songs from the sitemeter: in russia...

I commented on this before, but wow, interesting, and hello to my Russian readers!

Here's the gist: there are nearly as many Russian readers of this blog as Americans. I'm still trying to process this to understand why. If any of you can enlighten me, I'd be very pleased. Either way, it's pleasing in itself.

What can I say except that I feel the US and Russia are so similar, what with both nations being oligarchies and police states? Shhhhh, I know, don't tell the little people here in A'murka that, especially the ones who still have purchasing power...

If Congress and the President keep putting band-aids on shotgun wounds...

Yakov Smirnoff will be able to do national tours again and preface every joke with: "In America... ." What a country!

"We won the Cold War," but didn't want it to end: reflections on the Thatcher-Gorbachev revelations

WWW--We did? Who won it? It wasn't the average person. Considering the recent revelations about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("Iron Maggie," a beloved to neocons along with the Maoist veneration of Ronald Reagan) and her discussions with the final Soviet President Mikael Gorbachev--that Thatcher and the rest of the West including America--didn't want reunification of Germany under any circumstances, you'd think it would be everywhere in our media.

Fine, it came out on September 11th, our new sacred national day, but this is earth-shattering news, it downs many myths about the Cold War, including the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. The contention of "we won the Cold War" just doesn't float anymore, they wanted to keep it going, and it served many purposes for the power structures on both sides, and Thatcher's comments underscore what many have suspected all along: the Cold War was a lie, a big lie. I could have told you that, but now we have solid-proof.

As usual, the official line and rhetoric are just window dressing, a lie, cover. The Western powers wanted the Soviet Union to stay-in-place for the foreseeable future during Peristroika (the thaw of authoritarianism in the Warsaw Pact nations) and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This exchange comes less than three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it is extraordinary.

From the Times:

September 23 1989 : transcript

Thatcher: I wanted to raise some questions regarding the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe. I was deeply impressed by the courage of General Jaruzelski in Poland and by his patriotism. Of course, the future of Poland and its alliance with you are very important. I noticed that you reacted calmly to the results of the Polish elections and generally to processes taking part in this and other Eastern European countries. My understanding of your position is following: you welcome each country developing in its own way on the condition that Warsaw Pact stays. I understand this position perfectly.

Now I would like to say something in complete confidence and would ask you not to record this part of our conversation.

Gorbachev: I agree to your request.

(The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory)

Thatcher: We are very concerned about the processes taking place in Eastern Germany. Some big changes could happen there, forced partly by the state of the society and partly by the illness of Erich Honecker. One example of this is the flight of thousands of people from the GDR to the FRG. All of this is on the surface, it is very important but even more important is something else.

The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests. Of course, internal changes are happening in all Eastern European countries, somewhere they are deeper than in others. However, we would prefer if those processes were entirely internal, we would not interfere in them or push the de-communisation of Eastern Europe. I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position. He sent me a telegram to Tokyo in which he asked me directly to tell you that the United States would not do anything that might put at risk the security of the Soviet Union or perceived by the Soviet society as danger. I am fulfilling his request.

Gorbachev: Thank you for this message. In broad terms, you have outlined our position correctly. We believe that socialist countries should solve their internal problems themselves, chose themselves the course and speed on the way of implementation of their socialist choice. We do not want and will not interfere but will, of course help our allies as we have always done.

As for the state of health of Erich Honecker, he is planning to take part in all events commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the GDR. I can tell you that I am planning to arrive to the GDR on 6-7th October to celebrate this anniversary.

In other words, Reagan was in total agreement with Thatcher and considering American might, could be presumed to have been pulling some of the strings here. And there is more, much more to establish the veracity and legitimacy of these documents. Where was it in the American press? The virtual "page eight," if it was there at all.

This is a stunning rebuttal to the mythology surrounding the Cold War, former Prime Minister Thatcher, and the late President Ronald Reagan. Former President Gorbachev comes off looking very good, even better than before. Western leaders of the time look like the lying, scrambling, unimaginative clowns that they were and are. "Conventional wisdom" is often misinformed, now we know. The real history tends to be unwritten for generations. We lucked-out on this one. What a "Man in the High Castle" moment.

