TBR News January 26, 2017

Jan 26 2017

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. January 26, 2017:” We have just received a notice from a firm that specializes in digging electronic information out of the woodwork. The firm lists several pages of topics, some of which are unbelievable. They are very expensive but one must assume that their data is correct. We are excerpting some of this list and have included their address for those who have the money to learn the truth as, according to the précis, it has never been available before.

  • Successor to the NSA ‘Harvest” programs that catalog important overseas telephone calls made via communications satellites.
  • In depth information on the DoD’s DISA sytems / VIPER and others
  • USIA/Warrentown files
  • In depth dossiers on members of Congress. These, the list advises us, consists of medical and financial records.
  • A 250 page report on the fake Anthrax scare
  • Firms and individuals in foreign countries known to be friendly sources.
  • Scanned copies of Governor George W. Bush’s personal correspondence and financial records, now hidden in the George H.W.Bush Presidential Library
  • Lists of offshore bank accounts for senior political and military figures
  • The so-called ‘Wilson Blvd.’ technical and scientific records

There are many more fascinating offerings but it should be noted that on the list we were sent, prices are very high indeed but approved credit cards, especially American Express, can be used. We have not availed ourselves of this reported service but as it might prove to be interesting to our many readers, especially those with large amounts of cash, we are including the address for your general information: www.spywarelabs.inc and one must apply for an entrance code.

Good hunting!”

Descending into Darkness: The Making of a Wartime President

by Brian Harring

www.amazon.com  kindle ebooks $3.99

 

“THE HARRING REPORT IS ANOTHER ‘DEEP THROAT’”

 

Published for the first time ever, Descending Into Darkness shows the actual, as opposed to the propaganda, background to the upheavals in the Middle East and the reasons for the 9/11 attacks. It also includes the complete, as contrasted with the false, official (at the time this book went to press) DoD listings of U.S. Military casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Also in Prelude to Disaster:

  • Events leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom
  • War in Iraq – Russian Military Intelligence Reports & Assessment [March 17-April 8, 2003]
  • The “Nazi” Neocons – Who are they?
  • The Secret Downing Street Memo – Setting the Stage for 9/11
  • Israeli Espionage Against the United States

Table of Contents

  • Obama Bequeaths a More Dangerous World
  • Need To Reorganize US Spy Agencies
  • SECRECY NEWS
  • Mexico’s president condemns Trump’s border wall directive
  • New Homeland Security Data Shows Major Surge in Illegal Immigration in the United States
  • Greece rejects Turkey soldiers’ extradition
  • The U.S. Assassination of Salvador Allende
  • Abbas Adviser: Palestinians Reassured Jerusalem Embassy Move Not High on Trump’s Agenda
  • ‘Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 18

Obama Bequeaths a More Dangerous World

President Obama may have entered the White House with a desire to rein in America’s global war-making but he succumbed to neocon pressure and left behind an even more dangerous world

January 24, 2017

by Robert Parry

Consortium

Any fair judgment about Barack Obama’s presidency must start with the recognition that he inherited a dismal situation from George W. Bush: the U.S. economy was in free-fall and U.S. troops were bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly, these intertwined economic and foreign policy crises colored how Obama viewed his options, realizing that one false step could tip the world into the abyss.

It’s also true that his Republican rivals behaved as if they had no responsibility for the messes that Obama had to clean up. From the start, they set out to trip him up rather than lend a hand. Plus, the mainstream media blamed Obama for this failure of bipartisanship, rewarding the Republicans for their nihilistic obstructionism.

That said, however, it is also true that Obama – an inexperienced manager – made huge mistakes from the outset and failed to rectify them in a timely fashion. For instance, he bought into the romantic notion of a “Team of Rivals” with his White House trumpeting the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln (although some of Lincoln’s inclusion of rivals actually resulted from deals made at the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago to gain Lincoln the nomination).

In the real world of modern Washington, Obama’s choice of hawkish Sen. Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State and Republican apparatchik Robert Gates to remain as Secretary of Defense – along with keeping Bush’s high command, including neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus – guaranteed that he would achieve little real foreign policy change.

Indeed, in 2009, this triumvirate collaborated to lock Obama into a futile counterinsurgency escalation in Afghanistan that did little more than get another 1,000 or so U.S. soldiers killed along with many more Afghans. In his memoir Duty, Gates said he and Clinton could push their joint views – favoring more militaristic strategies – in the face of White House opposition because “we were both seen as ‘un-fireable.’”

Seasoned Operatives

So, Obama’s rookie management mistake of surrounding himself with seasoned Washington operatives with a hawkish agenda doomed his early presidency to maneuvering at the edges of change rather than engineering a major – and necessary – overhaul of how the United States deals with the world

Obama may have thought he could persuade these experienced players with his intellect and charm but that is not how power works. At moments when Obama was inclined to move in a less warlike direction, Clinton, Gates and Petraeus could easily leak damaging comments about his “weakness” to friendly journalists at mainstream publications. Obama found himself consistently under pressure and he lacked the backbone to prove Gates wrong by firing Gates and Clinton.

Thus, Obama was frequently outmaneuvered. Besides the ill-fated counterinsurgency surge in Afghanistan, there was his attempt in 2009-10 to get Brazil and Turkey to broker a deal with Iran in which it would surrender much of its enriched uranium. But Israel and the neocons wanted a “regime change” bombing strategy against Iran, leading Secretary Clinton to personally torpedo the Brazil-Turkey initiative (with the strong support of The New York Times’ editorial page) as Obama silently acquiesced to her insubordination.

In 2011, Obama also gave in to pressure from Clinton and one of his key advisers, “humanitarian” warmonger Samantha Power, to support another “regime change” in Libya. That U.S.-facilitated air war devastated the Libyan military and ended with Islamic militants sodomizing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi with a knife and then murdering him, a grisly outcome that Clinton celebrated with a chirpy rephrase of Julius Caesar’s famous boast about a conquest, as she said: “We came, we saw, he died.”

Clinton was less upbeat a year later when Islamic militants in Benghazi, Libya, killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel, launching a scandal that led to the exposure of her private email server and reverberated through to the final days of her failed presidential campaign in 2016.

Second-Term Indecision

Even after Clinton, Gates and Petraeus were gone by the start of Obama’s second term, he continued to acquiesce to most of the demands of the neocons and liberal interventionists. Rather than act as a decisive U.S. president, Obama often behaved more like the sullen teen-ager complaining from the backseat about not wanting to go on a family trip. Obama grumbled about some of the neocon/liberal-hawk policies but he mostly went along, albeit half-heartedly at times

For instance, although he recognized that the idea of “moderate” Syrian rebels being successful in ousting President Bashar al-Assad was a “fantasy,” he nevertheless approved covert shipments of weapons, which often ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda-linked terrorists and their allies. But he balked at a full-scale U.S. military intervention.

Obama’s mixed-signal Syrian strategy not only violated international law – by committing aggression against a sovereign state – but also contributed to the horrific bloodshed that ripped apart Syria and created a massive flow of refugees into Turkey and Europe. By the end of his presidency, the United States found itself largely sidelined as Russia and regional powers, Turkey and Iran, took the lead in trying to resolve the conflict.

But one of the apparent reasons for Obama’s susceptibility to such fruitless undertakings was that he seemed terrified of Israel and its pugnacious Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who made clear his disdain for Obama by essentially endorsing Obama’s 2012 Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

Although Obama may have bristled at Netanyahu’s arrogance – displayed even during meetings in the Oval Office – the President always sought to mollify the tempestuous Prime Minister. At the peak of Obama’s power – after he vanquished Romney despite Netanyahu’s electoral interference – Obama chose to grovel before Netanyahu with an obsequious three-day visit to Israel.

Despite that trip, Netanyahu treated Obama with disdain, setting a new standard for chutzpah by accepting a Republican invitation to appear before a joint session of Congress in 2015 and urge U.S. senators and representatives to side with Israel against their own president over Obama’s negotiated agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu and the neocons wanted to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.

However, the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu failed to derail, may have been Obama’s most significant diplomatic achievement. (In his passive-aggressive way, Obama gave Netanyahu some measure of payback by abstaining on a December 2016 motion before the United Nations Security Council condemning Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands. Obama neither vetoed it nor voted for it, but let it pass.)

Obama also defied Washington’s hardliners when he moved to normalize relations with Cuba, although – by 2016 – the passionate feelings about the Caribbean island had faded as a geopolitical issue, making the Cuban sanctions more a relic of the old Cold War than a hot-button issue.

Obama’s Dubious Legacy

Yet, Obama’s fear of standing up consistently to Official Washington’s  neocons and cowering before the Israeli-Saudi tandem in the Middle East did much to define his foreign policy legacy. While Obama did drag his heels on some of their more extreme demands by resisting their calls to bomb the Syrian government in 2013 and by choosing diplomacy over war with Iran in 2014, Obama repeatedly circled back to ingratiating himself to the neocons and America’s demanding Israeli-Saudi “allies.”

