NOT "clickbait" . . .
When is a sexual revolution NOT a sexual revolution?
When it comes to W.R., the film, as part of the film's climax, the gun masturbation imagery is intercut with other orgasmic sequences. This is, unfortunately, partly buying into the same process of categorisation and marginalisation of Reich as the "sex box" madman. The counterculture of the 1960's and early 1970's is associated with a version of a "sexual revolution" more in line with the ersatz philosophy of Playboy's Hugh Hefner than Reich's SEX POL.
MAD magazine's typical critique of the 1969 American comedy drama film directed by Paul Mazursky, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice says it all.
Let's have an ORGY!!
After a weekend of emotional honesty at an Esalen-style retreat, Los Angeles sophisticates Bob and Carol Sanders return home determined to embrace complete openness. They share their enthusiasm and excitement over their new-found philosophy with their more conservative friends Ted and Alice Henderson, who remain doubtful. Soon after, filmmaker Bob has an affair with a young production assistant on a film shoot in San Francisco. When he gets home he admits his liaison to Carol, describing the event as a purely physical act, not an emotional one. To Bob's surprise, Carol is completely accepting of his extramarital behavior. Later, Carol gleefully reveals the affair to Ted and Alice as they are leaving a dinner party. Disturbed by Bob's infidelity and Carol's candor, Alice becomes physically ill on the drive home. She and Ted have a difficult time coping with the news in bed that night. But as time passes they grow to accept that Bob and Carol really are fine with the affair. Later, Ted admits to Bob that he was tempted to have an affair once, but didn't go through with it; Bob tells Ted he should, rationalizing: "You've got the guilt anyway. Don't waste it."During another visit to San Francisco, Bob decides to skip a second encounter with the young woman, instead returning home a day early. When he arrives, he discovers Carol having an affair with her tennis instructor. Although initially outraged, Bob quickly realizes that the encounter was purely physical, like his own affair. He settles down and even chats and drinks with the man.When the two couples travel together to Las Vegas, Bob and Carol reveal Carol's affair to Ted and Alice. Ted then admits to an affair on a recent business trip to Miami. An outraged Alice demands that this new ethos be taken to its obvious conclusion: a mate-sharing foursome. Ted is reluctant, explaining that he loves Carol "like a sister," but eventually acknowledges that he finds her attractive. After discussing it, all four remove their clothes and climb into bed together. Swapping partners, Bob and Alice kiss fervently, as do Ted and Carol, but after a few moments all four simply stop.The scene cuts to the couples walking to the elevator, riding it down, and walking out of the casino hand-in-hand with their original partners. A crowd of men and women of various cultures and races congregate in the casino parking lot, wherein the four main characters exchange long stares with each other and with strangers, reminiscent of the non-verbal communication shown in the early scene at the retreat. Over this final scene, the film's theme song reminds the viewer that "what the world needs now is love." The credits roll as the couples look into each other's eyes.
What the world needs now is . . .
The film score was composed, arranged and conducted by Quincy Jones and featured Jackie DeShannon performing Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "What the World Needs Now Is Love".
So, what kind of sexual revolution was Reich interested in, in his theories and experimental work in Europe and the United States?
SEX-POL
So, what is . . .
. . . SEX-POL?
In Radical thinkers: Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol, Stella Stanford of Kingston University makes the case for Wilhelm Reich to be better understood as a radical thinker in this short Guardian video recorded in the Freud Museum London.
Reich was a witness to an event on the streets during the July Revolt of 1927 in Vienna, when 84 workers were shot and killed by police and another 600 were injured. It seems that the experience changed Reich; he wrote that it was his first encounter with human irrationality. He began to doubt everything, and in 1928 joined the Communist Party of Austria:As if struck by a blow, one suddenly recognizes the scientific futility, the biological senselessness, and the social noxiousness of views and institutions, which until that moment had seemed altogether natural and self-evident. It is a kind of eschatological experience so frequently encountered in a pathological form in schizophrenics. I might even voice the belief that the schizophrenic form of psychic illness is regularly accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and political mores.Partly in response to the shooting he had witnessed in Vienna, Reich, then 30, opened six free sex-counseling clinics in the city in 1927 for working-class patients. Each clinic was overseen by a physician, with three obstetricians and a lawyer on call, and offered what Reich called Sex-Pol counseling. Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics. Reich offered a mixture of "psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives", and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help.He also took to the streets in a mobile clinic, driving to parks and out to the suburbs with other psychoanalysts and physicians. Reich would talk to the teenagers and men, while a gynaecologist fitted the women with contraceptive devices, and Lia Laszky, spoke to the children. They also distributed sex-education pamphlets door to door.
Orgasms for the working class?
Reich's ideas about the importance of the uninhibited orgasm goes back to 1924 when Reich published a series of papers on the idea of "orgastic potency", the ability to release the emotions from the muscles and lose the self in an uninhibited orgasm, an idea that Freud came to call Reich's "Steckenpferd" (hobby horse).
Reich argued that psychic health and the ability to love depended on orgastic potency, the full discharge of the libido:
"Sexual release in the sex act must correspond to the excitement which leads up to it."
"It is not just to fuck . . . not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self."
He argued that orgastic potency was the goal of character analysis.Whereas Reich's work on character was well received by the psychoanalytic community, his work on orgastic potency was unpopular from the start and later ridiculed. He came to be known as the "prophet of the better orgasm" and the "founder of a genital utopia".So, a healthy orgasm for Reich, as someone who works towards a goal where humanity was free from neurosis and those oppressive forces, material, social and psychological at its cause, he was a "prophet of the better orgasm" for everyone.
Here comes everybody?
The Wikipedia article on orgastic potency states that:
Reich's precise definition for the phrase "orgastic potency" changed over time as he changed his understanding of the phenomenon. He first described it in detail in his 1927 book Die Funktion Des Orgasmus, later published in English as Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis. In the 1980 English translation of the book, he defined orgastic potency as "the ability to achieve full resolution of existing sexual need-tension".
In his 1940 book Die Entdeckung des Orgons Erster Teil: Die Function des Orgasmus, published in English in 1942 as The Discovery of the Orgone, Volume 1: The Function of the Orgasm, he defined it as;
"the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body."His last published definition of orgastic potency, which is repeated in his 1960 published Selected Writings, is;
"the capacity for complete surrender to the involuntary convulsion of the organism and complete discharge of the excitation at the acme of the genital embrace."Reich related orgastic potency and orgastic impotence to a, respectively, healthy and unhealthy sexual experience for the adult. He described that the healthy experience has specific biological and psychological characteristics; is identical for men and women; is characterised by love and the ability to express it; full, deep, pleasurable breathing is present; deep, delicious current-like sensations run up and down the body shortly before orgasm; and involuntary muscular movements are present before climax. Moreover, Reich defined the healthy sexual experience exclusively in terms of the sexual union between male and female.
Reich's assumption that orgastic potency was contingent on heterosexuality, suggests that his theory was governed by mores that were less than universal in their emancipatory scope.
Nevertheless Reich was critical of bourgeois sexual morality. The Wikipedia article referenced here on Reich's 1936 book Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf ("sexuality in the culture war"), and published later in English as The Sexual Revolution, has a warning that the neutrality of the article is disputed, as with much literature is when it comes to Reich and his ideas. Nevertheless, it is worth quoting at this point, as it frames the social and political contexts that were core to driving Reich's efforts.
The first part "analyzes the crisis of the bourgeois sexual morality" and the failure of the attempts of "sexual reform" that preserved the frame of capitalist society (marriage and family). The second part reconstructs the history of the sexual revolution that took place with the establishment of the Soviet Union since 1922, and which was opposed by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s.
It is worth noting that the editions of the publication of this work since 1945, have had a number of "reshuffles, terminology changes and abuses by editors", some of which were intended to "disguise the communist-revolutionary orientation", to avoid hurting a susceptible American public.
There are also crucial omissions and changes to the content; while the original edition (1936), based its theory on the "rejection of the family institution as such", the softened versions reject just the "authoritarian family structure", aiming to replace it with a "better and more natural form of family". Other omissions or changes affected the "terms" regarding religion, class society, radical left politics, the 'bourgeois' attribute referred to family, morality or sexuality, proletariat, etc.In 1992, Italian publisher Erre Emme, published for the first time not only an integral 1936 edition, but also integrations showing the changes of the 1945 edition, in order to allow a scientific confrontation. Boris Fraenkel, an "intellectual without a work", provided an Introduction to this edition that is cited throughout the Wikipedia article. Fraenkel passed his life reading, translating and popularising theses by authors such as Reich, Marcuse ("Eros et Civilisation"), Lukács, and Trotsky.When it comes to "sexuality in the culture war", Reich explains that sexual neuroses derive from the lack of gratification of natural sexuality. Natural sexuality is left unsatisfied and thereby creates neuroses due to suppression of this sexuality by the authoritarian state. For Reich, this state is characterised by the capitalist state, one that is based on the unit of the patriarchal family, where the father mirrors the state as the absolute authority.According to Reich, the authoritarian state uses a variety of tools in order to suppress its citizens' natural sexualities. These tools comprise Reich's view of "conservative, sex-negative moralism" and include:
- the ideology of lifelong, monogamous marriage, which Reich calls "compulsive marriage";
- the suppression of infantile sexuality, which Reich cites as the primary cause of unnatural sexual desires and perversions later in life;
- a lack of candid sexual education or sexual freedom for adolescents;
- the persecution of abnormal sexualities such as homosexuality;
- the illegality of abortion;
- marriage as a legalized institution, and the lack of an "incompatibility" reason for divorce.