"Thatcher Told Gorbachev Britain Did Not Want German Reunification," The Times online, 09.11.2009: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829735.ece

Excerpts from the Thatcher-Gorbachev talks and related excerpts:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829416.ece

Why do they hate the Jews, why do they hate immigrants and minorities?

WWW--This, of course, is my own humble opinion regarding why Jews, Blacks, other minorities, and immigrants are so hated by rednecks and nouveau nativists whose own ancestors were subjected to the same generations ago or even recently: because many in these groups have retained some semblance of their original culture, while those who "hate" or are "suspicious" of them in-the-main, do not, they've been Americanized.

The United States is the most business-dominated nation state in human history. We are constantly bombarded with propaganda that's routinely called "advertising" which has not only decimated traditional cultures here at home, but has essentially resulted in near cultural genocide in other nations that came under the sway of American commercialization in the immediate aftermath of WWII. America was the "last man standing" at the end of the Second World War. Traditional empires like the French, British, Belgian, & the Dutch (among others), were on-the-ropes after the war, it being their crazed attempt to dominate the Continent, meaning each other. Germany was a latecomer to the game of empire, hence Hitler's drive to create a Germanic one, one that we all know failed. Who taught him to do that?

In America and it's captive postwar markets, television and other media played a tragic role in the dumbing down of foreign populations in countries like Italy, France, Germany, and so on. Had the Marshall Plan never happened or had it failed, it's likely that Continental Europe would have gone to the far left, something that certainly wouldn't have been the end of the world. Aid came at a price: American dominance of the domestic markets of "captive" nations, a reverse-side to the rhetoric of the Cold War, but one thatwas just as true as its obverse. When that didn't always work, proxy armies were created under the umbrella of NATO in an overarching program called GLADIO, and they were essentially comprised of criminals, Nazi-collaborators, racists, anti-Communist extremists, and other cuddly people. In other words, counterinsurgency, repression. So much for the invisible hand of the marketplace...

But what really did the job of killing the heart of most cultures under the sway of American-style capitalism? That's right, it was television. Regional dialects vanished; people's diets degraded; wage-slavery, already a problem before the war, became virtually ubiquitous; cultural attitudes and viewpoints became more narrow; the partisan resistance and its memory were quelled; and people throughout the world basically became greedy consumerist slobs like many Americans were during the Cold War, and are today. The medium is the message alright, and that message is submit or die, or perhaps "conform, buy, or die." Not only is this a pathetic message, but a peculiarly millennial and American one transmitted by clerks with too much power, American businessmen and investors. America was never the savior of the world and never will be.

The same destruction of culture has occurred domestically, but it hasn't been total. What's one of the number one problems of our youth at any given moment? The lack of an identity, and the search for a new one, or moves to create one where one no longer exists. In the "eternal" (not looking so eternal anymore, thank God) consumer model, we inhabit a timeless present with no beginning and no end, just the now. That's also called "death," and it can only be a road to cultural death, and ultimately, the death of the species.

To hate Jews, Blacks who have retained some of their original culture or reinvented themselves, creating a new one, or hating immigrants and other minorities, then, is a subconscious admission that you have no culture, that you're a hollow man. The reality is that those who are racist in the modern world aren't just expressing classic anthropology, they're expressing that they want what these so-called groups want: an identity. They're the wretched of the earth, and these are the vagaries and dysfunctional behaviors of the oppressed. If they keep it up, they'll kill us all.

Official: Romanov Princess Anastasia and Prince Alexander were slaughtered by Bolshevik forces in 1918

Russia--It's a lieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! She's in Atlantis with Bigfoot, D.B. Cooper, and all those missing planes and ships from the (fictional) Bermuda Triangle! Lieeeeeeeeeeeessssss!!!!!!