Instead of getting tough with Israel over its continued abuse of the Palestinians, Obama gave Netanyahu’s regime the most sophisticated weapons from the U.S. arsenal. Instead of calling out the Saudis as the principal state sponsor of terrorism – for their support for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State – Obama continued the fiction that Iran was the lead villain on terrorism and cooperated when the Saudis launched a brutal air war against their impoverished neighbors in Yemen.

Obama personally acknowledged authorizing military strikes in seven countries, mostly through his aggressive use of drones, an approach toward push-button warfare that has spread animosity against the United States to the seven corners of the earth.

However, perhaps Obama’s most dangerous legacy is the New Cold War with Russia, which began in earnest when Washington’s neocons struck back against Moscow for its cooperation with Obama in getting Syria to surrender its chemical weapons (which short-circuited neocon hopes to bomb the Syrian military) and in persuading Iran to accept tight limits on its nuclear program (another obstacle to a neocon bombing plan).

In both cases, the neocons were bent on “regime change,” or at least a destructive bombing operation in line with Israeli and Saudi hostility toward Syria and Iran. But the biggest challenge to these schemes was the positive relationship that had developed between Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. So, that relationship had to be shattered and the wedge that the neocons found handy was Ukraine.

By September 2013, Carl Gershman, the neocon president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, had identified Ukraine as “the biggest prize” and a steppingstone toward the ultimate goal of ousting Putin. By late fall 2013 and winter 2014, neocons inside the U.S. government, including Sen. John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, were actively agitating for a “regime change” in Ukraine, a putsch against elected President Viktor Yanukovych that was carried out on Feb. 22, 2014.

This operation on Russia’s border provoked an immediate reaction from the Kremlin, which then supported ethnic-Russian Ukrainians who had voted heavily for Yanukovych and who objected to the coup regime in Kiev. The neocon-dominated U.S. mainstream media, of course, portrayed the Ukrainian conflict as a simple case of “Russian aggression,” and Obama fell in line with this propaganda narrative.

After his relationship with Putin had deteriorated over the ensuring two-plus years, Obama chose to escalate the New Cold War in his final weeks in  office by having U.S. intelligence agencies leak unsubstantiated claims that Putin interfered in the U.S. presidential election by hacking and publicizing Democratic emails that helped Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

Smearing Trump

The CIA also put in play salacious rumors about the Kremlin blackmailing Trump over a supposed video of him cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. And, according to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. counterintelligence agents investigated communications between retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, and Russian officials. In the New McCarthyism that now surrounds the New Cold War, any conversation with Russians apparently puts an American under suspicion for treason.

The anti-Russian frenzy also pulled in The New York Times, The Washington Post and virtually the entire mainstream media, which now treat any dissent from the official U.S. narratives condemning Moscow as prima facie evidence that you are part of a Russian propaganda apparatus. Even some “progressive” publications have joined this stampede because they so despise Trump that they will tout any accusation to damage his presidency.

Besides raising serious concerns about civil liberties and freedom of association, Obama’s end-of-term anti-Russian hysteria may be leading the Democratic Party into supplanting the Republicans as America’s leading pro-war party allied with neocons, liberal hawks, the CIA and the Military-Industrial Complex – in opposition to President Trump’s less belligerent approach toward Russia.

This “trading places” moment over which party is the bigger warmonger could be another profound part of Obama’s legacy, presenting a crisis for pro-peace Democrats as the Trump presidency unfolds.

The Real Obama

Yet, one of the mysteries of Obama is whether he was always a closet hawk who just let his true colors show over the course of his eight years in office or whether he was a weak executive who desperately wanted to belong to the Washington establishment and underwent a gradual submission to achieve that acceptance.

I know some Obama watchers favor the first answer, that he simply bamboozled people into thinking that he was an agent for foreign policy change when he was always a stealth warmonger. But I tend to take the second position. To me, Obama was a person who – despite his intelligence, eloquence and accomplishments – was never accepted by America’s predominantly white establishment.

Because he was a black male raised in a white family and in a white-dominated society, Obama understood that he never really belonged. But Obama desperately wanted to be part of that power structure of well-dressed, well-schooled and well-connected elites who moved with such confidence within the economic-political system.

An instructive moment came in 2014 when Obama was under sustained criticism for his refusal to bomb the Syrian military after a sarin gas attack outside Damascus that was initially blamed on the government though later evidence suggested that it was a provocation committed by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.

Despite the uncertainty about who was responsible, the neocons and liberal hawks deemed Obama “weak” for not ordering the bombing strike to enforce his “red line” against chemical weapons use.

In a 2016 article in The Atlantic, Obama cited his sarin decision as a moment when he resisted the Washington “playbook” that usually favors a military response. The article also reported that Obama had been informed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that there was no “slam dunk” evidence pinning the attack on the Syrian military. Yet, still Obama came under intense pressure to strike.

A leader of this pressure campaign was neocon ideologue Robert Kagan, an architect of the Iraq War and the husband of Assistant Secretary of State Nuland. Kagan penned a long essay in The New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.” A subsequent New York Times article observed that Kagan “depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence.”

Kagan “called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to reassume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention,” the Times article read.

Obama was so sensitive to this criticism that he modified his speech to the West Point graduation and “even invited Mr. Kagan to lunch to compare world views,” the Times reported. A source familiar with that conversation described it to me as a “meeting of equals.”

So, Obama’s subservience to the neocons and liberal hawks may have begun as a case of an inexperienced president getting outmaneuvered by rivals whom he had foolishly empowered. But Obama’s descent into a full-scale New Cold Warrior by the end of his second term suggests that he was no longer an overpowered naïf but someone who had become a committed convert.

How Obama reached that point may be less significant than the fact that he did. Thus, the world that President Obama bequeaths to President Trump may not have all the same dangers that Bush left to Obama but the post-Obama world has hazards that Obama did more to create than to resolve — and some of the new risks may be even scarier

Need To Reorganize US Spy Agencies

On President Trump’s first full day in office, he went to the CIA and promised to back the nation’s spy agencies, but his time would be better spent downsizing the sprawling intelligence community

January 26, 2017

by Ivan Eland

AntiWar

Originating from the dispute over whether the Russians hacked the U.S. election and tried to influence it, rumblings came from the Trump transition team about reorganizing the intelligence community or parts thereof. That’s not a bad idea at all.

Prior to 9/11, the US intelligence community had grown to 16 sprawling, secretive agencies, which stayed in their stovepipes, thus cooperating insufficiently. For example, the CIA and FBI had coordination problems that really impaired the government’s warning of the 9/11 attacks.

Logically, coordination problems tend to multiply the more intelligence agencies the government has and the bigger they get. Yet after 9/11, the George W. Bush administration and Congress instead used political logic. They wanted to be perceived as “doing something,” often anything, about the problem – no matter whether it would be effective in dealing with it, a mere placebo with no effect but looked good, or an action that was actually counterproductive.

“Reform” of the intelligence community after 9/11 fell into the last category. After a crisis, politicians often add government bureaucracy to show the public they are not letting a problem slide. In this case, they added yet a 17th intelligence agency – the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – to “coordinate” the CIA, FBI, NSA and other mostly gargantuan organizations of the 16-agency community.

Of course, one person couldn’t herd all these big cats, so the DNI had to have a new bureaucracy to allegedly tame them. Yet the DNI’s bureaucracy did not win control over the budgets of the other 16 agencies. In fact, most of the intelligence community’s budget is controlled by the massive Department of Defense – in which many of the intelligence agencies reside.

Complicated enough? In the government, like everywhere else, controlling money directs effort. Thus, the DNI has been ineffectual in coordinating the US intelligence community.

Instead of adding yet another bureaucracy to coordinate the existing ones (after 9/11, the president and Congress did the same thing in the homeland security sphere by creating the new Department of Homeland Security to incorporate and coordinate all the government entities dealing with that function), the politicians should have done the opposite.

The new enemy, which is not so new anymore, was small, agile cells of terrorists, not the traditional slothful nation states of the Cold War, such as the Soviet Union. In bureaucratic parlance, the terrorist chain of command is simple and responsive. To counter this threat, the intelligence community must also be nimbler, not less agile.

Dysfunction and Inefficiency

This means that after 9/11, intelligence agencies and excess personnel should have been pruned, not added. Dysfunction and inefficiency would have also been reduced when dealing with threats from other nation-states.

A specific plan for streamlining the intelligence community to make it more agile and effective for a new global security environment might begin by eliminating the ineffectual Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Then the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) should be merged with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which like the ODNI, sits on top of other intelligence agencies – the service intelligence agencies of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard, which provide tactical battlefield intelligence.