These various means of suppression in turn cause the authoritarian state's citizens to both repress their natural sexual desires and create new, neurotic, unhealthy sexual desires. Reich explains that this relationship between suppression/repression of natural sexuality and the creation or intensification of sexual neuroses is a cyclical relationship that constantly results in more power for the authoritarian state.The authoritarian state's motive, whether it is conscious of it or not, is to preserve its economic structure through continuance of the patriarchal family as its primary social unit. The family, according to Reich, is essential to the economic structure of capitalism because it benefits the capitalist as well as preserves itself to the next generation. The latter is achieved through suppression of infantile sexual attraction to the parents, thereby producing a repressed attachment to the family unit. The child longs for familial relationships and mimics the parent of its own gender in the creation of its own family. The capitalist benefits from the economic unit of the family because of the husband's economic dominance over the wife, who is economically dependent on her husband and works for no wage in the house. This allows the employer of the husband to pay him a lesser wage because the employer need not take into account the cost that the husband would have to pay a housekeeper or childcare provider. This lack of extra wage for traditional female housework and child-rearing encourages the woman to stay home to be economical, as well as allows her husband's employer to keep that extra surplus capital for himself. The husband also benefits because he is given power and authority in the home that he does not necessarily get in the workplace.In the preface of the 1945 edition, Reich says that "our" family structure, that is the Western European family, is inherited from the origins of an essentially patriarchal society.Fraenkel (1992) notes that the supposed "sexual revolution" claimed for the West since the late 60s is indeed a misconception. Sex is not actually enjoyed freely, it is just observed in all the fields of culture. In order to move from that to an actual sexual liberation, we must change our mental structures and our moral inhibitions. Instead, the repressive Judeo-Christian morals still basically hold, and small social changes are exaggerated because they're seen in that light. Even many supposed atheists have just secularized and internalized the same old morals.Bourgeois ideology has a strong demand that adolescents, having reached sexual maturity, be repressed in sexual abstinence. To justify this sad privation, which is the basis of their unhappiness, all sorts of unscientific and ridiculous justifications have been made up.
This doesn't happen, as anthropological cross-cultural studies have shown, in many contemporary societies which don't have a marked patriarchal ideology.
Anthropologists who have studied such people include Bronisław Malinowski, with his 1929 work The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, Ploss-Bartels, Havelock Ellis, Hans Meyer on the Wahehe and Wossangu.There is an active effort to obstruct pubescent people from starting to engage in sexual activity. This includes keeping them from finding the information they need to understand their sexual issues. So-called "sex education" is practically always a work of deception which focuses on biology while concealing excitement-arousal, which is what interests them the most, and hides the fact that all their worries and difficulties originate from unsatisfied sexual impulses.From the Orgasmatron . . .
In popular culture an orgone accumulator made an appearance as the Orgasmatron in Woody Allen's comedy feature film Sleeper (1973) parodying a dystopic future of the United States in the year 2173, directed by Woody Allen and written by Allen and Marshall Brickman.
The plot involves the misadventures of the owner of a health food store who is cryogenically frozen in 1973 and defrosted 200 years later in an ineptly led police state.
Contemporary politics and pop culture are satirized throughout the film, which includes tributes to classic comedy and science fiction, and reinforcing a popular misconception while having a bit of fun about Riech's work, at the expense of his reputation.
A version of the orgone accumulator features in the film Barbarella, a 1968 science fiction film directed by Roger Vadim, based on the French comic series of the same name by Jean-Claude Forest. The film stars Jane Fonda as the title character, a space-traveller and representative of the United Earth government sent to find scientist Durand Durand, who has created a weapon that could destroy humanity. This version is another also based on the "sex box" misconception associated with the orgone accumulator.
The point that Fraenkel (1992) makes about the supposed "sexual revolution" claimed for the West since the late 60s is indeed a misconception that is played with creatively in these examples where a simulacra of SEX is simulated and re-presented as mechanically induced. From the comic book to the internet, there's a short journey from the image to an advert for a monetised and remote version of SEX. SEX is not actually enjoyed freely, it ends up as a visual experience/commodity to be observed in all the fields of culture.
From healing device . . .
. . . to comic strip!
From comic strip sex with a robot . . .
. . . to Chaturbate!
Chaturbate is an adult website providing live webcam performances by individual webcam models and couples, typically featuring nudity and sexual activity ranging from striptease and erotic talk to masturbation with sex toys that is often highly explicit.
As of October 2020, Chaturbate was the 65th most popular website in the world and the 5th most popular adult site.
"Chaturbate" is a portmanteau of "chat" and "masturbate". Viewers are allowed to watch for free, but pay money in the form of "tips" in order to see certain sex acts performed. There are popular chat rooms, that can have more than 500,000 followers and can get up to 20,000 viewers at once. The site itself earns revenues by taking roughly 40% of what performers make. In addition, Chaturbate generates revenue from the audience when they purchase tokens using their credit cards.
Orgasms for SEX workers?
This internet streaming video image set up, with SEX worker given "tips", to encourage engagement in sexual activities, in a display, that potentially includes a real or faked orgasm, has NO relation to the orgone accumulator concept. The question of whether the outcome of either the orgone accumulator SEX BOX is real or fake, whether in the Chaturbate interface the looker "jerks off" successfully or the subject actually "cums" is irrelevant. The two situations can NOT be compared, and the situation of chatting and masturbating, as a result of "tips" given or received, is NOT to be understood as a context for a wholistic bodily healing process and a psychosomatic experience.
Accumulation by dispossession and the commodification of the orgasm?
The Wikiporno site (sic) sets out the Jerkmate offer: Jerkmate is a site that makes watching online cam shows simple, with a simple user interface which helps the visitors find the models they want to see. First they have to set if they are mainly interested in Women, Men, Trans, or Couple webcams.
"Making her yours", including her (or his) orgasm, fake or real, says it all! It's about the monetisation of transactions in what is, according to the Wikiporno page on the Price of Jerkmate:
Freemium
(but there is no such thing as a "free lunch"!)
Next, the "user" can choose the ethnicity (Asian, Latina, Caucasian, Ebony), hair color (Red, Blond, Black, Brown), and the body type (Skinny, BBW, Athletic, Chubby). The viewer is then presented with a big cam window, showing a model matching his/her criteria. The users can watch the cam show for free, start a chat with the model, or even enable their own cam for a two-way cam show. If the user doesn't like the model, they can switch to another or start a new search.
Re:LODE Radio chooses to juxtapose this example of Surveillance Capitalism with the concept of Accumulation by dispossession, presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. The concept defines neoliberal capitalist policies that result in a centralisation of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land. Such policies are visible in many western nations from the 1970s and to the present day. Harvey argues these policies are guided mainly by four practices: privatisation, financialisation, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions. Re:LODE Radio argues that the Chaturbate and Jerkmate models include a process of dispossession in a context of exchange, and where Freemium is in actuality, at the cost to the SEX worker and the user, in ways that reinforce the power relations of "business as usual". Anything but a revolution, sexual or political.
This "business as usual" oft quoted mantra, found on many of the posts and pages of this Re:LODE Radio project, is also the primary cause for the globalised processes leading to the Americanisation of the World.
The commodification of SEX is just the most important example, among a myriad of others, of the process of homogenisation at the core of this capitalist economic system. The irony is that the internet is potentially a space where "modernity" finally provides a space/time actuality where a non-alienated type of human activity, free work, and new forms of freedom, becomes viable.
Instead we see how, as in the climax of W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, the gun masturbation imagery is intercut with other orgasmic sequences, as the director Dušan Makavejev highlights Reich's ideas about how sexual frustration and violence are connected.
In 1971, when the film was made, the geopolitical background was dominated by an ideological contestation between East and West, of Cold War, of Communism versus Capitalism. But the struggle for hegemony was not to be conducted on equal terms. Far from it. The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union during the period of 1988-92 was greeted in the USA with a degree of triumphalism following a post-World War II protracted propaganda/culture war.
For example, The End of History and the Last Man, a book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy — which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) — humanity has reached
"not just . . . the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
For the book, which is an expansion of his essay, "The End of History?" (1989), Fukuyama draws upon the philosophies and ideologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear progression, from one socioeconomic epoch to another.
Let's have an ORGY!!
Playboy's Little Annie Fanny had a role to play in massaging the American message . . .
. . . a message for a readership in the US and its wider sphere of cultural influence rather than spooks at the Kremlin.
Little Annie Fanny was a humorous satire of contemporary American society and its sexual mores, created by Harvey Kurtzman, the genius who founded the satirical Mad magazine in 1952. An early fan of Mad was onetime cartoonist Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy in 1953. Hefner had offered Kurtzman an opportunity to conceive a new humour magazine, which the cartoonist accepted after laving Mad in 1956 in an ownership dispute. Kurtzman took most of the Mad artists with him, including frequent collaborator Will Elder, to create the adult-oriented humour magazine Trump. Trump magazine was short lived, as was their they self-published the satirical magazine Humbug in 1957–58. In the end Kurtzman returned to work for Hefner, creating a series appearing in 107 two- to seven-page episodes in Playboy magazine from October 1962 to September 1988, and with Little Annie Fanny as the culmination of his career. Each episode of the comic strip was designed and written by Kurtzman and rendered in oil, tempera, and watercolor by Elder. Hefner edited each episode, often requiring detailed changes to ensure that the series remained true to the magazine's editorial style.
