Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis FukuyamaMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
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Saturday, May 31, 2025
Friday, May 30, 2025
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Review: THE VENUS VIVISECTION. Second Edition.
THE VENUS VIVISECTION. Second Edition. by Gregory James WyrickMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Karen. Page 39. "This is my Rock 'n' Roll SCAR! When I was in the band Inside Out, I was playing chicken in the slam pit with a pal from High School on my back! It was a kickass show with the bands Angry Red Planet, The Trash Brats and Inside Out. I was so drunk, I fell face-first into a table and gashed my chin open. I couldn't feel a thing!"
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Monday, May 26, 2025
Review: Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA
Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John LisleMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The figure of Sidney Gottlieb as part of the CIA MKULTRA program has always fascinated me. I was quite please to learn a book is available to take a deep dive into this man's actions. It might be hard for us to think back into the Cold War when parity w/USSR in weapons, like missiles and atomic bombs, was a foreign policy topic for the US. This went, apparently, into areas of mind control.
Throughout his depositions, Gottlieb stressed that in order to understand his work, it was necessary to understand the context in which it was done. At the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA had feared that Communist powers like the Soviet Union and China possessed methods of mind control powerful enough to manipulate a person’s beliefs and behaviors. One reason why the CIA feared such a thing was because Russian scientists had pioneered the field of behavioral conditioning. Back in 1897, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had shown that by ringing a bell every time that a dog ate, he could condition the dog to salivate at the sound of the bell alone. Surely the Soviets had since extended Pavlov’s work to include human subjects. Another reason was because in the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had held a series of show trials in Moscow to remove his political opponents from power. Strangely, many of the defendants begged to be found guilty of the false charges levied against them. Yuri Pyatakov even prostrated before Stalin and asked for the honor of shooting his fellow defendants. (Perhaps his plea fell on deaf ears because his ex-wife was among the group.) Why were the defendants behaving so bizarrely? Had they been drugged? Had they been hypnotized? Had they been subjected to some other form of mind control? Then, in 1948, Cardinal József Mindszenty, leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary and a vocal critic of the country’s new Communist regime, was arrested on charges of treason. Again, the charges were obviously false. The Communists were simply trying to silence one of their most influential critics. But at a show trial six weeks after his arrest, Mindszenty had somehow changed. He wasn’t his fearless, outspoken self. Instead, he appeared cold and unemotional. He didn’t even recognize his own mother when she came to visit him. Strangest of all, he confessed to the false charges. The image of this downtrodden priest, once so full of conviction, confessing to crimes that he didn’t commit caused many CIA personnel to wonder whether he had been subjected to mind control. “Somehow they took his soul apart,” said one intelligence officer.
This project evolved into dosing unsuspecting people and observing them. This included involving the over-enthusiastic George White.
Beginning in June 1953, he established a safe house in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he dosed his guests with drugs. It was “a small three-room apartment,” Gottlieb said, “and it was equipped with [a] one way mirror so that things going on in the one side of the mirror could be viewed from the other side.” Back in the OSS days, White had injected THC into cigarettes; now he injected LSD through the cork of a wine bottle. One of his first targets was gangster Eugene Giannini. Journalist Ed Reid, a close friend of White’s, witnessed the drugging and described what happened: “Giannini, glass in his hand, looked around and smiled. He leaned back and talked and talked and talked. He talked about the syndicate in Manhattan, about its friends in high places, in political clubs, in the halls of Justice, in the United States Attorney’s office in the Federal Building on Foley Square. He gave names, dates, places. . . . He talked.” Five months later, Giannini’s body was found sprawled in a gutter with two bullets in his head.
[...]
Using magician John Mulholland’s sleight-of-hand tricks, White occasionally slipped LSD to his unsuspecting friends and tried to seduce them into orgies.
[...]