The Marine and Coast Guard intelligence agencies could be folded under the umbrella of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The technical collection functions of the National Security Agency, The National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency should be merged into an Office of Technical Intelligence Collection.

The small Office of Intelligence and Research in the State Department, the only intelligence agency that was skeptical that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, should be left alone as a counter to the frequently alarmist threat inflation of the CIA/DIA.

The FBI should be returned to being a law enforcement agency, with its intelligence functions being transferred to the Office of Intelligence and Analysis in the Homeland Security Department. The intelligence branches of the Energy and Treasury Departments, as well as that of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the Justice Department, should be abolished (in fact, because the federal drug war has been such a costly and abysmal failure, the entire DEA should be dismantled).

Streamlining and Consolidation

Such streamlining of and consolidation in the intelligence community would enable many redundancies to be reduced or eliminated, thus eliminating much duplication and bureaucratic overhead.

In addition, during the Cold War the US intelligence community concentrated on having the best technical means of gathering information in the world – satellites, spy aircraft, drones, and other technological marvels of modern intelligence gathering. However, such gadgets have their limitations when trying to penetrate a small, secretive terrorist cell; human agents are still needed. Yet a decade-and-a-half after 9/11, the intelligence community still needs to improve its human intelligence (humint) capability. One major reason humint has lagged is that it doesn’t generate big money contracts in states and congressional districts, as does the building of satellites, spy aircraft, drones, and other electronic collection gizmos.

Thus, some intelligence agencies need to be eliminated or combined with sister agencies and the excess personnel eliminated. On the other hand, money should be taken away from technical collection and used to recruit more human agents.

In sum, almost any Trump administration shakeup of the ossified intelligence community would be welcome.

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 7

January 26, 2017

REBOOTING THE IC INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT

Over the past several years, former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper led an ongoing transformation of information policy in the U.S. intelligence community that stresses information sharing among intelligence agencies based on a common information technology infrastructure.

On his way out the door last week, DNI Clapper signed Intelligence Community Directive 121 on Managing the Intelligence Community Information Environment, dated January 19, 2017.

The goal is for each IC member agency “to make information readily discoverable by and appropriately retrievable to the [entire] IC.”

Although the policy makes allowance for unique individual agency requirements, and acknowledges legal and policy restrictions on sharing of privacy information, a common IC-wide information architecture is otherwise supposed to become the new default for each intelligence community agency.

“IC elements shall first use an IC enterprise approach, which accounts for all IC equities and enhances intelligence integration, for managing the IC IE [Information Environment] before using an IC element-centric solution,” the new directive says.

Further, “IC elements shall […] migrate IC IT capabilities to IC IT SoCCs [Services of Common Concern] as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

Increased sharing of information naturally entails increased vulnerability to compromise of the shared information.

To help mitigate the increased risk, “all personnel accessing the IC IE [must] have unique, identifiable identities, which can be authenticated and have current and accurate attributes for accessing information in accordance with IC policies, guidance, and specifications for identity and access management,” the directive says.

The new IT Enterprise approach has received congressional support and seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

But in the current period of turbulence everything is uncertain, including the future of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself.

In its report on the FY2017 Intelligence Authorization Act last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee mandated a new review of the roles and missions of the ODNI.

“It has been more than ten years since the Congress established the position of the DNI in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, building on its predecessor, the Director of Central Intelligence. Given this experience and the evolving security environment, the Committee believes it appropriate to review the DNI’s roles, missions and functions and adapt its authorities, organization and resources as needed,” the new Committee report said.

EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY TO EXCLUDE ALIENS, & MORE FROM CRS

The President seems to have broad statutory authority to exclude aliens from the United States, a new report from the Congressional Research Service says.

“On its face, [the Immigration and Nationality Act] would appear to give the President broad authority to preclude or otherwise restrict the entry into the United States of individual aliens or classes of aliens who are outside the United States and lack recognized ties to the country,” according to the report by Kate M. Manuel of CRS.

But that authority is not necessarily unlimited.

“In no case to date […] has the Executive purported to take certain types of action, such as barring all aliens from entering the United States for an extended period of time or explicitly distinguishing between categories of aliens based on their religion. Any such restrictions could potentially be seen to raise legal issues that were not raised by prior exclusions…. Similarly, if the President were to purport to exclude aliens based on their religion, an argument could potentially be made that this action is in tension with U.S. treaty obligations or the First Amendment,” the CRS report said.

See Executive Authority to Exclude Aliens: In Brief, January 23, 2017

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Unaccompanied Alien Children: An Overview, January 18, 2017

FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act: Selected Military Personnel Issues, January 23, 2017

The Selective Service System and Draft Registration: Issues for Congress, January 23, 2017

Venezuela: Issues for Congress, 2013-2016, January 23, 2017

Vulnerable Youth: Employment and Job Training Programs, January 23, 2017

Sentencing Reform at the End of the 114th Congress, CRS Legal Sidebar, January 24, 2017

Mexico’s president condemns Trump’s border wall directive

The Mexican president has expressed “regret” at the White House’s plans to build a border wall. Mexican politicians have called on him to ditch a meeting with US President Donald Trump.

January 26, 2017

DW

Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto has considered scrapping a meeting with US President Donald Trump scheduled for January 31, local media reported. However, Mexico’s foreign minister confirmed that the meeting would take place.

In a brief statement, Nieto criticized Trump’s executive order on the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border.

“I regret and condemn the decision of the United States to continue construction of a wall that, for years, has divided us instead of uniting us,” Nieto said. “Mexico does not believe in walls. I have said it time and again: Mexico will not pay for any wall.”

Trump’s executive order to build a wall on the border has been met with fury in the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country.

“The position is very clear,” said Ricardo Anaya Cortes, who serves as the president of the opposition party National Action.

“Either one cancels the meeting with Donald Trump, or one attends it to say publicly and with absolute firmness that Mexico rejects the wall and we will not pay a single cent for it,” he added.

Nieto has witnessed his approval ratings drop to historic lows since he met with Trump in August before his electoral victory and failed to publicly condemn the wall at a joint press conference.

US to ‘pay for it’

US House speaker Paul Ryan told American broadcaster “MSNBC” that Washington will front the bill for the wall at first after Trump last year vowed to have Mexico pay for it.

“There are a lot of different ways of getting Mexico to contribute to doing this, and there are different ways of defining how exactly they pay for it,” Ryan said, noting that the US is “going to pay for it and front the money up.”

He confirmed that the price of constructing the wall is between $8 billion (7.4 billions euros) and $14 billion (13 billion euros).

Meanwhile, leftist opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told a crowd of supporters near Mexico City that the government should explore legal mechanisms to block the construction of the wall.

“I respectfully suggest that the government of Mexico presents a lawsuit at the United Nations against the US government for violation of human rights and racial discrimination,” Obrador said.

New Homeland Security Data Shows Major Surge in Illegal Immigration in the United States

January 2, 2017

ijreview

According to numbers released by the Department of Homeland Security, the United States saw a 15% increase in illegal immigration in 2016.

Fox News reporter Adam Housley related the surge to a similar circumstance in 2014 and said that most immigrants are coming from Central and South America.

Specifically, immigrants are fleeing countries with high crime rates, such as:

  • El Salvador
  • Honduras
  • Guatemala

Due to the violent conditions in those countries, human rights activists are urging the Obama administration to treat the surge as a “refugee crisis.”

On Friday, Homeland Security officials said many of the immigrants from Central America applied for asylum in America with claims of “credible or reasonable fear of persecution.”

Numbers released on Friday show an increase of 67,922 Department of Homeland Security apprehensions.

The 23% increase in Border Patrol arrests are attributed to the problems in Central America, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Administration officials claimed that the 450,954 removals and returns in 2016 reflected a policy shift to target convicted criminals. In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said:

“We continued to better focus our interior resources on removing individuals who may pose threats to public safety — specifically, convicted criminals and threats to national security.”

Statistics released by DHS reported that 91% of apprehensions were part of the enforcement category “Priority 1.” The top priority category includes:

  • National security threats
  • Individuals apprehended at the border while attempting to enter unlawfully
  • The most serious categories of convicted criminals as well as gang members

The Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) was made effective in 2015 by the Obama Administration as an attempt to focus deportation attention on people who posed a threat to Americans.

However, some immigration human rights advocates believe the policy change came too late. J. Kevin ­Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, told the Washington Post:

“In the end, the president will be remembered as a deporter, not a reformer. In the first four years, he set record numbers in removals, much to the dismay of the immigrant community.”

During Obama’s first term in office, over 400,000 immigrants were deported.

Sanctuary cities with limited or no cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have played a significant factor in impacting removal operations.