Annie Fanny, the title character, is a statuesque, buxom young blonde woman who innocently finds herself nude in every episode. An inspiration for the artist Will Elder was the Playboy model June Cochran who first appeared nude in magazine two months after the first Annie Fanny comic strip appeared in October 1962. Annie Fanny is the feature's lead character. Like other young women in Playboy pictorials, Annie is beautiful, buxom, and often unclothed. She is sexually innocent, oblivious to the worldliness around her. Annie was conceived as a modern Candide, a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. As such she rises above each story's corruptions and temptations.
Annie is never shocked or offended, and she remains blithe of spirit throughout her trials and tribulations.
Annie "glides through a changing world with an untiring optimism" with a "good-natured lack of desire". She is insulated from the carnal nature of those around her, who explain the new rules of society to her each episode. A number of other characters in Little Annie Fanny are derived from Gray's Little Orphan Annie. Sugardaddy Bigbucks, Annie's surrogate father and a powerful, manipulative capitalist, is based on Daddy Warbucks.
The character of Daddy Warbucks was often used as a platform for cartoonist Harold Gray's political views, which were free market-based. He sometimes expounded on the need for wealthy men to work hard — lest the masses have no employment. At the same time, capitalists who underpaid or mistreated their workers were portrayed in a negative light, with corrupt businessmen often being shown as villains. While, in the strip, Warbucks would interact with the rich and powerful, the close relationship in the play and movie between Warbucks and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) would likely have been anathema to Gray, who opposed the New Deal policies of FDR and the Democrats.
In the 1982 film Annie, Daddy Warbucks says he was born in Liverpool, which has an obvious significance for the Re:LODE Radio project along the LODE Zone Line.
Sugardaddy Bigbucks and Daddy Warbucks are classic caricatures of the twentieth century American capitalist class. Making money from wars that shape neoliberal, colonial and imperialist ventures.
The fictional backstory for the Daddy Warbucks character is that, having lost both parents in childhood he had to work seven nights a week in the local steel mill to make ends meet. He eventually became foreman in the rolling mill, married Mrs. Warbucks, worked and planned for a family and house of their own. "Daddy" began to make big money during World War I. After the war, Warbucks continued as an industrialist, but became a philanthropist as well — his fortune had built to "ten billion dollars." His wife instigated the taking in of Annie while Warbucks was away on a business trip. On his return, he was smitten with Annie and, as her father-figure, offered the girl support as needed.
Just as with the Sugardaddy Bigbucks and Annie Fanny storylines, Daddy Warbuck's often intervened in Annie's life during a crisis, always returning in time to save the day. During World War II, Warbucks became a three-star general. Later in life he was knighted by the Queen of the United Kingdom.
Sugardaddy Bigbucks would, likewise, have profited from the neocolonialist wars waged by the US government, but the costs would be covered by the citizen taxpayer. The economic impact upon US citizens of the Vietnam War was considerable, especially with inflation and an increasingly high interest rate. This is another example of the "business as usual" model that ends up with:
The privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss!
Vietnam War Profits and Loss!
U.S. Spent $141‐Billion In Vietnam in 14 YearsMay 1, 1975
WASHINGTON, April 30 (AP) —From 1961 until the surrender of the Saigon Government, the United States spent more than $141‐billion in South Vietnam, or more than $7,000 for each of South Vietnam's 120 million people.
By the time the Paris peace accords were signed in January, 1973, more than 56,000 American servicemen had died in Vietnam, 46,000 of them in combat.
Measuring the full cost of Vietnam fighting to the United States inevitably goes far beyond the statistics. For example many economists link the rapid inflationary spiral of the late nineteen‐sixties directly to large Federal deficits that resulted from United States spending in Vietnam.
Critics of the late President Lyndon B. Johnson maintain that he tried to finance his Great Society domestic programs and an expensive war simultaneously without a corresponding increase in Federal taxes. When huge Federal deficits appeared, the purchasing power of the dollar fell, a decline that continues eating into the pocketbooks of American consumers today.
Million Battle Deaths
Although America's involvement in the war was costly in both casualties and dollars spent, it set no U.S. record for either category. In the Civil War 498,332 Americans died, and combat deaths were higher in both World Wars 1 and II than they were in Vietnam.
Casualties and combat deaths among the South Vietnamese and Communist forces went far beyond American losses.
The Pentagon estimates that there were over 241,000 South Vietnamese combat deaths and more than one million combined Vietcong and North Vietnamese combat deaths.
The dollar cost of the United States involvement in the war is more difficult to compare. Everything from rifles to uniforms to ships to fighter planes cost less in previous conflicts;
Salaries of the 2.6 million servicemen who served in Vietnam over 11‐ years accounted for much of the cost of the Vietnam war, as did the 4,900 helicopters and more than 3,700 jets and other American‐made planes lost in the fighting.
American ‐ made military weaponry and equipment valued at more than $2‐billion were in the hands of the South Vietnamese Army before it stopped fighting.
Record tonnages of ammunition, including artillery and B‐52 bombs, expended by the United States in Vietnam also added to the cost of the war.
The Soviet Union and China have also poured staggering amounts or military and economic aid into North Vietnam,
Hanoi Received $7‐Billion
As of January, 1975, it was estimated that the Soviet Union and China had provided more than $7.5‐billion in aid to the North Vietnamese, with about 40 per cent being military. But Pentagon officials cautioned that all such estimates are at best rough guesses.
Nonetheless, the March 1975 intelligence estimate said: “Total Communist military and economic aid to North Vietnam in 1974 was higher than in any previous year.”
When the role of American fighting men in Vietnam ended on Jan. 27, 1973, the conflict was the longest in American history. It took eight years for the Revolutionary War to end; the Spanish‐American War of 1898 ran only four months.
In the period 1967 to 1970, the United States spent successively $22.2‐billion, $26.3‐billion, $26.5‐billion and $18.5‐billion.
In the current fiscal year, after sending almost $700‐million in aid to South Vietnam, President Ford was still pressing for additional millions when the end came.
Understanding the Vietnam War Machine
This Jacobin interview with Diana Roose by Derek Seidman (originally published by LittleSis) runs under the subheading:
A look at the radical Vietnam-era research collective that exposed US companies profiteering off the war
17 June 2018The interview is in a section of the Jacobin website headed:
UNITED STATESWAR AND IMPERIALISMThe document illustrated (the image with an orange background) at the top of the webpage sets out in order the:
TOP 100 DEFENSE CONTRACTORS IN FISCAL 1977
No. 1. in the list is McDonnell Douglas Corp with a contract award amounting to $2,574,047,000.00
This is the No. 1. representative of the so-called Military Industrial Complex. No. 65. turns out to be British Petroleum Co Ltd with a contract award running to $104,498,000.00
Derek Seidman contextualises the interview with Diana Roose with the following introduction:
Diana Roose was a longtime staffer with National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex, or NARMIC, as it was commonly known. NARMIC was a group of power researchers that was affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee. It formed in 1969, at the height of the US war on Vietnam, and existed throughout the mid-1980s.
NARMIC was dedicated to uncovering the defense profiteers behind the US war machine. They worked closely with the peace movement to resist militarism and published valuable reports and slideshows that helped activists better understand the power behind the military-industrial complex — and how to fight it.
In October, I profiled NARMIC as part of an ongoing exploration into the role of power research in social movement history. I interviewed Diana Roose to learn more about NARMIC and its legacy.
The LittleSis webpage carrying this interview runs with the headline:
The “Research Arm” of the Peace Movement: How Power Researchers Helped the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
Beneath the headline the webpage shows this photo of an Anti-Vietnam War protest with marchers carrying a banner that reads:
We won't fight another rich man's war!!!
One of the questions to Diana Roose in the interview was:
Can you talk a little bit about the slideshows you made?
That was a brilliant idea that came from somebody in the movement who said, “You have all this information and you can put out all these booklets. Can you put this together with pictures and make it into a slideshow or something, so that we can use it to go out into the communities and tell people about the war – and not just have leaflets?”
I don’t know why anybody didn’t think about it earlier. It was remarkable in its success. We had pictures from all these military magazines of all these weapons. We had pictures from Vietnam of people who had been injured by these weapons. So we made all this into slides, and people started saying, “Can I get a copy?”
We found a little business in Philadelphia that would copy slides pretty quickly, and we decided to sell them as kits. That’s what people were asking for – it was all driven by the market, by the activists who were trying to find tools that they could use to educate their communities.
“Automated Air War” became used all across the country. Groups would take the slideshows out into communities all over the country and show them. I remember talking to some of the veterans that were using the slideshows. They would go into the bars and set them up, and they’d get their fellow veterans to see it. They’d even go into VFW places and show these things before anybody had a clue what they were trying to do!
It really hit a nerve. Organizers now had a tool they could use as a group. It wasn’t just an individual reading a pamphlet. It was a group activity, and that was the the important part of it, because it was self reinforcing. People would talk to their neighbors. If you’re just reading a pamphlet or a report, it’s a mostly individual act.
So this, again, was part of the activism part of research. It wasn’t just research for research’s sake. It was research that would be useful to activists. And that was something new.
Welcome to the Capitalocene!!
What are the costs and benefits of political activism?
Hanoi Jane . . .