On a separate occasion when Eliot was away, White drugged nineteen-year-old Barbara and her friend Clarice Stein with LSD, even though Barbara had brought along her baby daughter. White wrote in his diary that the women contracted the “Horrors” that night. Afterward, Barbara left Eliot and moved back in with her parents. When Eliot visited her, “She was cowering in a corner,” he said. “She thought the Mafia was out to get her. Her parents were unable to cope with the problem, so on our psychiatrist’s advice I admitted her to Stony Lodge Hospital in December 1958. Not long after that we got divorced, and Valerie,” their daughter, “went to live with my parents.” At the hospital, Barbara exhibited a paranoia eerily reminiscent of Frank Olson’s and insisted that her telephone was being tapped by an unidentified “they.”
[...]
MKULTRA was trying to determine whether such a thing was possible. Could drugs make someone talk during an interrogation? Could they make someone obey commands? “If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country.” As Bureau of Narcotics agents, White and Feldman knew “the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs”...
Beside dosing people without their knowledge, some groups with limited knowledge of what they were consenting to, such as prison inmates, were used. The full extent of this may never be known.
Jolly West often treated the airmen at Lackland Air Force Base for their mental disorders. In one of his letters to Sidney Gottlieb, he suggested using the airmen, along with “prisoners in the local stockade,” as guinea pigs for MKULTRA experiments. Jimmy Shaver was known to have suffered from debilitating migraines. During West’s interrogation of him, Shaver had said, “I was already sick, Doc. I have headaches. Seven-eight hours at a time, Doc, you know? And they drive you to do anything to get away from them. I’ve ducked ’em in almost solid ice, and drank, and done everything.” At Shaver’s trial, his wife testified that he had often complained of headaches. Did West ever “treat” Shaver for his headaches prior to the murder of Chere Jo Horton? Was Shaver a guinea pig in an MKULTRA experiment? Curiously, all of West’s patient records from 1954, the year of the murder, survive except for a single file: last315 names “Sa” through “St.”
LSD appears to have been a gateway drug to the CIA as it sought anywhere some soft of Philosopher's Stone of pharmacology.
His files also indicate that he withdrew the spinal fluid of comatose patients in an attempt to identify the compounds that cause “maximum levels of physical and emotional stress in human beings.” When asked during a 1977 Senate investigation why the CIA was interested in such a grim topic, Geschickter said, “I can only give you the report that came to me from Allen Dulles, and I will quote it: ‘Thank God there is something decent coming out of our bag of dirty tricks. We are delighted.’”
It ends up, we weren't in an arms race with the Communists on this front. They found what has been long known -- Nothing magical is needed to break down the will of a human being.
The Communists weren’t controlling people through drugs, hypnotism, or “occult methods.” Instead, they were using the same methods that had been employed for centuries: hunger, beatings, isolation, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.
[...]
In their report, Wolff and Hinkle marvel at the dramatic effects that mere isolation can have on a person’s psyche: The profound boredom and complete loneliness of his situation gradually overwhelm the prisoner. There is literally nothing for him to do except ruminate and because he has so much to worry about, his ruminations are seldom pleasant. Frequently, they take the form of going over and over all the possible causes of his arrest. His mood becomes one of dejection. His sleep is disturbed by nightmares. . . . Some prisoners may become delirious and have hallucinations. God may appear to such a prisoner and tell him to cooperate with his interrogator. He may see his wife standing beside him, or a servant bringing him a large meal. In nearly all cases the prisoner’s need for human companionship and his desire to talk to anyone about anything becomes a gnawing appetite. If he is given an opportunity to talk, he may say anything which seems to be appropriate, or to be desired by the listener. . . . He may be unable to tell what is “actually true” from what “might be” or “should be” true. He may be highly suggestible. The similarities between the effects of isolation and LSD, down to the hallucinations, are striking. Although the Communists didn’t use LSD in their interrogations, it’s little wonder why the CIA thought that they might have. Ironically, Wolff and Hinkle headed the cutout organization— the SIHE— that would allow MKULTRA to flourish, even though they also wrote the report that debunked the claims that had led to the creation of MKULTRA in the first place.
(These tried-and-true techniques recalled to me the "rest cure" used in history to, really, control women. See The Cure for Women.)