The DHS report stated that PEP promoted collaboration, and in 2016, 82% of the top jurisdictions have agreed to participate in the program.

The new program hopes to prevent illegal immigrants who have repeatedly committed crimes from being protected from deportation by sanctuary cities.

Greece rejects Turkey soldiers’ extradition

January 26, 2017

BBC News

Greece’s Supreme Court has ruled against extraditing eight Turkish soldiers whom the Turkish government accuses of being involved in last July’s attempted coup.

The eight men fled in a helicopter to Greece after the coup attempt but say they were not involved.

Presiding judge Giorgos Sakkas said the men were unlikely to receive a fair trial in Turkey.

The case has presented a diplomatic dilemma for Greece.

But the court’s decision is final and cannot be appealed against. Justice Minister Stavros Kontonis said before the verdict that he would respect the decision and not intervene.

Turkey has demanded the men, who it calls traitors, be returned to stand trial. The soldiers – three majors, three captains and two sergeant majors – argue their lives would be in danger.

The issue has created new tensions between the Nato allies, who have a complex relationship and are currently working together to help negotiate a peace deal in divided Cyprus.

Turkey is expected to react strongly to the court’s decision.

The eight soldiers in Greece have said that their relatives in Turkey have lost jobs and had their passports confiscated.

In the wake of the coup attempt, tens of thousands of people from every level of Turkish society have been purged from their jobs, including military officers, government officials and schoolteachers.

Critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan say he has used the failed uprising as a way of removing his opponents and tightening his hold on power.

The Turkish government says that it has taken legitimate action to root out “terrorist” groups that had infiltrated the state.

It blamed US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who leads a mass movement in Turkey, for the bloody coup attempt. He denies any involvement.

Soon after the soldiers arrived in Greece, they were given two-month suspended prison sentences for illegally entering the country.

 

The U.S. Assassination of Salvador Allende

January 25, 2017

by Gregory Douglas

 

When Salvador Allende, a committed Marxist, came within three percent of winning the Chilean presidency in 1958, the United States government decided that the next electionto be held in 1964, needed to be prevented.

Washington, at that time strongly influenced by neo-cons, was determined to prevent Allende from coming to power.

During the Kennedy administration, in 1961, an electoral committee was established, composed of top-level officials from the State Department, the CIA and the White House and in the Chilean capital, Santiago, a parallel committee of embassy and CIA people was set up.

In order to block the election, the U.S. have over a hundred CIA operatives working in Chile against Allende.

They began laying the groundwork for the election disruption several years in advance. Later, a Senate investigating committee disclosed, that “by establishing operational relationships with key political parties and by creating propaganda and organizational mechanisms capable of influencing key sectors of the population,” the attack against Allende was set in motion. CIA-directed projects were launched “to help train and organize ‘anti-communists”‘ among peasants, slum dwellers, organized labor, students, the media, etc..

After channeling funds to several non-leftist parties, the CIA’s electoral team settled on a man of the center, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, as the one most likely to block Allende’s rise to power.

The CIA underwrote more than half the party’s total campaign costs, one of the reasons that the Agency’s overall electoral operation reduced the U.S. Treasury by an estimated $20 million-much more per voter than that spent by the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns combined in the same Year in the United States.

The operation worked beyond expectations. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent. The CIA regarded “the anti-communist scare campaign as the most effective activity undertaken”, noted the Senate committee.

This was the tactic directed toward Chilean women in particular. As things turned out, Allende won the men’s vote by 67,000 over Frei (in Chile men and women vote separately), but amongst the women Frei came out ahead by 469,000. The testimony before the Senate committee showed very clearly  the remarkable ease it was to manipulate the minds of the societial masses.  .

The question arises as to why Salvador Allende warranted all this very time-consuming and very large expenditure of American tax-payers money. The neo-cons saw Allende as a dangerous political figure who, according to the Senate committee report, wished to “redistribute income [two percent of the population received 46 percent of the income] and reshape the Chilean economy, beginning with the nationalization of major industries, especially the copper companies; greatly expanded agrarian reform; and expanded relations with socialist and communist countries.”

This attitude was felt by the CIA as being contrary to established American global economic policy, hence Allende was viewed as an enemy.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” Said Henry Kissinger, principal adviser to the President of the United States on matters of national security.

Kissinger made this statement on June 27, 1970, at a meeting of the National Security Council’s 40 Committee, and the people Kissinger suspected of imminent irresponsibility were Chileans whom he feared might finally elect Salvador Allende as their president.

. At this meeting approval was given to a $300,000 increase in the anti-Allende spoiling operation funds.

The CIA trained its disinformation section on the Chilean electorate,the theme of which was: “An Allende victory means violence and Stalinist repression.” The usual CIA b lack propaganda was employed to undermine Allende’s coalition and support by sowing dissent between the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, the main members of the coalition, and between the Communist Party and the [communist dominated]CUTCh.

Nevertheless, on September 4, Allende won a plurality of the votes.

On October 24, the Chilean Congress would meet to choose between Allende and the runner-up, Jorge Alessandri of the Conservative National Party.

By tradition, Allende was certain to become president.

The United States had seven weeks to prevent him from taking office. On  September 15, President Nixon met with Kissinger, CIA Director Richard Helms, and Attorney General John Mitchell.

Helms’ handwritten notes of the meeting have become famous: ” One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! … not concerned with risks involved … $10,000,000 available, more if necessary … make the economy scream.

Funds were authorized by the 40 Committee to bribe Chilean congressmen to vote for Alessandri, but this was soon abandoned as unworkable, and under intense pressure from President Nixon, American efforts were concentrated on inducing the Chilean military to stage a coup and then cancel the congressional vote altogether’

Simultaneously , Nixon and Kissinger made it clear to the CIA that an assassination of Allende would not be unwelcome. One White House options-paper specifically discussed various ways this could be carried out.

Meanwhile, the CIA was in active consultation with several Chilean military officers who were receptive to the suggestion of a coup.

The difficulty in finding such officers was described by the CIA as a problem in overcoming “the apolitical, constitutional-oriented inertia of the Chilean military. The military leaders were assured that the United States would give them full support short of direct military involvement.

The immediate obstacle faced by the officers was the determined opposition of the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, Rene Schneider, who insisted that the constitutional process be followed.

The CIA then determined that Schneider needed to be killed.

In the early morning of October 22, the CIA gave unmarked automatic weapons to the conspirators and that same day Schneider was mortally wounded in an attempted kidnap on his way to work.

The CIA station in Santiago cabled its headquarters that the general had been shot with the same kind of weapons it had delivered to the military plotters, although the Agency later claimed to the Senate that the actual assassins were not the same ones it had passed the weapons to.

This exculpation was not accepted but allowed to enter the record.

Like most CIA operations this assassination was a failure and it only served to rally the army around the concept of constitutionalism.

Time was growing short and the CIA was unable to launch any new actions against Allende and two days later, Salvador Allende was confirmed by the Chilean Congress and on 3 November 3 he took office as president.

There were two concepts heading for collision. The first was was Allende’s socialist experiment aimed at lifting Chile from economic underdevelopment and he other was, as CIA Director William Colby later put it, a “prototype or laboratory experiment to test the techniques of heavy financial investment in an effort to discredit and bring down a government.”

“Not a nut or bolt [will] be allowed to reach Chile under Allende”, warned American Ambassador Edward Korry before the confirmation. The Chilean economy, so extraordinarily dependent upon the United States, was the country’s Achilles Heel, easy for the U.S. to attack. In the following three years, all US government assistance programs for Chile diminished totally and there was also a similar boycott with loans from the US Export-Import Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, in which the United States held what amounted to a veto; and the World Bank none of whom were allowed to make new loans to Chile during 1971-73.

U.S. government financial assistance or guarantees to American private investment in Chile were cut back sharply and American businesses were further instructed to clamp down on profits to Chile. This Washington ordered boycott resulted in were such factors as the many busses and taxis being out of service throughout Chile due to a lack of replacement parts and there were similar difficulties in the copper, steel, electricity and petroleum industries.

American suppliers, acting on American orders, refused to sell needed replacement parts despite Chile’s offer to pay cash in advance.

Multinational ITT, which didn’t need to be told what to do, stated in a 1970 memorandum: “A more realistic hope among those who want to block Allende is that a swiftly deteriorating economy will touch off a wave of violence leading to a military coup.”

In the midst of the near disappearance of economic aid, and contrary to its warning, the United States increased its military assistance to Chile during 1972 and 1973 as well as training Chilean military personnel in the United States and Panama. The Allende government, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, was reluctant to refuse this “assistance” for fear of antagonizing its military leaders.

Perhaps nothing produced more discontent in the population than the food and domestic supplied.

Equally telling were the extended strikes in Chile, which relied heavily on CIA financial support for their prolongation.