. . . otherwise known as Jane Fonda, star of Barbarella, and pictured in this screenshot from a British Vogue article that included this 1970 photo and a caption that reads:
In a sun-drenched garden, Fonda – in a ’60s style side-exposing dress – poses for the camera
15 Free-Spirited Photos Of A Young Jane Fonda, Political Force In The Making
The Wikipedia article on Jane Fonda has a section, following a section on her Career, quaintly headed:
Other works
This section includes:
Political activism
During the 1960s, Fonda engaged in political activism in support of the Civil Rights Movement, and in opposition to the Vietnam War. Fonda's visits to France brought her into contact with leftist French intellectuals who were opposed to war, an experience that she later characterized as "small-c communism". Along with other celebrities, she supported the Alcatraz Island occupation by American Indigenous People in 1969, which was intended to call attention to the failures of the government with regards to treaty rights and the movement for greater Indigenous People's sovereignty.She supported Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, stating:
"Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood."
She called the Black Panthers "our revolutionary vanguard ... we must support them with love, money, propaganda and risk."
She has been involved in the feminist movement since the 1970s and dovetails her activism in support of civil rights.Opposition to the Vietnam WarSee also: Opposition to the Vietnam War and RITA Resistance Inside the Armies § Jane Fonda and RITAIn April 1970, Fonda, with Fred Gardner and Donald Sutherland formed the FTA tour ("Free The Army", a play on the troop expression "Fuck The Army"), an anti-war road show designed as an answer to Bob Hope's USO tour. The tour, described as "political vaudeville" by Fonda, visited military towns along the West Coast, aiming to establish a dialogue with soldiers about their upcoming deployments to Vietnam. The dialogue was made into a movie (F.T.A.) which contained strong, frank criticism of the war by servicemen and servicewomen; it was released in 1972.On May 4, 1970, Fonda appeared before an assembly at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, to speak on G.I. rights and issues. The end of her presentation was met with a discomfiting silence until Beat poet Gregory Corso staggered onto the stage. Drunk, Corso challenged Fonda, using a four-letter expletive: why hadn't she addressed the shooting of four students at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard, which had just taken place? In her autobiography, Fonda revisited the incident: "I was shocked by the news and felt like a fool." On the same day, she joined a protest march on the home of university president Ferrel Heady. The protesters called themselves "They Shoot Students, Don't They?" – a reference to Fonda's recently released film, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which had just been screened in Albuquerque.In the same year, Fonda spoke out against the war at a rally organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She offered to help raise funds for VVAW and was rewarded with the title of Honorary National Coordinator. On November 3, 1970, Fonda started a tour of college campuses on which she raised funds for the organisation. As noted by The New York Times, Fonda was a "major patron" of the VVAW.Visit to HanoiBetween 1965 and 1972, almost 300 Americans – mostly civil rights activists, teachers, and pastors – traveled to North Vietnam to see firsthand the war situation with the Vietnamese. News media in the United States predominantly provided a U.S. viewpoint, and American travelers to Vietnam were routinely harassed upon their return to the States. Fonda also visited Vietnam, traveling to Hanoi in July 1972 to witness firsthand the bombing damage to the dikes. After touring and photographing dike systems in North Vietnam, she said the United States had been intentionally targeting the dike system along the Red River. Columnist Joseph Kraft, who was also touring North Vietnam, said he believed the damage to the dikes was incidental and was being used as propaganda by Hanoi, and that, if the U.S. Air Force were "truly going after the dikes, it would do so in a methodical, not a harum-scarum way". Sweden's ambassador to Vietnam, however, observed the bomb damage to the dikes and described it as "methodic". Other journalists reported that the attacks were "aimed at the whole system of dikes".Fonda was photographed seated on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun; the photo outraged a number of Americans, and earned her the nickname "Hanoi Jane". In her 2005 autobiography, she wrote that she was manipulated into sitting on the battery; she had been horrified at the implications of the pictures. In a 2011 entry at her official website, Fonda explained:It happened on my last day in Hanoi. I was exhausted and an emotional wreck after the 2-week visit ... The translator told me that the soldiers wanted to sing me a song. He translated as they sung. It was a song about the day 'Uncle Ho' declared their country's independence in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square. I heard these words: 'All men are created equal; they are given certain rights; among these are life, Liberty and Happiness.' These are the words Ho pronounced at the historic ceremony. I began to cry and clap. 'These young men should not be our enemy. They celebrate the same words Americans do.' The soldiers asked me to sing for them in return ... I memorized a song called 'Day Ma Di', written by anti-war South Vietnamese students. I knew I was slaughtering it, but everyone seemed delighted that I was making the attempt. I finished. Everyone was laughing and clapping, including me ... Here is my best, honest recollection of what happened: someone (I don't remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed ... It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. But if they did I can't blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen ... a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever ... But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart. I have apologized numerous times for any pain I may have caused servicemen and their families because of this photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm.Fonda made radio broadcasts on Hanoi Radio throughout her two-week tour, describing her visits to villages, hospitals, schools, and factories that had been bombed, and denouncing U.S. military policy. During the course of her visit, Fonda visited American prisoners of war (POWs), and brought back messages from them to their families. When stories of torture of returning POWs were later being publicized by the Nixon administration, Fonda said that those making such claims were "hypocrites and liars and pawns", adding about the prisoners she visited, "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." In addition, Fonda told The New York Times in 1973, "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture ... but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that's a lie." Her visits to the POW camp led to persistent and exaggerated rumours which were repeated widely, and continued to circulate on the Internet decades later. (Fonda had met with seven American POWs and later said they asked her to tell their friends and family to support presidential candidate George McGovern as they feared they’d never be freed during a Richard Nixon administration. Rumours spread and still persist that she betrayed them by accepting secret notes and then turning them over to the North Vietnamese.) Fonda, as well as the named POWs, have denied the rumours, and subsequent interviews with the POWs showed these allegations to be false — the persons named had never met Fonda.In 1972, Fonda helped fund and organise the Indochina Peace Campaign, which continued to mobilise antiwar activists in the US after the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement, until 1975 when the United States withdrew from Vietnam.Because of her tour of North Vietnam during wartime and the subsequent rumors, resentment against her persists among some veterans and serving U.S. military. For example, when a U.S. Naval Academy newly entered cadet ritually shouted out "Goodnight, Jane Fonda!", the entire company of midshipmen plebes, who had not yet been born when Fonda protested against the Vietnam War, replied "Goodnight, bitch!" This practice has since been prohibited by the academy's Plebe Summer Standard Operating Procedures. In 2005, Michael A. Smith, a U.S. Navy veteran, was arrested for disorderly conduct in Kansas City, Missouri, after he spat chewing tobacco in Fonda's face during a book-signing event for her autobiography, My Life So Far. He told reporters that he "consider[ed] it a debt of honor", adding "she spit in our faces for 37 years. It was absolutely worth it. There are a lot of veterans who would love to do what I did." Fonda refused to press charges.RegretsIn a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, Fonda expressed regret for some of her comments and actions, stating:I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families. ... I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless.In a 60 Minutes interview on March 31, 2005, Fonda reiterated that she had no regrets about her trip to North Vietnam in 1972, with the exception of the anti-aircraft-gun photo. She stated that the incident was a "betrayal" of American forces and of the "country that gave me privilege". Fonda said, "The image of Jane Fonda, Barbarella, Henry Fonda's daughter ... sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal ... the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine." She later distinguished between regret over the use of her image as propaganda and pride for her anti-war activism: "There are hundreds of American delegations that had met with the POWs. Both sides were using the POWs for propaganda ... It's not something that I will apologize for." Fonda said she had no regrets about the broadcasts she made on Radio Hanoi, something she asked the North Vietnamese to do: "Our government was lying to us and men were dying because of it, and I felt I had to do anything that I could to expose the lies and help end the war."Subject of government surveillanceIn 2013, it was revealed that Fonda was one of approximately 1,600 Americans whose communications between 1967 and 1973 were monitored by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as part of Project MINARET, a program that some NSA officials have described as "disreputable if not downright illegal". Fonda's communications, as well as those of her husband, Tom Hayden, were intercepted by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Under the UKUSA Agreement, intercepted data on Americans were sent to the U.S. government.1970 arrestOn November 3, 1970, Fonda was arrested by authorities at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on suspicion of drug trafficking. Her luggage was searched when she re-entered the United States after participating in an anti-war college speaking tour in Canada, and several small baggies containing pills were seized. Although Fonda protested that the pills were harmless vitamins, she was booked by police and then released on bond. Fonda alleged that the arresting officer told her he was acting on direct orders from the Nixon White House. As she wrote in 2009, "I told them what [the vitamins] were but they said they were getting orders from the White House. I think they hoped this 'scandal' would cause the college speeches to be canceled and ruin my respectability." After lab tests confirmed the pills were vitamins, the charges were dropped with little media attention.Fonda's mugshot from the arrest, in which she raises her fist in a sign of solidarity, has since become a widely published image of the actress. It was used as the poster image for the 2018 HBO documentary on Fonda, "Jane Fonda in Five Acts", with a giant billboard sporting the image erected in Times Square in September 2018.
In 2017, she began selling merchandise with her mugshot image to benefit the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential.
Mug and mugshot!
This video montage begins with a trailer for the documentary on the F.T.A. tour and followed by the HBO documentary "Jane Fonda in Five Acts".
From Barbarella to . . .