Eventually, the CIA realized what it should have already known.
...document from 1961 summarizing a conversation between two anonymous CIA officers, sodium pentothal, the “pure gravy” drug that Artichoke teams had used to interrogate foreign spies, “should not be considered more effective for elicitation than getting a man drunk.” In fact, a CIA memo from February 1953— two months before MKULTRA was created— argues that there was “no428 reason for believing that drugs are reliable for obtaining truthful information.”
[...]
Gottlieb tried to put a positive spin on the negative results. When asked whether he had learned anything useful from the various MKULTRA experiments, he said, “Sure. Sure. I think [we] learned a lot of things. Most of the information was negative information, but you know, I think it established pretty clearly the limits of what you could do in surreptitiously altering a human’s behavior by covert means. It was damn little.”
This poorly managed drug experimentation drifted into melding with political assassination during the CIA's heyday with that activity.
Under the alias “Sid from Paris,” Gottlieb arranged to meet Lawrence Devlin, the CIA station chief in Léopoldville, inside a private room of a high-rise apartment building. Once the door behind them was locked, Gottlieb handed over the pouch and told Devlin what it was for. “Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin exclaimed. “Isn’t this unusual?” He asked Gottlieb who had authorized the assassination. “President Eisenhower,” Gottlieb said.
[...]
Years later, O’Donnell reflected on the episode: “All the people I knew acted in good faith,” even Bissell and Gottlieb. “I think they acted in light of— maybe not their consciences, but in light of their concept of patriotism.” They weren’t “evil people,” he said. They had simply abandoned their moral compass “because the boss says it is okay.”
[...]
Satisfied with Gottlieb’s explanation of his involvement in the attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, attorney Joseph Rauh moved on to another incident. “Could you tell us what you know about any CIA mailing of a handkerchief with poison to an Iraqi colonel?” “I have a remembrance of that operation taking place. I can’t pinpoint the time it was done, but it was not an assassination operation in any way.”
[...]
...the chief’s request to “incapacitate” Qasim eventually landed on the desk of Sidney Gottlieb. To carry out the “incapacitation” attempt, Gottlieb procured a handkerchief doused with tuberculosis from Fort Detrick, took it to what is only referred to as an “Asian country,” and mailed it to Qasim. Apparently the package never reached him.
[...]
...another involved lacing Castro’s famous Cuban cigars with LSD. Ike Feldman, the Bureau of Narcotics agent who had helped George White conduct Operation Midnight Climax, was put in charge of the operation. “One of my whores was this Cuban girl,” he later said, “and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.” But by the time that everything was ready, the CIA had become less interested in humiliating Castro and more interested in killing him.
MKULTRA, assassinations.... The CIA came to believe it could do what it wanted, including torture.
The CIA, in turn, awarded psychologist James Mitchell an $ 81 million contract to conduct these “enhanced interrogations.” Mitchell, who had never so much as witnessed an interrogation before, was a supervisor for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training in the military. The SERE program had been developed at the end of the Korean War to teach soldiers how to defend themselves against Communist interrogation methods. Armed with a knowledge of SERE, Mitchell reverse engineered those methods for the CIA. In his view, the key to a successful interrogation was to treat each detainee “like a dog in a cage.” When an FBI agent confronted Mitchell about the fact that the detainees weren’t dogs but human beings, he responded, “Science is science.” An undisclosed number of detainees died as a result.
[...]
...Mitchell’s “Clockwork Orange kind of approach,” as an insider described it, indeed got the detainees to talk. One of them confessed to knowing that his companions in the terrorist group al-Qaeda were plotting to blow up malls, banks, supermarkets, nuclear power plants, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty. Of course, none of the plots were real. The detainee wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda.
I was amused to read of the CIA's Technical Services creations, including "skyhook" referenced in the 2008 film The Dark Knight mentioned by Lucius Fox as a means of re-boarding an aircraft without its landing.