In October 1972, for example, an association of private truck owners instituted a CIA-funded work-stoppage aimed at disrupting the flow of food and other important commodities, including in their embargo even newspapers which supported the government. Subtlety was never the hallmark of a CIA operation. Then came store closures, and  most private bus companies stopped running And many professional and white-collar workers, largely unsympathetic to the government, walked out, with CIA background help.

Much of this campaign was aimed at wearing down the patience of the public, convincing them that socialism could not work in Chile.

Yet there had been worse shortages for most of the people before the Allende government-shortages of food, housing, health care, and education, for example.

At least half the population had suffered from malnutrition. Allende, who was a medical doctor, explained his free milk program by pointing out that “Today in Chile there are over 600,000 children mentally retarded because they were not adequately nourished during the first eight months of their lives, because they did not receive the necessary proteins.”

Financial aid was not the CIA’s only input into the strike scene. More than 100 members of Chllean professional associations and employers’ guilds were graduates of the school run by the American Institute for Free Labor Development in Front Royal, Virginia-“The Little Anti-Red Schoolhouse”.

AIFLD, the ClA’s principal Latin America labor organization, also assisted in the formation of a new professional association in May 1971: the Confederation of Chilean Professionals. The labor specialists of AIFLD had more than a decade’s experience in the art of fomenting economic turmoil (or keeping workers quiescent when the occasion called for it).

CIA propaganda merchants had a field day with the disorder and the shortages, exacerbating both by instigating panic buying. All the techniques, the whole of the media saturation, the handy organizations created for each and every purpose, so efficiently employed in 1964 and 1970, were facilitated by the virtually unlimited license granted the press: headlines and stories which spread rumors about everything from nationalizations to bad meat and undrinkable water … “Economic Chaos! Chile on Brink of Doom!” in the largest type one could ever expect to see in a newspaper … raising the specter of civil war, when not actually calling for lt., literally … alarmist stories which anywhere else in the world would have been branded seditious … the worst of London’s daily tabloids or the National Enquirer of the United States appear as staid as a journal of dentistry by comparison.

The government contingency plans were presumably obtained by the Agency through its infiltration of the various parties which made up Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) coalition. CIA agents in the upper echelons of Allende’s own Socialist Party were “paid to make mistakes in their jobs” In Washington, burglary was the CIA’s tactic of choice for obtaining documents.

Papers were stolen from the homes of several employees of the Chilean Embassy; and the embassy itself, which had been bugged for some time, was burgled in May 1972 by some of the same men who the next month staged the Watergate break-in.

In March 1973, the UP won about 44 percent of the vote in congressional elections compared to some 36 percent in 1970. It was said to be the largest increase an incumbent party had ever received in Chile after being in power more than two years. The opposition parties had publicly expressed their optimism about capturing two-thirds of the congressional seats and thus being able to impeach Allende. Now they faced three more years under him, with the prospect of being unable, despite their best and most underhanded efforts, to prevent his popularity from increasing even further.

During the spring and summer the destabilization process escalated. There was a whole series of demonstrations and strikes, with an even longer one by the truckers. Time magazine reported: “While most of the country survived on short rations, the truckers seemed unusually well equipped for a lengthy holdout.” A reporter asked a group of truckers who were camping and dining on “a lavish communal meal of steak, vegetables, wine and empanadas” where the money for it came from. “From the CIA,” they answered laughing.

There was as well daily sabotage and violence, including assassination. In June, an abortive attack upon the Presidential Palace was carried out by the military and Patria y Liberatad..

In September the military prevailed. “It is clear,” said the Senate investigating committee, “the CIA received intelligence reports on the coup planning of the group which carried out the successful September 11 coup throughout the months of July, August, and September 1973.”

The American role on that fateful day was one of substance and shadow. The coup began in the Pacific coast port of Valparaiso with the dispatch of Chilean naval troops to Santiago, while US Navy ships were present offshore, ostensibly to participate in joint maneuvers with the Chilean Navy. The American ships stayed outside of Chilean waters but renamed on the alert. A US WB-575 plane-an airborne communications control system-piloted by US Air Force officers, cruised in the Chilean sky. At the same time, American observation and fighter planes were landing at the US air base in Mendoza, Argentina, not far from the Chilean border.

On September 11, 1973, just prior to the capture of the Palacio de La Moneda (the presidential palace) by military units loyal to Pinochet, President Salvador Allende made his famous farewell speech to Chileans on live radio (Radio Magallanes). The president spoke of his love for Chile, and of his deep faith in its future. He also stated that, as he was committed to Chile, he would not take an easy way out or be used as a propaganda tool by those he called “traitors” (accepting an offer of safe passage, like Carlos Altamirano). The radio address was made while gunfire and explosions were clearly audible in the background.

Shortly afterwards, an official announcement declared that he had gone to war with an AK-47 rifle.

Allende was found in his office, riddled with bullets.

A later autopsy, carried out under U.S. direction and supervision, also recorded his death as a ‘suicide.’

In reality, Allende was machine-gunned in his office by a member of the U.S. Naval Security Group,(NSG, now disbanded)  working in conjunction with the CIA out of the American Embassy.

Washington has always refused to permit any financial independence in any Third World country and in the case of Salvador Allende such independence came with the  constitutionally legal election of a person, albeit a Marxist, who continued to honor his constitution.

Whatever the legality involved, this was totally unacceptable to Washington who believed that there could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power and that was an elected Marxist in power.

Washington knows no heresy in the Third World worse than local independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume-a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution.

This would not do.

There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power-an elected Marxist in power.

Abbas Adviser: Palestinians Reassured Jerusalem Embassy Move Not High on Trump’s Agenda

New U.S. administration wishes to focus on restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Ahmed Majdalani tells Haaretz.

January 25, 2017

by Jack Khoury

Haaretz

The Palestinian Authority in recent days received reassuring messages concerning U.S. President Doland Trump’s declarations about moving the American Embassy In Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Ramallah feared that the Trump administration would take instant action to relocate the embassy, and so took steps within the international and Arab arenas to try to stop it, including a personal appeal from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Trump.

Dr. Ahmed Majdalani, adviser to Abu Mazen and member of the PLO Executive Committee, confirmed to Haaretz that the Palestinian leadership received reassurances that moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem is not at the top of Trump’s agenda and that the administration will soon focus on renewing the peace process.

Majdalani, who also spoke with London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, said that Trump received direct messages from Saudi Arabia and Jordan and other Arab countries, as well as from Russia and the European Union, telling him that such a move would have ruinous implications for America’s standing as a superpower and as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and that it would be a “blatant violation of decisions from the international community concerning Jerusalem.”

Abbas also met on Tuesday with U.S. Consul David Blum at the Muqata in Ramallah. The Palestinian Wafa news agency reported that Abbas said he was ready to cooperate with the Trump administration for the sake of peace

A Palestinian official said however that there were no grand declarations or pledges made by the American diplomat at the meeting.

“The only official statement we have is the statement of the White House spokesperson that the issue of the embassy is still in the early stages of being studied,” the official said. “The American representative heard the Palestinian side and its position on the peace process and the steps that will be taken to strengthen it, and those that could hurt the efforts to resume talks. Everything appears to be in the learning and exploratory stages, and conclusions cannot really be drawn yet.”

In its first daily press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said no decision has been made regarding relocating the embassy in Israel – one of Trump’s campaign pledges. “We’re at the very early stages of that decision making progress,” he said.

Earlier on Monday, a report on MSNBC also said that moving the embassy was not a top priority for Trump at this time. Citing a source in the administration, Joe Scarborough, the host of the network’s popular morning show, said that Trump’s priority in the region was to work towards a Middle East peace deal, and moving the embassy to Jerusalem could harm the process.

“They are not going to move on Jerusalem for quite some time, they want a peace deal in the Middle East, that is their top priority and they have been told under no uncertain terms, that the recognition of Jerusalem sets that back for the next four years,” Scarborough said. “So, that’s not happening… while they measure out the possibility of actually getting peace in the Middle East.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump spoke on the phone on Sunday night. Statements issued by the Prime Minister’s Office and the White House did not mention the issue of relocating the embassy and is it not clear whether the two leaders discussed the subject. During the call, Trump told Netanyahu that peace between Israel and the Palestinians could only be reached through direct negotiations.

Abbas met on Sunday with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in Amman about the possibility of relocating the embassy. After the meeting Abbas said that the two leaders agreed on a list of steps they would take if such a decision would be implemented.

‘Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 18

January 26, 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 original German edition.

German officially- approved historians have recently released a highly doctored edition of ‘Mein Kampf’ that is selling very well in Germany.

Perhaps a free copy of the unredacted original work would do better in the same marketplace. Ed

 

 

 

VOLUME II: THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

 

CHAPTER XIPROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION

 

 

The year 1921 was especially important for me from many points of view.