Jane Fonda's career as a successful movie actor was stymied as a result of, in effect, being blacklisted by sections of the US entertainment industry. This shameful treatment was compounded by levels of hostility directed to Jane Fonda's other work. Both of these treatments were the product of the unholy marriage of patriarchy and capitalist free-market ideology. Given that the dark days of Fonda's subjection to politically motivated and misogynistic abuse occurred in an age before Twitter, Re:LODE Radio wonders what it's like for her as she continues to engage now in her "other works", namely:
FIRE DRILL FRIDAYS
As Greta Thunberg said, “Our House Is On Fire”, and we need to act like it.
Inspired by Greta and the youth climate strikes as well as Reverend Barber’s Moral Mondays and Randall Robinson’s often daily anti-apartheid protests, I’ve moved to Washington, D.C. to be closer to the epicenter of the fight for our climate. Every Friday through January, I will be leading weekly demonstrations on Capitol Hill to demand that action by our political leaders be taken to address the climate emergency we are in. We can’t afford to wait.Welcome to Fire Drill Fridays.
Sheer misogyny?
Piers Morgan, 54, took aim a Jane Fonda on Twitter today, after the 82-year-old actress shared details of her Oscars 2020 outfit online.
The Good Morning Britain presenter appeared to make a sarcastic dig at the movie star, who is on a campaign to raise awareness for climate change.
Sharing a picture of herself in her sparkly red gown with short cropped hair, she told her 824,200 followers: “At Oscars wearing Pomellato jewelry because it only uses responsible, ethically harvested gold and sustainable diamonds. #Oscars.”(sic)
Earlier today, Piers retweeted the post, along with the caption: “The sacrifice is humbling," alongside an emoji of hands in prayer.
Twitter users headed straight to the comments section to share their thoughts on the post about the actress.
One user joked: “Puts the rest of us mere mortals to shame.”
Another remarked: “Such empty symbolism is what Hollywood is all about.”
A third added: “Awww! I have tears in my eyes over such a huge ‘sacrifice’! Only wearing ethical diamonds and gold! Bless her heart Hanoi Jane.”(sic)
Fans on Jane's original post were a bit more positive, with one adding: "Love you Jane, just beautiful! Appreciate what you are doing for our environment!"
Another wrote: "Thank you for brining the red coat on stage. We see you. We care about climate change and sustainability in fashion. We also appreciate you and how you are using your platform. You are gorgeous and incredible #InSolidarity."(sic)
A third remarked: "You Always lead with your integrity. I love you."
By ANDREA TONKS for The Daily Express Tue, Feb 11, 2020
The levels of hostility directed at the research that exposes the patriarchy embedded in the world view Playboy normalises, are equally intense and extreme, as with the life and work of Shere Hite.
Sheer HATE?
Shere Hite, the sex educator and feminist, who died in September this year, received a masters degree in history from the University of Florida in 1967. She then moved to New York City and enrolled at Columbia University to work toward her Ph.D. in social history. Hite said that the reason for her not completing this degree was the conservative nature of Columbia at that time. While studying at Columbia University Shere Hite posed in the nude for the December 1971 issue of Playboy magazine.
Following the publication of "The Hite Report" in 1976, a sexological work that focused primarily on female sexuality:
Hite was lambasted for being a man-hater and berated by the Christian right for destroying traditional family values. Social scientists and book reviewers alike castigated her for using unrepresentative samples of women that didn’t match the census data in order to draw her conclusions, calling her findings flawed and unreliable. Critics started referring to her as “Sheer Hype.” Playboy, the country’s head cheerleader for male pleasure, referred to the book as “The Hate Report.”
The above quote comes from the recent The New York Times Magazine article by Jazmine Hughes.
Shere Hite never set out to discover the female orgasm. As a child, she wanted to be either a classical composer or a person who could figure out how society got to be so “irrational.” But as she once told an interviewer, “How many women have you heard of becoming composers, right?” So she obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history instead, and in 1968, she enrolled in Columbia University’s Ph.D. program, where she ended up studying female sexuality.
Around that time, Hite modeled for extra money. She was booked for a television commercial for Olivetti typewriters that she later discovered was being used for an advertising campaign with the tagline “The Typewriter That’s So Smart, She Doesn’t Have to Be.” Hite was livid. She discovered that the National Organization for Women was protesting the campaign and decided to join them on the street. Soon after she became a member of NOW-NY.
By then she had dropped out of Columbia, disheartened by its conservative standards for her studies. She came up with the idea to create a questionnaire about women’s ability to orgasm for a NOW discussion; she found a printing press that was Quaker during the day, but cheap and agnostic at night, and printed her 58-question survey about female sexuality on pieces of colorful paper, to match the colorful topic. In 1972, she began distributing them via NOW, as well as abortion rights groups, university women’s centers, church newsletters and women’s magazines.
Hite received comprehensive responses: sometimes 14 or 15 pages, often from women who wrote in secret. Without university support, she culled the answers herself over nearly half a decade, surviving on about $10,000 a year.
“The Hite Report,” published in 1976, provoked a sexual revolution — the second smallest thing that year to elicit extensive male anxiety, the clitoris being the first. Subtitled “A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality,” it was based on the responses of more than 3,000 women, ages 14 to 78, who for the first time described how they felt about sex in their own words: what they liked, what they didn’t and, to great male shock, how vital clitoral stimulation was to orgasm.
Being asked these sorts of questions — No. 14, “How do you masturbate? Please give a detailed description”; No. 51, “Do you think your vagina and genital area are ugly or beautiful?” — was clearly the release these women needed. Hite ran pages of women’s responses to every question; the comments on faking orgasms ran over 10 pages, confessional, forlorn and funny:
“Sometimes when I hate the partner and feel the state of my mind might lead him to violence.”
“I went along for 34 years carrying the burden of not having vaginal orgasms, never telling anyone because I felt something was wrong with me.”
“Yes, I always fake orgasms. It just seems polite.”
The book’s bombshell was that women couldn’t reliably orgasm from penetrative sex, contradicting the wildly accepted, Freudian theory that women who didn’t were broken; according Hite’s work, approximately 30 percent of women said they orgasmed regularly from intercourse. Of the 82 percent who said they masturbated, almost all of them orgasmed reliably from masturbation, which meant that women were orgasming all the time — they just didn’t really need men for it to happen. The problem, according to Hite, was our inaccurate expectations for sex. It didn’t have to be a contest or a recipe; instead, bodies should be in communication with each other. Penetration was not the only game in town.
After publication, Hite was lambasted for being a man-hater and berated by the Christian right for destroying traditional family values. Social scientists and book reviewers alike castigated her for using unrepresentative samples of women that didn’t match the census data in order to draw her conclusions, calling her findings flawed and unreliable. Critics started referring to her as “Sheer Hype.” Playboy, the country’s head cheerleader for male pleasure, referred to the book as “The Hate Report.”
She wrote three more reports, on men and sexuality, on women and love and on the family, each laden with new controversies, each receiving similarly vicious attacks. She received death threats and was followed by the paparazzi; she had to redirect her phone calls. It began taking a toll on her psyche: she invented staff members — a publicist and an assistant — and sometimes assumed their identities when she spoke to the press, using them to defend her work.
In 1995, she renounced her American passport and became a German citizen, claiming that the previous decade of intellectual attacks had left her unable to do the work she wanted. She lived in Europe until her death this year, writing one final book: “The Hite Report on Shere Hite: Voice of a Daughter in Exile,” an autobiography published in 2000. The first chapter describes, in innocent detail, the first time she masturbated: feeling a strong, foreign desire come over her and figuring out how to wriggle it out of her body. After all of her studies of women and men, pleasure and pain, of shame and disappointment, she realized that she’d had the ideal experience of discovering her sexuality: on her own. “Not hearing about it first through pornography or seeing naked bodies displayed for profit on every newsstand, but just alone in my room, in my own bed, finding my own sensual self.”
Fake or real?
When Harry Met Sally . . . is a 1989 American romantic comedy film written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. It stars Billy Crystal as Harry and Meg Ryan as Sally.
In a scene featuring the two title characters having lunch at Katz's Delicatessen in Manhattan, the couple are arguing about a man's ability to recognize when a woman is faking an orgasm. Sally claims that men cannot tell the difference, and to prove her point, she vividly (fully clothed) fakes one as other diners watch.
The scene ends with Sally casually returning to her meal as a nearby patron (played by Reiner's mother) places her order, deadpan: "I'll have what she's having." When Estelle Reiner died at age 94 in 2008, The New York Times referred to her as the woman "who delivered one of the most memorably funny lines in movie history". This scene was shot again and again, and Ryan demonstrated her fake orgasms for hours. Katz's Deli still hangs a sign above the table that says, "Where Harry met Sally . . . hope you have what she had!"
This classic scene was born when the film started to focus too much on Harry. Crystal remembers saying, "'We need something for Sally to talk about,' and Nora said, 'Well, faking orgasm is a great one,' and right away we said, 'Well, the subject is good,' and then Meg came on board and we talked with her about the nature of the idea and she said, 'Well, why don't I just fake one, just do one?'"[3] Ryan suggested that the scene take place in a restaurant, and it was Crystal who came up with the scene's classic punchline – "I'll have what she's having." In 2005, the quote was listed 33rd on the AFI's 100 Years . . . 100 Movie Quotes list of memorable movie lines.
Reiner recalls that at a test screening, all of the women in the audience were laughing while all of the men were silent.
Let's have an ORGY!!
Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's Little Annie Fanny satire reduces a "Living Theatre" event, that engages with social and political issues, to Annie's observation that:
If they didn't have nudity who'd be interested!