Perhaps the most imaginative of the TSD’s inventions was the skyhook, designed to extract an agent from any location in a hurry. As part of the skyhook system, the agent would attach one end of a nylon line to a body harness and the other end to a helium balloon that he would release into the air. A capture plane equipped with thirty-foot “horns” protruding from its nose would snag the dangling line...
There was a connection to the headlines if not the marquee.
TSD ... gave the pilots a new suicide device in the form of a needle coated with sticky brown shellfish toxin. One finger prick from the needle would deliver enough toxin to kill a grown man. To prevent any accidental pricks, the needle was stored in a narrow hole drilled into the side of a silver dollar. The needle soon made international news when a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to safety, but the Soviet military captured him and confiscated his suicide needle.
This, of course, led to the CIA merging its willingness to operate domestically and without conscience to meet at involvement with the Watergate scandal.
...TSD had supplied the perpetrators with disguises, false identification papers, and a voice-altering device. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gottlieb was driven out of the CIA.
During the Form administration, oversight, investigation, and sunlight were applied to the CIA, especially around The Family Jewels, a 693-page secret report commissioned by CIA Director Richard Helms to investigate allegations of illegal CIA activities, especially during the Vietnam War. The report was compiled by the CIA's own Inspector General's Office.
...In response to the directive, a surprising number of people submitted reports. The CIA’s Office of the Inspector General compiled all of them into a secret 693-page file nicknamed the “Family Jewels.” Ironically, Schlesinger had issued the directive to stay one step ahead of the press, but by forsaking compartmentalization and assembling the CIA’s most sensitive secrets into one file, he made it much easier for those secrets to leak out.
[...]
Colby didn’t have any luck silencing Hersh this time. On December 22, 1974, the front page of The New York Times proclaimed in bold letters, “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” The story revealed that the CIA had spied on thousands of antiwar protestors despite the fact that the CIA’s charter forbade it from operating within the United States.
[...]
Schorr taped a news segment for CBS that began, “President Ford has reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving the CIA.” The cat was out of the bag. Ford now had no choice but to tell the Rockefeller Commission to add assassinations to its list of CIA activities to investigate, the very activity that the commission had been created to conceal.
[...]
During Colby’s testimony, Senator Church asked with a hint of excitement, “Have you brought with you some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA to use this [shellfish toxin] for killing people?” “We have, indeed.” In front of the awestruck audience, Colby unveiled a battery-powered dart gun fitted with a telescopic sight. It shot a frozen dart of shellfish toxin that would melt inside of the victim’s body, eliminating any trace of the crime.
[...]
“Some of them apparently have been destroyed.” “Do you know who destroyed them?” “I do. I have a report that one set was destroyed by the Chief of the Division in question before his retirement.” “Do you know who that was?” “Mr. Gottlieb.” “Is that Mr. Sidney Gottlieb?” “Yes.” On live television, Colby and the Church Committee associated one name with the suspicious activities of the CIA’s past: Sidney Gottlieb. The public was eager to learn more about this mysterious figure whom newspapers quickly dubbed “Dr. Death.”
[...]
Twenty years later, in 1996, Colby’s dead body was found in an offshoot of the Potomac River. His green canoe was nearby, weighed down with sand. The CIA, which had exclusive control of the death scene, said that there were no signs of foul play. The medical examiner suspected that Colby had suffered a heart attack while canoeing, fell into the water, and drowned. Not everyone believed the official explanation. Colby’s body wasn’t bloated or disfigured, as is common in drowning victims. Also, the supposed time of death was around 10:00 P.M., an odd time to go canoeing.
[...]
The CIA could have easily lied about the existence of the files. Or it could have issued the famous Glomar response, “We can neither confirm nor deny . . .” Or it could have refused to release the files under the pretense that doing so would jeopardize national security. Instead, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the new director of central intelligence, wanted the files released. Ever since the Year of Intelligence, journalists and congressional committees had been airing out the CIA’s dirty laundry. Better, he thought, to add these files to the heap and bear the inevitable backlash now rather than later.