Well, at least something along those lines. Hey, it sold books for decades, what with dumbells speculating for dumbells what had happened to the Prince Alexander and Princess Anastasia. Armies of crazy old Slavic ladies claimed that they too were Anastasia, and even a few faceless cranks claimed they were Alexander. All of it was a lie, a body of completely worthless literature.

Nobody should have cared. The only thing that matters now is what really happened, and now we know: all of the Romanovs were killed by the Ural Soviet under orders of Lenin and the Central Committee in the month of July, 1918.

Of course they were going to slaughter all of them. That was the M.O. of the Bolsheviks, beginning with the deposed Tsar's family. Like the "Night of Long Knives" for the Nazis, this was what kicked-off the slaughter that was to come, the crossing of a threshold. Nothing could be the same after the Ural Soviet's deed, under orders from the Central Committee under V.I. Lenin.

Lenin directly ordered the murders of the Romanovs, and it was hidden until around the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. One of the first publications to note Lenin's orders (in memo form) was in Lenin: A New Biography (1994, first published in Russia years earlier) a book by the late Major General Dmitri Volkogonov that details most of the known machinations at the time it was written. Volkogonov had unparalleled access to the Party archives during the last years of the Cold War and was finally able to release his discoveries during Glasnost and the final fall of the Soviet regime.

The Truth (I think this is the original article on the findings by U.S. Military pathologists): http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004838

My favorite photo, and the turning of the wheel...

This is a photograph of my mother and grandfather. He'd just returned from WWII, from the European theater, having served under that nut General George "Blood and Guts" Patton. My mother looks so thrilled to see her daddy coming home. WWII was necessary.

Military-style fascism had to be crushed in Germany and Japan and all of the occupied territories. But this same fascism still infects America, and it must be crushed. Luckily, it's extinguishing itself.

My grandfather never fully recovered from his experiences in the war. For the rest of his life, he was very nervous man with a hair-trigger temper. He couldn't connect very well with my mother because she had been born in 1944, after he'd left to serve in the Army. He wasn't a dumbass, he was drafted, he didn't enlist. I respect him for this greatly. He had sense. When he came back, the economy was far worse than it is right now (just wait). What can I say? He was a good man who found it hard to express his feelings to his family, but we loved him just the same.

Today, I dug-out some of these old photos to show to my three-year-old niece, Zofia, to show her what her grandma looked like as a baby (exactly like Zofia, since we have non-recessive genes). She's a precocious little baby with a big heart and a mostly peaceful temperment. She rarely cries. She's a joy. When I showed her this and other photos and told her "This is grandma," she said, "No--this is Zofia!"

Rollie and Billie, father and daughter, finally united--it was 1946, and the Cold War had yet to be invented by the politicians (mainly the utterly corrupt GOP). When the wars have ended, when tyranny has been smashed, when people finally learn to live amongst one another in relative peace, and when we realize that we're all a family, we'll have the same moment of love that Rollie and Billie lived 62-years-ago. That moment was--and is--love. Love for ourselves and each other, because it really is that simple. The circle is unbroken.

"America shoots-down a spy satellite" is a cover-story

The State Department--The mainstream media has done its best to convince us that this was Skylab 2.0, a case of space junk crashing back down into backyards everywhere. That was the misdirection, but the reality is that it was a real world test and use of the missile defense shield system, a deadly new step in the global arms race. A source who witnessed earlier tests in the South Pacific almost ten-years-ago told me at the time how wasteful and faulty the program was.

What a difference ten years makes, but do we really need this stupid thing? Does it really justify the billions that it cost to develop and make? Will the reactions of other nations make us safer, knowing that we possess the capability of a first nuclear strike with a defense shield to "protect" us from the inevitable retaliation?

Assuming that the radar installations being constructed in Poland and the Czech Republic are part of the global infrastructure of this anti-missile system, is it really wise to add to the intimidation of Russia by pushing Kosovo's (as Germany and NATO did with Croatia and Slovenia in the early-1990s--the rest is history) independence from Serbia? Ask most Russians and they'll tell you that "the Serbs are our brothers," a healthy reminder that Pan-Slavism is hardly dead.