When I entered the German Labour Party I at once took charge of the propaganda, believing this branch to be far the most important for the time being. Just then it was not a matter of pressing necessity to cudgel one’s brains over problems of organization. The first necessity was to spread our ideas among as many people as possible. Propaganda should go well ahead of organization and gather together the human material for the latter to work up. I have never been in favour of hasty and pedantic methods of organization, because in most cases the result is merely a piece of dead mechanism and only rarely a living organization. Organization is a thing that derives its existence from organic life, organic evolution. When the same set of ideas have found a lodgement in the minds of a certain number of people they tend of themselves to form a certain degree of order among those people and out of this inner formation something that is very valuable arises. Of course here, as everywhere else, one must take account of those human weaknesses which make men hesitate, especially at the beginning, to submit to the control of a superior mind. If an organization is imposed from above downwards in a mechanical fashion, there is always the danger that some individual may push himself forward who is not known for what he is and who, out of jealousy, will try to hinder abler persons from taking a leading place in the movement. The damage that results from that kind of thing may have fatal consequences, especially in a new movement.

For this reason it is advisable first to propagate and publicly expound the ideas on which the movement is founded. This work of propaganda should continue for a certain time and should be directed from one centre. When the ideas have gradually won over a number of people this human material should be carefully sifted for the purpose of selecting those who have ability in leadership and putting that ability to the test. It will often be found that apparently insignificant persons will nevertheless turn out to be born leaders.

Of course, it is quite a mistake to suppose that those who show a very intelligent grasp of the theory underlying a movement are for that reason qualified to fill responsible positions on the directorate. The contrary is very frequently the case.

Great masters of theory are only very rarely great organizers also. And this is because the greatness of the theorist and founder of a system consists in being able to discover and lay down those laws that are right in the abstract, whereas the organizer must first of all be a man of psychological insight. He must take men as they are, and for that reason he must know them, not having too high or too low an estimate of human nature. He must take account of their weaknesses, their baseness and all the other various characteristics, so as to form something out of them which will be a living organism, endowed with strong powers of resistance, fitted to be the carrier of an idea and strong enough to ensure the triumph of that idea.

But it is still more rare to find a great theorist who is at the same time a great leader. For the latter must be more of an agitator, a truth that will not be readily accepted by many of those who deal wit problems only from the scientific standpoint. And yet what I say is only natural. For an agitator who shows himself capable of expounding ideas to the great masses must always be a psychologist, even though he may be only a demagogue. Therefore he will always be a much more capable leader than the contemplative theorist who meditates on his ideas, far from the human throng and the world. For to be a leader means to be able to move the masses. The gift of formulating ideas has nothing whatsoever to do with the capacity for leadership. It would be entirely futile to discuss the question as to which is the more important: the faculty of conceiving ideals and human aims or that of being able to have them put into practice. Here, as so often happens in life, the one would be entirely meaningless without the other. The noblest conceptions of the human understanding remain without purpose or value if the leader cannot move the masses towards them. And, conversely, what would it avail to have all the genius and elan of a leader if the intellectual theorist does not fix the aims for which mankind must struggle. But when the abilities of theorist and organizer and leader are united in the one person, then we have the rarest phenomenon on this earth. And it is that union which produces the great man.

As I have already said, during my first period in the Party I devoted myself to the work of propaganda. I had to succeed in gradually gathering together a small nucleus of men who would accept the new teaching and be inspired by it. And in this way we should provide the human material which subsequently would form the constituent elements of the organization. Thus the goal of the propagandist is nearly alwayvfixed far beyond that of the organizer.

If a movement proposes to overthrow a certain order of things and construct a new one in its place, then the following principles must be clearly understood and must dominate in the ranks of its leadership:

Every movement which has gained its human material must first divide this material into two groups: namely, followers and members.

It is the task of the propagandist to recruit the followers and it is the task of the organizer to select the members.

The follower of a movement is he who understands and accepts its aims; the member is he who fights for them.

The follower is one whom the propaganda has converted to the doctrine of the movement. The member is he who will be charged by the organization to collaborate in winning over new followers from which in turn new members can be formed.

To be a follower needs only the passive recognition of the idea. To be a member means to represent that idea and fight for it. From ten followers one can have scarcely more than two members. To be a follower simply implies that a man has accepted the teaching of the movement; whereas to be a member means that a man has the courage to participate actively in diffusing that teaching in which he has come to believe.

Because of its passive character, the simple effort of believing in a political doctrine is enough for the majority, for the majority of mankind is mentally lazy and timid. To be a member one must be intellectually active, and therefore this applies only to the minority.

Such being the case, the propagandist must seek untiringly to acquire new followers for the movement, whereas the organizer must diligently look out for the best elements among such followers, so that these elements may be transformed into members. The propagandist need not trouble too much about the personal worth of the individual proselytes he has won for the movement. He need not inquire into their abilities, their intelligence or character. From these proselytes, however, the organizer will have to select those individuals who are most capable of actively helping to bring the movement to victory.

The propagandist aims at inducing the whole people to accept his teaching. The organizer includes in his body of membership only those who, on psychological grounds, will not be an impediment to the further diffusion of the doctrines of the movement.

The propagandist inculcates his doctrine among the masses, with the idea of preparing them for the time when this doctrine will triumph, through the body of combatant members which he has formed from those followers who have given proof of the necessary ability and will-power to carry the struggle to victory.

The final triumph of a doctrine will be made all the more easy if the propagandist has effectively converted large bodies of men to the belief in that doctrine and if the organization that actively conducts the fight be exclusive, vigorous and solid.

When the propaganda work has converted a whole people to believe in a doctrine, the organization can turn the results of this into practical effect through the work of a mere handful of men. Propaganda and organization, therefore follower and member, then stand towards one another in a definite mutual relationship. The better the propaganda has worked, the smaller will the organization be. The greater the number of followers, so much the smaller can be the number of members. And conversely. If the propaganda be bad, the organization must be large.

And if there be only a small number of followers, the membership must be all the larger–if the movement really counts on being successful.

The first duty of the propagandist is to win over people who can subsequently be taken into the organization. And the first duty of the organization is to select and train men who will be capable of carrying on the propaganda. The second duty of the organization is to disrupt the existing order of things and thus make room for the penetration of the new teaching which it represents, while the duty of the organizer must be to fight for the purpose of securing power, so that the doctrine may finally triumph.

A revolutionary conception of the world and human existence will always achieve decisive success when the new WELTANSCHAUUNG has been taught to a whole people, or subsequently forced upon them if necessary, and when, on the other hand, the central organization, the movement itself, is in the hands of only those few men who are absolutely indispensable to form the nerve-centres of the coming State.

Put in another way, this means that in every great revolutionary movement that is of world importance the idea of this movement must always be spread abroad through the operation of propaganda. The propagandist must never tire in his efforts to make the new ideas clearly understood, inculcating them among others, or at least he must place himself in the position of those others and endeavour to upset their confidence in the convictions they have hitherto held. In order that such propaganda should have backbone to it, it must be based on an organization. The organization chooses its members from among those followers whom the propaganda has won. That organization will become all the more vigorous if the work of propaganda be pushed forward intensively. And the propaganda will work all the better when the organization back of it is vigorous and strong in itself.

Hence the supreme task of the organizer is to see to it that any discord or differences which may arise among the members of the movement will not lead to a split and thereby cramp the work within the movement.

Moreover, it is the duty of the organization to see that the fighting spirit of the movement does not flag or die out but that it is constantly reinvigorated and restrengthened. It is not necessary the number of members should increase indefinitely. Quite the contrary would be better. In view of the fact that only a fraction of humanity has energy and courage, a movement which increases its own organization indefinitely must of necessity one day become plethoric and inactive.

Organizations, that is to say, groups of members, which increase their size beyond certain dimensions gradually lose their fighting force and are no longer in form to back up the propagation of a doctrine with aggressive elan and determination.

Now the greater and more revolutionary a doctrine is, so much the more active will be the spirit inspiring its body of members, because the subversive energy of such a doctrine will frighten way the chicken-hearted and small-minded bourgeoisie. In their hearts they may believe in the doctrine but they are afraid to acknowledge their belief openly. By reason of this very fact, however, an organization inspired by a veritable revolutionary idea will attract into the body of its membership only the most active of those believers who have been won for it by its propaganda. It is in this activity on the part of the membership body, guaranteed by the process of natural selection, that we are to seek the prerequisite conditions for the continuation of an active and spirited propaganda and also the victorious struggle for the success of the idea on which the movement is based.

The greatest danger that can threaten a movement is an abnormal increase in the number of its members, owing to its too rapid success. So long as a movement has to carry on a hard and bitter fight, people of weak and fundamentally egotistic temperament will steer very clear of it; but these will try to be accepted as members the moment the party achieves a manifest success in the course of its development.