I see there is new doc on the mysterious death of William Colby.
This led to a Victims Task Force being formed and documenting much more than the widely known Frank Olson case of a life upended by CIA dosing.
Barbara was the woman whose husband, Eliot, had been away when White drugged her with LSD, even though she was caring for her baby daughter. Following the incident, she left Eliot, moved back in with her parents, experienced acute paranoia, and spent the rest of her life in various sanitariums receiving electroshock therapy. She died six months before the creation of the Victims Task Force.The book reconsider this MKULTRA story in the light of the damage and disinformation damage of secrecy and rippled effects of real government conspiracies.
[...]
By the time that the Victims Task Force disbanded in late 1979, Laubinger had contacted twelve of the fifteen potential unwitting victims mentioned in White’s diary. Some of them insisted, “It didn’t happen to me.” Others told him, “Thanks, I learned that a long time ago. Please go away and leave me alone.” Clarice was the only one who sued the CIA. She initially sought $ 150,000 in damages, but she settled for $ 15,000, plus the lunch. As insignificant as her lawsuit may have seemed at the time, it was a harbinger of things to come.
[...]
Ritchie had known White back in the 1950s. “My605 God,” he thought, “how could he have done that to me?” Was Ritchie right? Had he been an unwitting victim of Operation Midnight Climax? Fortunately, White’s diary offers a clue. On December 20, 1957, the night that Ritchie lost his mind, the diary entry reads, “Xmas606 party Fed bldg Press Room.”
[...]
At the end of the forensic investigation, Starrs made a shocking announcement: Frank Olson had received “a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A.” Olson was “intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”
[...]
But Starrs’s conclusion wasn’t definitive. Another member of the forensic team maintained that the blow to Olson’s head was consistent with him hitting the window on the way out. Yet another member of the team complained that Starrs “tends to relish the spotlight more than he does the details” and “sometimes he overlooks, or tends to brush aside, pertinent facts, or evidence, in favor of his opinions or theories.” Starrs had reached the conclusion that he had wanted to. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting coincidence that in 1997, the CIA declassified a short primer written in 1953— the year that Olson died— titled “A Study of Assassination.” The primer describes seven different methods of assassination: drugs, manual, edge weapons, blunt weapons, firearms, explosives, and accidents. For manual methods, the primer says that simple tools are often “the most efficient means” available. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.
[...]
The existence of the primer has caused much speculation about the Olson incident, but there’s little reason to think it describes what happened. For one, Olson went through the window blinds, which the primer discourages. Additionally, Lashbrook didn’t make an “outcry” or play the “horrified witness.” Lastly, the primer specifically advises against creating a “wound or condition not attributable to the fall,” which wouldn’t have been the case if Olson had been bludgeoned in the head, as Starrs claimed.
[...]
Rose Ann Sharp, a preschool teacher who volunteered with him, said, “A lot of Sid’s later life was spent atoning, whether he needed to or not, for how he had been exposed publicly as some sort of evil scientist.” Gottlieb came to deeply regret MKULTRA, to the point where he completely lost his peace of mind. The project that had ruined so many lives finally claimed its last victim. In that sense, Gottlieb “was not a monster but a man,” his friend Lois Manookian reminded the world.
MKULTRA is a case study in the vicious cycle of secrecy. Compartmentalization and bad recordkeeping practices (secrecy) emboldened the perpetrators (plausible deniability) to conduct unethical experiments (reckless behavior), and the fear of exposure (embarrassment) prompted them to destroy the files (secrecy).
[...]
As James Madison observed at the beginning of the American experiment, humans are not angels, and therefore “auxiliary precautions” are required to keep their ambitions in check.
[...]
There are two straightforward solutions. The first is to support free speech that speaks truth to power and a free press that exposes abuses. The second is to realign the incentives of elected representatives so that they take seriously their role as overseers. Gerrymandering, closed primaries, plurality voting, and winner-take-all elections currently incentivize these representatives to engage in political theater at the expense of actual governance. If the American people can end gerrymandering and implement some combination of open primaries, ranked voting, and proportional representation, then they can create a system that better prioritizes service over selfishness.