So, with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's Little Annie Fanny the article comes full circle, the depiction of female nudity takes us back to where this webpage begins, and the matter of the WORLD WIDE WEB and . . .
. . . clickbait!!!
Something else . . .
. . . so MAD it's GOOD!
It's worth mentioning at this point that the creators of Little Annie Fanny, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder had an earlier and more significant culturally transforming role, and impact, with the phenomenal Mad magazine.
From COOL comics to COOL TV . . .
. . . is the story of how the COOL MEDIUM of COMICS became an augury of the COOL role of television in transforming the experience of life, in a world becoming American, and is a story at the core of this article. So it is that there is chapter in Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media on:
Comics: Mad Vestibule to TV!
Mad began as a comic book published by EC, debuting in August 1952 (cover date October–November).
The first issue was written almost entirely by Harvey Kurtzman, and featured illustrations by him, Wally Wood, Will Elder, Jack Davis, and John Severin. The comic book converted to magazine format as of issue #24, in 1955, a move that removed Mad from the strictures of the Comics Code Authority.
LITTLE ORPHAN MELVIN! (MAD #9, March 1954)
Wally Wood set a precedent, and tone, for Playboy's Little Annie Fanny in this satirical version of Little Orphan Annie . . .
. . . who is transformed when she's changed out of her work clothes into a normal outfit!
50 years on . . .
. . . or more, from some of the events and controversies included in this Re:LODE Radio article, this time span itself requires acknowledgement.
Q. What has prompted the composing, and juxtaposing of these examples?
A. The use of this scene in a montage illustrating American 20th & 21st century power, global reach, trade & communication . . .
. . . a scene from Apocalypse Now (1979), when Playboy Bunnies arrive in the middle of a dangerous "no mans land" to entertain American military forces engaged in the Vietnam War!
This 1971 magazine cover for MAD was published against the background of a negative balance of payments, growing public debt incurred by the Vietnam War and Great Society programs, and monetary inflation by the Federal Reserve caused the dollar to become increasingly overvalued. During 1971 more and more dollars were being printed in Washington, then being pumped overseas, to pay for government expenditure on the military and social programs. In the first six months of 1971, assets for $22 billion fled the U.S. The impending period of "stagflation" was yet to come, but the country was, and as MAD called it out, OUT OF ORDER. The so-called Nixon Shock sought to address this crisis, leading to the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system governing international exchange rates.
While MAD is not usually noted for its economic commentary, it is lauded by many as providing a cultural space for a healthy skepticism when it comes to the smugness, hypocrisy, arrogance and exceptionalism of established American power. Activist (and husband to Jane Fonda for 17 years) Tom Hayden said:
"My own radical journey began with Mad Magazine."
This quotation of Tom Hayden was taken from the blurb for:STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY: A Graphic Historyby Harvey Pekar; Art by Gary Dumm; Edited by Paul Buhle.
In 1977, Tony Hiss and Jeff Lewis wrote in The New York Times about MAD's then-25-year-old publication's initial effect:
The skeptical generation of kids it shaped in the 1950s is the same generation that, in the 1960s, opposed a war and didn't feel bad when the United States lost for the first time and in the 1970s helped turn out an Administration and didn't feel bad about that either ... It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren't alone, that in New York City on Lafayette Street, if nowhere else, there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles. Mad's consciousness of itself, as trash, as comic book, as enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise, thrilled kids. In 1955, such consciousness was possibly nowhere else to be found. In a Mad parody, comic-strip characters knew they were stuck in a strip. "Darnold Duck," for example, begins wondering why he has only three fingers and has to wear white gloves all the time. He ends up wanting to murder every other Disney character. G.I. Schmoe tries to win the sexy Asiatic Red Army broad by telling her, "O.K., baby! You're all mine! I gave you a chance to hit me witta gun butt ... But naturally, you have immediately fallen in love with me, since I am a big hero of this story."
Mad's satiric net was cast wide. The magazine often featured parodies of ongoing American culture, including advertising campaigns, the nuclear family, the media, big business, education and publishing. In the 1960s and beyond, it satirized such burgeoning topics as the sexual revolution, hippies, the generation gap, psychoanalysis, gun politics, pollution, the Vietnam War and recreational drug use. The magazine took a generally negative tone towards counterculture drugs such as cannabis and LSD, but it also savaged mainstream drugs such as tobacco and alcohol. Mad was famous for its spoof advertisements, as in this scene of a White American family along with their pets, enjoying the taste of beer.
Mad was long noted for the absence of advertising in the magazine, enabling it to satirize materialist culture, especially an amoral advertising industry, without fear of reprisal. For decades, it was the most successful American magazine to publish ad-free, beginning with issue #33 (April 1957) and continuing through issue #402 (February 2001).
Mad always satirized Democrats as mercilessly as it did Republicans. In 2007, Al Feldstein recalled, "We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it. Mad was wide open. Bill loved it, and he was a capitalist Republican. I loved it, and I was a liberal Democrat. That went for the writers, too; they all had their own political leanings, and everybody had a voice."
"But the voices were mostly critical. It was social commentary, after all."
And we are where we are!
But, sadly MAD magazine is no longer with us!
Using reason and philosophy to tear the veil from truth in an art project that embodies the progress, hope and the promise of emancipation . . .
. . . found in the Enlightenment!
As in the symbolic representation of the Enlightenment drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost, where the figure in the centre represents truth—surrounded by bright light, the central symbol of the Enlightenment.
Meanwhile two other figures on the right, reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil from truth.
Art as an un-veiling?
At this juncture and juxtaposition in the article Re:LODE Radio points to the veil covering the pornographer Julius Zimmerman's version of Little Annie Fanny.
Art? A magic mirror $99.95
Little Annie Fanny's naked body exposed in the magic mirror!
The idea that art is like a mirror, held up to reality and representing, via a reflection of that reality, something of the truth of the actuality, is a commonly held concept. Zimmerman's magic mirror is held up here as a prompt to making a proposal for an art that reveals, or exposes those TRUTHS obscured, covered or hidden in the everyday exchanges of information and the condition of knowledge about the world we are living in NOW.
A tower of magic mirrors?
Somehow, in the confusion of the inaccurately named Dark Ages (lots of light and culture but fewer surviving written texts), the great Roman poet Virgil became transmuted into Master Virgil, a consummate sorcerer whose magic helped the emperors rule the world.
In Rome he was associated with every ancient marvel. Besides tales of magic statues and buried treasures, there was the tower Virgil built for the emperor, covered with mirrors facing every point of the compass.
A global information environment?
Whenever a province was threatened with invasion or revolt, the danger would appear beforehand, reflected in the mirrors, and the emperor would know how to deal with it. Todays emperors are not so capable, and surveillance capitalism rules, but the internet still affords the citizen, who has access, to an equally powerful capability as Virgil's Tower of Mirrors. The artist Louise Bourgeois installed her own towers of mirrors, I Do, I Undo, I Redo (2000), in the Tate Modern's first Turbine Hall installation.
Definitions of art are many, and reflect (yes) the various patterns, socially based origins, and the politics of reason and philosophy that have generated them.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article on The Definition of Art that acknowledges that:
The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy.
Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy.
The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.Section 3.0 of this article is headed:Skepticism about Definitions of Art
This is followed by section 3.1 Skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, Marxism, feminism. Re:LODE Radio, going for a stock response, "cuts to the chase" points to the sections most apt especially when Re:LODE Radio is presenting images of the female body un-veiled, the sixth on Marxism and the seventh on Feminism.
Fifty years on . . .
This review by Sebastian Smee, art critic for The Washington Post (March 18, 2019), on the exhibition “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975,” a must-see show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, was headlined:
How the Vietnam War changed art forever
Kim Jones, "Mudman Structure (large)," 1974.
Sebastian Smee writes:
Kim Jones was back from active duty in Vietnam eight years when, on his 32nd birthday, he turned himself into, as he put it, “a walking sculpture that’s eighteen miles long.”
He put on combat boots, pulled a nylon stocking over his face and donned a makeshift crown of foam rubber and aviary wire. He slathered his body in mud and strapped to his back a weird, latticelike construction of sticks tied with rope. He then walked westward along Wilshire Boulevard from downtown Los Angeles toward the Pacific Ocean. Toward Vietnam.Before going to Vietnam, Jones had been an art student. After it . . . what?The cruel, unanswerable question of how art should respond to war is at the heart of “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975,” a must-see show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It’s an exhibition of miscellaneous work made by a diverse group of artists during the peak years of a war that changed everything — including art.It’s the first time the Vietnam War has been addressed on this scale by an art museum. Organized by Melissa Ho, it pulsates with anguish from first to last. And it reminds us that though Saigon fell more than 40 years ago, that anguish is still with us. Today’s polarized politics — from the culture wars to congressional gridlock — are shot through with the aftershocks of Vietnam (just think of the recent tweets exchanged by President Trump and John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain), as are the memories, family histories and inner lives of millions.“Sweat like pigs work like dogs live like rats red dust covered everything.” That’s how Jones described his time in Vietnam. For bystanders, “Mudman” — the persona he created for performances that led to “Wilshire Boulevard Walk” — was frightening, dissonant, uncomfortable. But it was still more uncomfortable for him.“Wilshire Boulevard Walk” wasn’t intended as a metaphor. It wasn’t even explicitly about Vietnam — although, according to Jones, other veterans got it, and several approached Mudman saying, “Yeah, I know what it was like.” Instead, the performance expressed Jones’s personal struggle and the wider crisis of American society.The shock of Vietnam made conventional art forms such as painting and sculpture look inadequate. Its reverberations inspired a rapid expansion of the possible forms art could take and a search for new audiences. Public performances, video, installations, land art and agitprop all flourished during the war.Vietnam also opened up avant-garde art to previously neglected voices, including women, African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. There has been a long delay in recognizing this, and part of the triumph of “Artists Respond” is that it shows how many artists from marginalized groups gave their unique responses to the war urgent and potent expression.African American and Latino populations bore a disproportionate load under a draft system that was patently unfair. Black and Latino soldiers returned from Vietnam in the late 1960s and early ’70s to a society still riven by discrimination. It’s no surprise, then, that some of the most explicitly activist art of the period was made by African Americans and Latinos, including Faith Ringgold, David Hammons and Malaquias Montoya.