Thanks-a-lot Werner Von Braun (and Robert Goddard). The continuing American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan also fuels Russia's justified paranoia, also including NATO's presence in those countries, and within the Balkans. How would Americans react if Chavez stationed peace keepers along the Rio Grande?

We shouldn't be surprised that Serbs are attacking the American Embassy in their Capitol considering how much the Clinton administration and the rest of NATO used them as their genocide scapegoat to bring about the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Not everyone in Western power circles has learned the lessons of why WWI happened. Wesley Clark's comments that the rioters who attacked and set-fire to our embassy were "extremists" could be held-up against those of the Hapsburg governors a century ago. The differences and the denials of reality are striking.

Very little has changed, and the Serbs aren't ever going to stop fighting against what they see as threats to their sovereignty from outside the region. America and NATO are bent on the domination of the Balkans and the encirclement of Russia, this much is certain. This missile test is just part of the plan.

An interview with Dr. Noam Chomsky, from "Interpol Magazine," February 1995 (Part 2 of 2)

This was an interview conducted through the mail with Dr. Chomsky while I was finishing my degree in American History at Ball State University. Just two-months after I received his answers in the mail, we all witnessed the Oklahoma City bombing, and the first stirrings of the war on terror (really a domestic one against all of us). It's been a long road from the Spring of 1995. At that time, the internet was just starting to become accessible, and its impact on the political and cultural discourse is only now being realized. 1995 was a year when the "zine revolution" was occurring, and it was quickly-supplanted by the high-price of paper and the internet.

This interview was done for one of those little zines--my own--called "Interpol." I actually got copies of it in zine-central, the legendary Quimby's Queer Store in Chicago. It was pretty surreal going up to the Windy City and seeing those copies in the store (I never got paid, incidentally), it felt pretty good.

All that said, I would never trade the blog format, it's superior in every respect to that old digest format, and it's getting better all the time. Dr. Chomsky is a very friendly and encouraging person, and when he passes from this world, we will have lost a wonderful human being. Appreciate the flowers in life, they are fleeting. Try to be that person you admire, and strive to make a better world for all. That's the meaning of life.


Matt Janovic: Is "Leftism", as defined by the mainstream culture, more a problem of semantics, rather than a cohesive movement? It seems that throughout much of the 20th century, when groups worked and protested and acted for honest political change, the press and various "populist" elements resorted to labeling them "anarchists," "reds," "communists/commies," "pinkos," etc. . Do you agree with the analysis that often mob actions are stimulated from above, or are there complex social and economic reasons behind scapegoating and vigilantism?

Noam Chomsky: If I were a PR specialist trying to indoctrinate and marginalize people(as they do, quite consciously), I'd try to deprive all words of meaning, so that it's impossible even to think and talk coherently about things that matter (the powerful will continue in their own ways). To a large extent, that's happened. Personally, I keep away from words like "left," "liberal," "conservative," etc.

They have been so deprived of meaning as to become useless. Take "conservatism." The Reaganites were called "conservative." In fact, they were statist reactionaries; a genuine conservative would have turned over in his grave to hear the way the term is used today. There's also been a massive falsification of the "sacred texts." Take Adam Smith. We are supposed to worship at his shrine, but if anyone takes the trouble to read him, they'll find a very different picture from the official version handed down in the doctrinal system.

As for "mob action," it has so many different causes and sources that one can't generalize. CIO organizing and the civil rights movement were "mob action" from one point of view; the rampages of Hitler's organizations were too. Usually, when destructive mob action is stimulated from above, as it often is, it appeals to genuine social and economic concerns, manipulated for that purpose. Those are the tools in trade of demagogues, of every stripe. We've got plenty of experience with it throughout US history, dramatically right now.

Matt Janovic: What can the average person learn from the fall of the Soviet Union?

