken all in all, its results were negative.