It is on these grounds that we are to explain why so many movements which were at first successful slowed down before reaching the fulfilment of their purpose and, from an inner weakness which could not otherwise be explained, gave up the struggle and finally disappeared from the field. As a result of the early successes achieved, so many undesirable, unworthy and especially timid individuals became members of the movement that they finally secured the majority and stifled the fighting spirit of the others. These inferior elements then turned the movement to the service of their personal interests and, debasing it to the level of their own miserable heroism, no longer struggled for the triumph of the original idea. The fire of the first fervour died out, the fighting spirit flagged and, as the bourgeois world is accustomed to say very justly in such cases, the party mixed water with its wine.

For this reason it is necessary that a movement should, from the sheer instinct of self-preservation, close its lists to new membership the moment it becomes successful. And any further increase in its organization should be allowed to take place only with the most careful foresight and after a painstaking sifting of those who apply for membership. Only thus will it be possible to keep the kernel of the movement intact and fresh and sound. Care must be taken that the conduct of the movement is maintained exclusively in the hands of this original nucleus. This means that the nucleus must direct the propaganda which aims at securing general recognition for the movement. And the movement itself, when it has secured power in its hands, must carry out all those acts and measures which are necessary in order that its ideas should be finally established in practice.

With those elements that originally made the movement, the organization should occupy all the important positions that have been conquered and from those elements the whole directorate should be formed. This should continue until the maxims and doctrines of the party have become the foundation and policy of the new State. Only then will it be permissible gradually to give the reins into the hands of the Constitution of that State which the spirit of the movement has created. But this usually happens through a process of mutual rivalry, for here it is less a question of human intelligence than of the play and effect of the forces whose development may indeed be foreseen from the start but not perpetually controlled.

All great movements, whether of a political or religious nature, owe their imposing success to the recognition and adoption of those principles. And no durable success is conceivable if these laws are not observed.

As director of propaganda for the party, I took care not merely to prepare the ground for the greatness of the movement in its subsequent stages, but I also adopted the most radical measures against allowing into the organization any other than the best material. For the more radical and exciting my propaganda was, the more did it frighten weak and wavering characters away, thus preventing them from entering the first nucleus of our organization. Perhaps they remained followers, but they did not raise their voices. On the contrary, they maintained a discreet silence on the fact. Many thousands of persons then assured me that they were in full agreement with us but they could not on any account become members of our party. They said that the movement was so radical that to take part in it as members would expose them to grave censures and grave dangers, so that they would rather continue to be looked upon as honest and peaceful citizens and remain aside, for the time being at least, though devoted to our cause with all their hearts.

And that was all to the good. If all these men who in their hearts did not approve of revolutionary ideas came into our movement as members at that time, we should be looked upon as a pious confraternity to-day and not as a young movement inspired with the spirit of combat.

The lively and combative form which I gave to all our propaganda fortified and guaranteed the radical tendency of our movement, and the result was that, with a few exceptions, only men of radical views were disposed to become members.

It was due to the effect of our propaganda that within a short period of time hundreds of thousands of citizens became convinced in their hearts that we were right and wished us victory, although personally they were too timid to make sacrifices for our cause or even participate in it.

Up to the middle of 1921 this simple activity of gathering in followers was sufficient and was of value to the movement. But in the summer of that year certain events happened which made it seem opportune for us to bring our organization into line with the manifest successes which the propaganda had achieved.

An attempt made by a group of patriotic visionaries, supported by the chairman of the party at that time, to take over the direction of the party led to the break up of this little intrigue and, by a unanimous vote at a general meeting, entrusted the entire direction of the party to my own hands. At the same time a new statute was passed which invested sole responsibility in the chairman of the movement, abolished the system of resolutions in committee and in its stead introduced the principle of division of labour which since that time has worked excellently.

From August 1st, 1921, onwards I undertook this internal reorganization of the party and was supported by a number of excellent men. I shall mention them and their work individually later on.

In my endeavour to turn the results gained by the propaganda to theadvantage of the organization and thus stabilize them, I had to abolish completely a number of old customs and introduce regulations which none of the other parties possessed or had adopted.

In the years 1920-21 the movement was controlled by a committee elected by the members at a general meeting. The committee was composed of a first and second treasurer, a first and second secretary, and a first and second chairman at the head of it. In addition to these there was a representative of the members, the director of propaganda, and various assessors.

Comically enough, the committee embodied the very principle against which the movement itself wanted to fight with all its energy, namely, the principle of parliamentarianism. Here was a principle which personified everything that was being opposed by the movement, from the smallest local groups to the district and regional groups, the state groups and finally the national directorate itself. It was a system under which we all suffered and are still suffering.

It was imperative to change this state of affairs forthwith, if this bad foundation in the internal organization was not to keep the movement insecure and render the fulfilment of its high mission impossible.

The sessions of the committee, which were ruled by a protocol, and in which decisions were made according to the vote of the majority, presented the picture of a miniature parliament. Here also there was no such thing as personal responsibility. And here reigned the same absurdities and illogical state of affairs as flourish in our great representative bodies of the State. Names were presented to this committee for election as secretaries, treasurers, representatives of the members of the organization, propaganda agents and God knows what else. And then they all acted in common on every particular question and decided it by vote. Accordingly, the director of propaganda voted on a question that concerned the man who had to do with the finances and the latter in his turn voted on a question that concerned only the organization as such, the organizer voting on a subject that had to do with the secretarial department, and so on.

Why select a special man for propaganda if treasurers and scribes and commissaries, etc., had to deliver judgment on questions concerning it?

To a person of commonsense that sort of thing seemed as incomprehensible as it would be if in a great manufacturing concern the board of directors were to decide on technical questions of production or if, inversely, the engineers were to decide on questions of administration.

I refused to countenance that kind of folly and after a short time I ceased to appear at the meetings of the committee. I did nothing else except attend to my own department of propaganda and I did not permit any of the others to poke their heads into my activities. Conversely, I did not interfere in the affairs of others.

When the new statute was approved and I was appointed as president, I had the necessary authority in my hands and also the corresponding right to make short shrift of all that nonsense. In the place of decisions by the majority vote of the committee, the principle of absolute responsibility was introduced.

The chairman is responsible for the whole control of the movement. He apportions the work among the members of the committee subordinate to him and for special work he selects other individuals. Each of these gentlemen must bear sole responsibility for the task assigned to him. He is subordinate only to the chairman, whose duty is to supervise the general collaboration, selecting the personnel and giving general directions for the co-ordination of the common work.

This principle of absolute responsibility is being adopted little by little throughout the movement. In the small local groups and perhaps also in the regional and district groups it will take yet a long time before the principle can be thoroughly imposed, because timid and hesitant characters are naturally opposed to it. For them the idea of bearing absolute responsibility for an act opens up an unpleasant prospect. They would like to hide behind the shoulders of the majority in the so-called committee, having their acts covered by decisions passed in that way. But it seems to me a matter of absolute necessity to take a decisive stand against that view, to make no concessions whatsoever to this fear of responsibility, even though it takes some time before we can put fully into effect this concept of duty and ability in leadership, which will finally bring forward leaders who have the requisite abilities to occupy the chief posts.

In any case, a movement which must fight against the absurdity of parliamentary institutions must be immune from this sort of thing. Only thus will it have the requisite strength to carry on the struggle.

At a time when the majority dominates everywhere else a movement which is based on the principle of one leader who has to bear personal responsibility for the direction of the official acts of the movement itself will one day overthrow the present situation and triumph over the existing regime. That is a mathematical certainty.

This idea made it necessary to reorganize our movement internally. The logical development of this reorganization brought about a clear-cut distinction between the economic section of the movement and the general political direction. The principle of personal responsibility was extended to all the administrative branches of the party and it brought about a healthy renovation, by liberating them from political influences and allowing them to operate solely on economic principles.

In the autumn of 1921, when the party was founded, there were only six members. The party did not have any headquarters, nor officials, nor formularies, nor a stamp, nor printed material of any sort. The committee first held its sittings in a restaurant on the Herrengasse and then in a café at Gasteig. This state of affairs could not last. So I at once took action in the matter. I went around to several restaurants and hotels in Munich, with the idea of renting a room in one of them for the use of the Party. In the old Sterneckerbräu im Tal, there was a small room with arched roof, which in earlier times was used as a sort of festive tavern where the Bavarian Counsellors of the Holy Roman Empire foregathered. It was dark and dismal and accordingly well suited to its ancient uses, though less suited to the new purpose it was now destined to serve. The little street on which its one window looked out was so narrow that even on the brightest summer day the room remained dim and sombre. Here we took up our first fixed abode. The rent came to fifty marks per month, which was then an enormous sum for us. But our exigencies had to be very modest. We dared not complain even when they removed the wooden wainscoting a few days after we had taken possession.