[...]
While the propagation of conspiracy theories can delegitimize the truth (as in censorship through noise), the propagation of the truth can legitimize conspiracy theories. The fact that the government conducted unethical programs such as MKULTRA, “enhanced interrogations,” involuntary sterilizations , human radiation experiments, and others of a similar nature, combined with the fact that the government has engaged in cover-ups, gives credence to conspiracy theories.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Saturday, May 24, 2025
Review: The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound
The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound by Robert CasilloMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Richly researched and annotated, this is a thorough analysis of Pound's embrace of antisemitism and a fascistic especially through his Cantos and radio addresses.
According to one unnamed observer, Pound became anti-Semitic through contagion; anti-Semitism was "in the air" in the teens and 1920s, and he caught a strain of it. Another explanation is that Pound's anti-Semitism derives from his American nativism and especially his Populism, for like Pound the Populists denounced the tyranny of Eastern banks and had strong agrarian and middle-class values. Other critics argue that Pound's anti-Semitism springs entirely or mainly from his hatred of usury, which he then mistakenly identified with the Jews. And others argue that it stems from his anti-monotheism and paganism, and is a "logical corollary" of these beliefs.
Pagans
Of all religions, Upward most associates Judaism with the idea of God as an absolute authority who, through fear and prohibitions, thwarts man's instincts and desires: "fear is the enemy that the Idealist has to fight," although "fear is the hardest word for him to understand." The remote and fearful Jewish God affronts human desire and intelligence: "If the Man Outside is a good man, then he cannot want us to fear him. He can only want us to live so that we need not fear him." Upward thus splits the idea of God into two conceptions, one an inaccessible and uncontrollable force, the other an indulgent being amenable to human control. The last of these, says Upward, is "the foe worth fighting, for when the Man Outside wrestles with us under this form he means us to prevail." No one is luckier than the Divine Man, whom the Man Outside has chosen to be his "privileged" servant, an "ambassador of the great King. "3
Pound likes Upward's idea that "the real God is neither a cad nor an imbecile" but an amiable being. "That is," Pound adds, "a fairly good ground for religion" (SP, 405). Like Upward and Zielinski, Pound distin-guishes between the good gods, indulgent and attractive to man, and the ugly and repressive Jehovah.4 The Greek gods are known by their "beauty," while "demons" are "unbeautiful" (SP, 47), and Jehovah, as repopularized by Calvin, is a "maniac sadist" (SP, 70). Pound believes that the Italian Catholic habit of "moderation" is attributable to such prayers as the one in an Italian schoolbook which supplicates God by referring to "the hilarity of thy face" (GK, 141). In numerous other instances Pound views divinity as an attribute possessed by favored human beings...
Fascism
In Pound's opinion the Italian Fascist guild and corporatist system is the antidote to an atomistic, deceitful, and usury-wracked parliamentarianism. Since, according to Pound, "Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely inside the sphere of their own trade or business", Fascism endows the "people by occupation and vocation with corporate powers", and thus installs them within an "organic" system of needs and functions. Mussolini, he says, "wants a council where every kind of man will be represented by some bloke of his own profession...". In the United States as well, "any or every state could organize its congressional representation on a corporate basis," whereby each profession "could have one representative". This idea, which Pound endorses for the United States as late as 1960, and which he shares with Mussolini, would overturn the concept of citizenship as it descends from the French Revolution. 51 Meanwhile, the American "big employer" should pursue a "corporate solution" in the Italian Fascist sense. Trade unions, however, should be denied legal status because they lack "RESPONSIBILITY" and are hence dysfunctional.