These artists didn’t have to be told that the war was connected to the fight for civil rights.
They felt it intimately, every day. But their responses were artistic, not mere sloganeering. Hammons’s “America the Beautiful” shows a black body and face draped in an American flag. He made the figure by pressing his greased body to paper, then sprinkling the paper with pigment. The resulting image haunts, its ghostliness keyed to the ambivalent predicament of young black lives even under a banner of patriotism.
The final years of the Vietnam War — the early 1970s — coincided with feminism’s second wave. Artists such as Carolee Schneemann (who died this month), Yayoi Kusama, Judy Chicago and Corita Kent rode and shaped that wave, articulating powerful critiques of the patriarchal forces that create and feed off war.
From Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece" to Carolee Schneemann's take on . . .
A lot of antiwar performance art emphasized the vulnerability of the body. Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” was staged five times between 1964 and 1966, including at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1965. Ono sat on a floor, a pair of scissors in front of her, and invited audience members to come forward one by one and cut off pieces of her clothing.
The performance, at heart, feels feminist. But in a year that saw U.S. troop levels in Vietnam ratcheted up from 23,000 to 184,300, it was also easy to read as a comment on the war. Some commentators erroneously identified Ono (who is Japanese) as representing Vietnam. But “Cut Piece,” like Jones’s “Wilshire Boulevard Walk,” was less a metaphor than a form of art-as-psych-experiment: Given the license, how much will you cut off? And how long will you watch a situation that is getting more and more disturbing before you intervene?The wider situation got more disturbing by the day, as bodies came home, and Americans watched it all on television. They saw monks setting themselves on fire, close-range executions and naked, running children burned by napalm. A constant stream of less notorious but scarcely less horrific images compounded their dismay. The propaganda and these images didn’t match up.
Martha Rosler, "Balloons" from the series "House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home", c. 1967-72
Martha Rosler, who was trained as an abstract painter, turned to making photomontages that highlighted the contradictions. She jammed horrific images from Vietnam into magazine photos of affluent American interiors, reminding people that, as a brochure accompanying one of her exhibitions put it, “the war is always home.”
Chris Burden, "Shoot," 1971, performance
Artist Chris Burden responded to the anguish of seeing, as he said, “a lot of people being shot on TV every night, in Vietnam, guys my age” with a 1971 performance that has become notorious and still hurts the brain to contemplate. He had a marksman aim a rifle at him and shoot him in the arm.
If you find it obscene that an artist should do such a thing while “guys his age” were being shot at and killed in chaotic circumstances far from home, so do I. But Burden was picking up on a level of irrationality that no longer felt exceptional. It was ambient.
When you think of how much was going on in the world, it can seem obscene that the most critically acclaimed American artists of the 1960s were spray-painting pretty patterns on giant canvases (Kenneth Noland), painting enlarged comic strips (Roy Lichtenstein) and fabricating metal boxes (Donald Judd).
Many of them, to be fair, were simply trying not to claim too much for art. The catastrophe of World War II had taught them that art’s place in the world was modest alongside the realities of war, genocide and nuclear destruction. They had watched fascists and communists try to convert art into an instrument of political power. They wanted to protect it from the task of mass persuasion.
Ad Reinhardt, "No War", 1967
That didn’t mean they didn’t hate the war or that they failed to oppose it. Ad Reinhardt, for instance, kept on painting his nuanced minimalist abstractions even as he became active in the protest movement. For an antiwar protest group, he made a postcard-style work illustrating his position. Addressed to “War Chief, Washington, D.C.,” it says “no war,” “no draft” and “no fear” on one side and “no art of war,” “no art about war” and “no art as war” on the other.
But the pressure they felt to keep art and activism apart became close to unbearable for many of the most acclaimed practitioners of abstraction and minimalism. Some, including Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, moonlighted as makers of explicitly antiwar art. Others, like Rosler, completely changed the kind of art they made.Philip Guston had become famous for his “abstract impressionist” paintings in quivering pinks and greys. But, he said, “I was feeling schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”.
Philip Guston, "San Clemente", 1975
In 1970, he switched from abstraction to a clunky kind of figurative painting, with legible, recurring forms (a lightbulb, Ku Klux Klan hoods, shoes, bricks, cigarettes) and an overall vision that felt mired in crisis. Guston is represented here by his most explicit expression of contempt for corrupt power: a blistering caricature of President Richard M. Nixon.
Judith Bernstein, "A Soldier’s Christmas", 1967
Some painters went further. “I wanted to make the ugliest paintings I could,” said Judith Bernstein. “I wanted them to be as ugly and horrifying as the war was.” In paintings such as “A Soldier’s Christmas,” which drew on the violent and sexual blurtings of bathroom graffiti, she made good on her wish.
Peter Saul, Target Practice, 1968
Elsewhere, painters kicked against the coolness of pop art and the mute elegance of minimalism by making work that was angry, hectic and hot: Jim Nutt and Peter Saul, members of the Chicago-based group the Hairy Who, represented torture and debauchery with paintings that were psychedelically vibrant even as they delivered up what Saul called a “cold shower” of “bad conscience.”All kinds of artists were trying to find forms to contain the war, to give it meaning. The source of their anguish was that they couldn’t: There was no proportionate response. The disaster was too large; their art — art itself — too small.
Leon Golub, "Vietnam II", 1973
“Paintings don’t change wars,” as the passionately political painter Leon Golub said in 1967. “They show feelings about wars.”Are feelings enough? If you compare the art in “Artists Respond” to the magnitude of the war, it can seem paltry. That does not mean it wasn’t poignant, courageous, estimable. It was just no match for the bigger forces at work.Being no match for bigger, catastrophic forces is the very definition of tragedy. And if tragedy teaches us anything, it is humility.That’s why, for me, the abiding image from this show is still the humble wooden lattice Kim Jones wore on his back as Mudman. It leans against a wall, like a prop from a Samuel Beckett play. Next to it are his mud-covered combat boots (they can’t help but put you in mind of van Gogh’s shoes). “Wilshire Boulevard Walk” was about more than the Vietnam War. It was about homelessness, humility and heartbreak.
Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975 . . .
Re:LODE Radio considers what can be gained from looking back to Playboy at the time of the Vietnam War.
Q. What sort of man read Playboy during the Vietnam War?
Aspirational country club member?
Or G.I. Jo?
A. Both!
When it comes to the aspirational country club member, featured in the Playboy advertisement, it is perhaps relevant to examine the behaviour of a country and golf club entrepreneur. The Military Times website posted this story in February 2019 concerning testimony given to lawmakers by Donald Trump's erstwhile lawyer Michael Cohen.
The headline reads:
Trump made up injury to dodge Vietnam service, his former lawyer testifies
Leo Shane III reports (February 27 2019):
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump acknowledged to advisors that he made up a fake injury to avoid military service, because “I wasn’t going to Vietnam,” his former lawyer told lawmakers during testimony on Wednesday.
Michael Cohen, who also worked as a fixer for Trump before his election, said he was tasked with tamping down criticism of the military deferment as the presidential candidate simultaneously mocked Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, for being regarded as a military hero. “I like people who weren’t captured," Trump said during a July 2015 interview.“Mr. Trump claimed (his medical deferment) was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery,” Cohen told members of the House Oversight Committee. “He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment.“He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I'm stupid, I wasn't going to Vietnam.’”Trump has downplayed his relationship with Cohen and claimed he is fabricating stories about their work together in order to negotiate a deal with federal prosecutors for a lesser sentence on a host of unrelated crimes.But Cohen said he worked closely with the New York businessman for nine years leading up to the 2016 election, and helped him cover up a host of embarrassing and potentially illegal activities.“I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump's illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience,” he told the committee. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”The lack of information surrounding Trump’s Vietnam war deferments has been a point of criticism since the campaign, but White House officials have dismissed those concerns as politically motivated.Trump received five deferments during the height of the Vietnam War. Four were for education. The fifth was the medical waiver, after his graduation.“Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” Cohen said. “He had no desire or intention to lead this nation, only to market himself and to build his wealth and power.”Committee chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., called Cohen’s allegations “disturbing” and said they will help inform the panel’s work to decide if the commander-in-chief committed potentially impeachable acts either before or after the election.And G.I. Jo?
When it comes to G.I. Jo Re:LODE Radio references an article that appeared in the May 1966 issue of Playboy.