This panelling had been specially put up for the Imperial Counsellors.

The place began to look more like a grotto than an office.

Still it marked an important step forward. Slowly we had electric light installed and later on a telephone. A table and some borrowed chairs were brought, an open paper-stand and later on a cupboard. Two sideboards, which belonged to the landlord, served to store our leaflets, placards, etc.

As time went on it turned out impossible to direct the course of the movement merely by holding a committee meeting once a week. The current business administration of the movement could not be regularly attended to except we had a salaried official.

But that was then very difficult for us. The movement had still so few members that it was hard to find among them a suitable person for the job who would be content with very little for himself and at the same time would be ready to meet the manifold demands which the movement would make on his time and energy.

After long searching we discovered a soldier who consented to become our first administrator. His name was Schüssler, an old war comrade of mine.

At first he came to our new office every day between six and eight o’clock in the evening. Later on he came from five to eight and subsequently for the whole afternoon. Finally it became a full-time job and he worked in the office from morning until late at night. He was an industrious, upright and thoroughly honest man, faithful and devoted to the movement. He brought with him a small Adler typewriter of his own.

It was the first machine to be used in the service of the party.

Subsequently the party bought it by paying for it in installments. We needed a small safe in order to keep our papers and register of membership from danger of being stolen–not to guard our funds, which did not then exist. On the contrary, our financial position was so miserable that I often had to dip my hand into my own personal savings.

After eighteen months our business quarters had become too small, so we moved to a new place in the Cornelius Strasse. Again our office was in a restaurant, but instead of one room we now had three smaller rooms and one large room with great windows. At that time this appeared a wonderful thing to us. We remained there until the end of November 1923.

In December 1920, we acquired the VÖLKISCHER BEOBACHTER. This newspaper which, as its name implies, championed the claims of the people, was now to become the organ of the German National Socialist Labour Party. At first it appeared twice weekly; but at the beginning of 1928 it became a daily paper, and at the end of August in the same year it began to appear in the large format which is now well known.

As a complete novice in journalism I then learned many a lesson for which I had to pay dearly.

In contradistinction to the enormous number of papers in Jewish hands, there was at that time only one important newspaper that defended the cause of the people. This was a matter for grave consideration. As I have often learned by experience, the reason for that state of things must be attributed to the incompetent way in which the business side of the so-called popular newspapers was managed. These were conducted too much according to the rule that opinion should prevail over action that produces results. Quite a wrong standpoint, for opinion is of itself something internal and finds its best expression in productive activity.

The man who does valuable work for his people expresses thereby his excellent sentiments, whereas another who merely talks about his opinions and does nothing that is of real value or use to the people is a person who perverts all right thinking. And that attitude of his is also pernicious for the community.

The VÖLKISCHE BEOBACHTER was a so-called ‘popular’ organ, as its name indicated. It had all the good qualities, but still more the errors and weaknesses, inherent in all popular institutions. Though its contents were excellent, its management as a business concern was simply impossible. Here also the underlying idea was that popular newspapers ought to be subsidized by popular contributions, without recognizing that it had to make its way in competition with the others and that it was dishonest to expect the subscriptions of good patriots to make up for the mistaken management of the undertaking.

I took care to alter those conditions promptly, for I recognized the danger lurking in them. Luck was on my side here, inasmuch as it brought me the man who since that time has rendered innumerable services to the movement, not only as business manager of the newspaper but also as business manager of the party. In 1914, in the War, I made the acquaintance of Max Amann, who was then my superior and is to-day general business Director of the Party. During four years in the War I had occasion to observe almost continually the unusual ability, the diligence and the rigorous conscientiousness of my future collaborator.

In the summer of 1921 I applied to my old regimental comrade, whom I met one day by chance, and asked him to become business manager of the movement. At that time the movement was passing through a grave crisis and I had reason to be dissatisfied with several of our officials, with one of whom I had had a very bitter experience. Amann then held a good situation in which there were also good prospects for him.

After long hesitation he agreed to my request, but only on condition that he must not be at the mercy of incompetent committees. He must be responsible to one master, and only one.

It is to the inestimable credit of this first business manager of the party, whose commercial knowledge is extensive and profound, that he brought order and probity into the various offices of the party. Since that time these have remained exemplary and cannot be equalled or excelled in this by any other branches of the movement. But, as often happens in life, great ability provokes envy and disfavour. That had also to be expected in this case and borne patiently.

Since 1922 rigorous regulations have been in force, not only for the commercial construction of the movement but also in the organization of it as such. There exists now a central filing system, where the names and particulars of all the members are enrolled. The financing of the party has been placed on sound lines. The current expenditure must be covered by the current receipts and special receipts can be used only for special expenditures. Thus, notwithstanding the difficulties of the time the movement remained practically without any debts, except for a few small current accounts. Indeed, there was a permanent increase in the funds. Things are managed as in a private business. The employed personnel hold their jobs in virtue of their practical efficiency and could not in any manner take cover behind their professed loyalty to the party. A good National Socialist proves his soundness by the readiness, diligence and capability with which he discharges whatever duties are assigned to him in whatever situation he holds within the national community. The man who does not fulfil his duty in the job he holds cannot boast of a loyalty against which he himself really sins.

Adamant against all kinds of outer influence, the new business director of the party firmly maintained the standpoint that there were no sinecure posts in the party administration for followers and members of the movement whose pleasure is not work. A movement which fights so energetically against the corruption introduced into our civil service by the various political parties must be immune from that vice in its own administrative department. It happened that some men were taken on the staff of the paper who had formerly been adherents of the Bavarian People’s Party, but their work showed that they were excellently qualified for the job. The result of this experiment was generally excellent. It was owing to this honest and frank recognition of individual efficiency that the movement won the hearts of its employees more swiftly and more profoundly than had ever been the case before.

Subsequently they became good National Socialists and remained so. Not in word only, but they proved it by the steady and honest and conscientious work which they performed in the service of the new movement. Naturally a well qualified party member was preferred to another who had equal qualifications but did not belong to the party.

The rigid determination with which our new business chief applied these principles and gradually put them into force, despite all misunderstandings, turned out to be of great advantage to the movement.

To this we owe the fact that it was possible for us–during the difficult period of the inflation, when thousands of businesses failed and thousands of newspapers had to cease publication–not only to keep the commercial department of the movement going and meet all its obligations but also to make steady progress with the VÖLKISCHE BEOBACHTER. At that time it came to be ranked among the great newspapers.

The year 1921 was of further importance for me by reason of the fact that in my position as chairman of the party I slowly but steadily succeeded in putting a stop to the criticisms and the intrusions of some members of the committee in regard to the detailed activities of the party administration. This was important, because we could not get a capable man to take on a job if nincompoops were constantly allowed to butt in, pretending that they knew everything much better; whereas in reality they had left only general chaos behind them. Then these wise-acres retired, for the most part quite modestly, to seek another field for their activities where they could supervise and tell how things ought to be done. Some men seemed to have a mania for sniffing behind everything and were, so to say, always in a permanent state of pregnancy with magnificent plans and ideas and projects and methods.

Naturally their noble aim and ideal were always the formation of a committee which could pretend to be an organ of control in order to be able to sniff as experts into the regular work done by others. But it is offensive and contrary to the spirit of National Socialism when incompetent people constantly interfere in the work of capable persons.

But these makers of committees do not take that very much into account.

In those years I felt it my duty to safeguard against such annoyance all those who were entrusted with regular and responsible work, so that there should be no spying over the shoulder and they would be guaranteed a free hand in their day’s work.

The best means of making committees innocuous, which either did nothing or cooked up impracticable decisions, was to give them some real work to do. It was then amusing to see how the members would silently fade away and were soon nowhere to be found. It made me think of that great institution of the same kind, the Reichstag. How quickly they would evanesce if they were put to some real work instead of talking, especially if each member were made personally responsible for the work assigned to him.

I always demanded that, just as in private life so also in the movement, one should not tire of seeking until the best and honestest and manifestly the most competent person could be found for the position of leader or administrator in each section of the movement. Once installed in his position he was given absolute authority and full freedom of action towards his subordinates and full responsibility towards his superiors. Nobody was placed in a position of authority towards his subordinates unless he himself was competent in the work entrusted tothem. In the course of two years I brought my views more and more into practice; so that to-day, at least as far as the higher direction of the movement is concerned, they are accepted as a matter of course. The manifest success of this attitude was shown on November 9th, 1923.

Four years previously, when I entered the movement, it did not have even a rubber stamp. On November 9th, 1923, the party was dissolved and its property confiscated. The total sum realized by all the objects of value and the paper amounted to more than 170,000 gold marks.

 

 

 

 

 

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