Noam Chomsky: The simplest lesson is a familiar one: in a conflict, the more powerful adversary tends to win. Europe began to separate into two parts in the 15th century, the West beginning to develop, the East becoming its "third world." That continued right to the early years of this century--for much of Eastern Europe, until 1945. There are some rules of the international game: (!) service areas have to fulfill their function, not get uppity about following an independent path; (2) if they do take off on their own and turn out to be successful in terms that appeal to others in the same boat, they really have to be crushed--in official rhetoric, they are a "virus" that might "infect others," a "rotten apple" that might "spoil the barrel."

If it's a speck in the Caribbean, it takes a weekend. If it's 1/6 of the world, it takes 70 years. But the logic is rather similar; and not surprisingly, much of Eastern Europe is returning to its earlier origins. Sectors that were part of the industrial West, like the Czech Republic, are returning to that status; parts that were basically service areas are returning to the typical third world model. There are all sorts of nuances and complications, but that's a fair approximation.

It's worth stressing that despite much pretense, Western leaders had no serious objections to Stalin's awesome crimes, any more than they had fundamental objections to Hitler or Mussolini, or to Saddam Hussein, or to a host of similar and lesser monsters. On that, the documentary record is very clear, and one can learn about it in arcane monographs (or the marginalised dissident literature). In a really free society, it would be on the front pages and in the school texts, along with much else that is consigned to the memory hole, as Politically Incorrect (in the operative sense of this ridiculous term).

Matt Janovic: Dr. Chomsky, what kind of direct improvements would you envision for the American worker in the workplace, if there was more democracy in most institutions of our society? How do you think that could be brought about?

Noam Chomsky: Right now [1995] one can't look for any improvements; the immediate problem is to preserve the rights that were finally achieved at least in part in the 1930s, after a century of bitter struggle, and have been eroding ever since. They are now under very sever and cruel assault, not just for working people: the same is true of family values, as I mentioned. A traditional stance within the US labor movement and intellectual life, as American as apple pie, is that industrial democracy must be a central component of operative democracy.

If the central decision-making institutions of a society--in production, commerce, finance, ideology, etc.--are in the hands of unaccountable private power, then democracy is a thin reed at best. That's traditional and mainstream. Today it sounds exotic, but that's because the American tradition has largely been demolished, also being "Politically Incorrect." How can democratic practices be extended to the central institutions of the society? There's only one answer, always: the same way they were slowly extended to governmental functions. That was never a gift; it was the result of committed popular organization and action.

Matt Janovic: In a truly democratic society, what do you think our educational system would be like?

Noam Chomsky: Education in a democratic society would try to encourage the natural curiosity and independence of mind of children, instead of suppressing it and channelling them into obedience and conformity. It would celebrate the traditional values of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, which held that teaching should not be like filling a vessel with water, but helping a plant grow in its own way by allowing it to have proper food and light. These traditional conservative values are, of course, anathema to contemporary statist reactionaries.

Matt Janovic: Lastly, what is your idea of international humanism, and do you believe that to impose Western democratic and humanistic ideals (as the Chinese communists/nationalists loyal to the party argue) on non-Western nations is cultural imperialism?

Noam Chomsky: The idea that the West tries to impose "western democratic and humanistic ideals" on the rest of the world is one of the most ridiculous scams that the commissar class has indulged in. Western leaders, including intellectual elites, are dedicated to undermining these professed ideals at home, and centuries of brutal history show how they have "fostered" them elsewhere. Take simply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD).

The official line is that we courageously defend its universality, fighting off the "cultural relativists" of backward countries who say it doesn't fully extend to them. As even a moment's attention will show, the US flatly rejects about half of the UD even in principle, and grossly violates the rest. That's not controversial; the documentation is readily available. But for the doctrinal managers, it doesn't matter: what is important is ideological warfare, not truth or honesty--in fact, those are the values that have to be undermined.

Link to Part 1: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/05/interview-with-dr-noam-chomsky-from.html#links

End of Part 2 of 2 (and statement of intellectual ownership): This interview is the intellectual property of Dr. Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic, in toto. Permission to reprint, quote, or reproduce can be obtained through written permission from the authors. Quotes of up-to four lines are acceptable without permission. All rights reserved as of 2007, Noam Chomsky and Matt Janovic.