Although Guild Socialism, like Fascist syndicalism, had originally favored local and autonomous guilds, Guild Socialist theory gradually developed the idea of "joint management" in which all producers are partners of the state and the state is endowed with "coercive functions" in disputes between producers. 52 In Italian Fascism there similarly developed the conception of the state as the coordinator, supervisor, sometimes even the nullifier of social and economic conflict. The state was to integrate classes, reward the fulfilment of economic functions, place labor and capital on an "equal footing," and encourage economic "collaboration" between capital and labor within the corporation, all in the interests of the nation as a whole. 53 To quote Mussolini's Consegna of the Fascist year XI (1933): "Discipline the economic forces and equate them to the needs of the nation"...
Pauline Christianity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli...
Pagans
Nazism, as in Pound, this kind of thinking masks a pagan hatred of Christianity and justifies programmatic anti-Semitism. Rosenberg believed that Jesus' great personality had been obscured by "the sterility of Near Eastern, Jewish, and African life," in short, the brutality of sacrifice, and that Christianity had been corrupted by that "Jewish preacher of race-chaos, St. Paul." Thanks to St. Paul, the world was not elevated "because of the life of the Saviour, but because of His death...." "This," he adds, "is the sole motif of the Pauline Scriptures," against which Rosenberg praises a non-Jewish "positive Christianity," based on the example of Jesus' life. Hitler too de-mands "positive Christianity" in Mein Kampf and in the twenty-five points of the official Nazi programme.26 In view of these religious perversions, the swastika takes on a new significance. It represents not only the solar cycle but the ascendant solar god, who instead of dying on the cross rises with the immortal sun, source of Nature's energy and vitality. This is the symbol of "life affirmation" under which millions of Jews were exterminated.
If the swastika is thus quite different from the Christian cross, what then of the cross Pound mentions, which "turns with the sun"? Pound's probable meaning is determinable through Allen Upward's Divine Mystery, which Pound reviewed most enthusiastically, and which, though Upward himself has no connection with Nazism, is sometimes reminiscent of Nazi cultural speculation.
fascism
If Pound belongs within the fascist ideology, he likewise shares its massive confusion and contradictions, which are embodied in his metaphors and images, the form and content of his works. Repeatedly Pound's ideology is problematized and undercut by his text; our task has been in large part to reveal these hiatuses in meaning. Not the least of Pound's contradictions is the disparity between his hope of installing an homogeneous, "organic," and "totalitarian" culture around a single luminous image (a religious and ritual object such as the goddess of Terracina) and the poem's final status as an aggregate of some bright and other terrifying images, a work that approaches totality only through numerical inclusiveness rather than through the all-embracing mythical symbol. Besides mirroring the ideology and pol-icy of fascism, The Cantos mirror what fascism tried violently and desperately to overcome, the fragmentation of modern culture.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Review: Mostly Harmless
Mostly Harmless by Douglas AdamsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The villagers had watched in consternation as the woman had marched boldly to the hut of the Sandwich Maker. The Sandwich Maker had been sent to them by Almighty Bob in a burning fiery chariot. This, at least, was what Thrashbarg said, and Thrashbarg was the authority on these things. So, at least, Thrashbarg claimed, and Thrashbarg was and so on and so on. It was hardly worth arguing about.
Almighty Bob is the god of the tribes of Lamuella
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Sunday, May 11, 2025
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Saturday, May 3, 2025
Review: Plutarch Fall of the Roman Republic [Penguin Classics L 84]
![Plutarch Fall of the Roman Republic [Penguin Classics L 84]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1697019052l/139481549._SX98_.jpg)
Plutarch Fall of the Roman Republic [Penguin Classics L 84] by Rex WarnerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
As a politician [Crassus] was singularly inconsistent, neither a steadfast friend nor an implacable enemy. Where his self-interest was involved he found no difficulty in breaking off an attachment or in making up a quarrel. Indeed it often happened that, in a short space of time, he came forward both as the supporter and as the opponent of the same man and the same measures. He was strong because he was popular and because he was feared - particularly because he was feared.
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Review: Coming Back Alive: The True Story of the Most Harrowing Search and Rescue Mission Ever Attempted on Alaska's High Seas
Friday, May 2, 2025
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Review: The Wild Blue
The Wild Blue by Stephen E. Ambrose My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews
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