This is the text of the article:
GI Jo: The Story of One Playmate’s Visit to Vietnam in 1966
Cover girl Jo Collins signing photos for American GI's during her 1966 visit to meet troops during the Vietnam War
Most military strategists agree that, aside from actual firepower, nothing means more to an army than the morale of its men. And since the days of GI Joe, the American fighting man has seldom appeared on the frontiers of freedom without an abundant supply of that most time-honored of spirit-lifting staples: the pinup. From the shores of Iwo Jima to the jungles of Vietnam, the pinup queen has remained a constant companion to our men at arms; but the long-legged likenesses of such World War Two lovelies as Grable and Hay-worth have given way to a whole new breed of photogenic females better known as the playboy Playmates. It was only a matter of time, therefore, until centerfolddom’s contemporary beauties would be asked to do their bit for our boys in uniform. That time came last November, when Second Lieutenant John Price — a young airborne officer on duty in Vietnam — sent Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner the following letter:
“This is written from the depths of the hearts of 180 officers and men of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade (Separate) stationed at Bien Hoa, Republic of Vietnam. We were the first American Army troop unit committed to action here in Vietnam, and we have gone many miles—some in sorrow and some in joy, but mostly in hard, bone-weary inches. …We are proud to be here and have found the answer to the question, ‘Ask what you can do for your country.’ And yet we cannot stand alone—which brings me to the reason for sending you this request.“The loneliness here is a terrible thing—and we long to see a real, living, breathing American girl. Therefore, we have enclosed with this letter a money order for a Lifetime Subscription to playboy magazine for B Company. It is our understanding that, with the purchase of a Lifetime Subscription in the U. S., the first issue is personally delivered by a Playmate. It is our most fervent hope that this policy can be extended to include us. …Any one of the current Playmates of the Month would be welcomed with open arms, but if we have any choice in the matter, we have unanimously decided that we would prefer . . .
. . . the 1965 Playmate of the Year — Miss Jo Collins.
“If we are not important enough…to send a Playmate for, please just forget about us and we will quietly fade back into the jungle.”
Deciding that only old soldiers should fade away, and deeply touched by the paratrooper’s plea, Hefner immediately began drawing up plans for the successful completion of Project Playmate. “When we first received the request,” Hef recalls, “we weren’t at all sure how the Defense Department would feel about Playboy sending a beautiful American girl into Vietnam at a time like this, but lieutenant Price’s letter was too moving to just put aside and forget. The lieutenant had obviously been a playboy reader for quite a while, since he remembered a special Christmas gift offer the magazine published several years ago, which stated that a lifetime subscriber from any city with a Playboy Club would have his first issue delivered in person by a Playmate. Of course we don’t have a Playboy Club in Vietnam at the moment, but we figured we could overlook that little technicality under the circumstances.”
Along with the usual complications and military restrictions any average civilian encounters when attempting to travel to Vietnam these days, many more technicalities had to be ironed out through the proper channels before Jo received the necessary Government clearance for a late-February flight to the front lines. “The fellows in Company B said it would be a privilege if I could visit them,” remarked the Playmate of the Year when asked how she felt about her upcoming tour of delivery duty in the war-torn Far East;
“but the way I see it — I’m the one who’s privileged.”
Roses are the order of the day as two members of Company B welcome Jo to Vietnam on behalf of their wounded Project Playmate officer, Lieutenant John Price, hospitalized back at battalion headquarters in Bien Hoa; Playboy’s pretty Vietnam volunteer visits Lieutenant Price’s wardmates at the Evacuation Hospital. “Most of them had been badly hurt,” says Jo, “but no one ever complained.”
Her call to arms came much sooner than expected, however, when word was received that Lieutenant Price had been wounded in action on January 3, and that her morale-boosting mission might have to be canceled unless Jo could reach the injured officer’s bedside at a Bien Hoa combat-zone hospital before his scheduled evacuation from Vietnam on January 13. All additional red tape still pending prior to Jo’s departure was quickly bypassed: On Sunday afternoon (January 9), Playmate First Class Collins and her party — which included playboy’s Playmate and Bunny Promotion Coordinator Joyce Chalecki as acting chaperone and staff photographer Larry Gordon — departed from San Francisco on a Pan Am jetliner bound for Saigon. Commenting on some of her own last-minute logistic problems before take-off, Jo later told us:
“Things were so hectic those last few days before we left that I was sure we’d never make it. For openers, I was away visiting friends in Oregon when the news came in about Lieutenant Price being wounded. The original plans called for my flying to Chicago in mid-February, where I would team up with Larry and Joyce, get my travel shots and clear up all the final details for the trip. Hef phoned me about the sudden switch in Project Playmate, and I spent the next five days flying back and forth—first to Seattle for my passport when I found out Oregon doesn’t issue them; then to Los Angeles, where I got my smallpox vaccination, checked out some last-minute details with my agent at American International Studios and raided my apartment for the clothes I figured I’d be needing. As it was, I managed to meet Larry and Joyce at the San Francisco airport and board our jet to Vietnam with all of about fifteen minutes to spare.” (In typical above-and-beyond-the-call fashion, trooper Collins — an aspiring actress whose recent film credits include minor roles in Lord Love a Duck and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? — neglected to mention that, in reporting for duty on such short notice, she’d had to bypass an important audition for a principal part on TV’s Peyton Place.)
Some 8000 miles and 18 hours after their Stateside rendezvous, Jo and her playboystaffers landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where 400 American troops and a regiment of newsmen and photographers had turned out to greet them. After a brief review of her assembled admires, Jo was introduced to Lieutenant Clancey Johnson and Private First Class Marvin Hudson, two of Lieutenant Price’s friends in the 173rd Airborne Brigade who had ever-so-willingly volunteered to serve as a stand-in reception committee for their wounded buddy back at Bien Hoa. Mindful of his guerrilla training, Private First Class Hudson put on a one-man camouflage display when, after handing Jo her Company B (for Bravo) tribute of red roses, he subsequently blushed a deep crimson and succeeded in concealing the telltale lipstick print she had just planted on each of his cheeks.Following the deplaning festivities, the three playboy recruits were taken to a nearby “chopper” pad and given a whirlwind aerial tour of Saigon and the outlying districts aboard the “Playboy Special” — a Brigade helicopter especially renamed in honour of their visit. “That first chopper ride really started things off with excitement,” reports GI Jo. “It seemed as though we’d hardly even arrived, and there we were over hostile country being given our first taste of what they call ‘contour flying.’ That’s where you skim the treetops to prevent possible enemy snipers from getting a clear shot at you and then, suddenly, shoot straight up at about 100 miles per hour to 3500 feet so you can check the area for Viet Cong troop movements from outside their firing range. After our stomachs got used to it, we figured we were ready for just about anything.”
Jo takes a guided tour of Company B’s base-camp area, stopping off to admire the imaginative floor-to-ceiling Playmate motif adoring the PX (“It was the closest the fellows could come to a real Playboy Club”).
Back on terra firma, the Playboy troupe was joined by Jack Edwards, who took time out from his regular duties as Special Services Director for the Saigon-based press and military officials to act as the trio’s liaison man during its forthcoming three-day tour of the surrounding combat areas. As Jo later told us: “Jack was so concerned about our running into a V.C. ambush after we left Saigon that he wound up worrying enough for all of us. He managed to get us rooms at the Embassy Hotel in Saigon after our original reservations at the Caravelle somehow went astray; he kept press conferences down to a minimum so we could spend most of our time with the men at the front, arranged a first-night sight-seeing trip to some of the Saigon night clubs in case our own morale needed bolstering and, in general, watched over us like a mother hen. By the end of the first evening in Vietnam, we were all so pleased we’d come that, when one reporter reminded me I could end up getting shot during the next three days, I told him that the only shot I was still worried about was the one for cholera I was scheduled to get the next morning.”
A bit foot-weary during her first day at the front, Playmate First Class Collins hitches a ride with some armored admirers. Back to the company mess hall; seems pleased that an autographing gal can always find a strong back in Bien Hoa when she needs one.
The following day (Tuesday, January 11), Jo and her colleagues got a chance to test their calmness under fire. Arriving at Tan Son Nhut at 0830 hours, dressed in combat fatigues, they were issued bulletproof vests before boarding the “Playboy Special” with their MP escorts for an initial front-line foray. “I realize it was a question of safety before beauty,” says Jo, “but I couldn’t help feeling a little insecure. After seeing some of Saigon’s Vietnamese beauties Lieutenant Price referred to in his letter and catching a glimpse of myself in combat gear, I was afraid the guys wouldn’t be nearly as homesick for an American girl once they had a basis for comparison.” Flying low over enemy-infiltrated territory and encircled by three fully manned gun ships flying escort, the “Playboy Special” made its first stop at the 173rd Airborne Brigade Headquarters in Bien Hoa. Here, any fears our pretty Playmate might have harbored about her uniform appeal were summarily dispatched by the parade of smiling paratroopers waiting on the airstrip to greet her.
Most of the men of Company B were on jungle patrols during Jo’s first visit to Bien Hoa, but the one man most responsible for her being in Vietnam — Lieutenant John Price — was present and accounted for at his unit’s surgical ward. In spite of a severely wounded arm that will require several additional operations before it can be restored to full use, Lieutenant Price managed to muster up enough energy to give his favorite Playmate a healthy hug or two when she showed up to deliver his company’s Lifetime Subscription certificate and the latest issue of Playboy. The lieutenant’s initial reaction to seeing the Company B sweetheart standing there in the flesh was “Gosh, you’re even prettier than your pictures.” Flattered, Jo sealed her Playboy delivery with a well-timed kiss, and consequently convinced the company medics that Price was well along the road to recovery by evoking his immediate request for a repeat engagement. In fact, his condition seemed so improved that the doctors waived hospital regulations for the day to allow him to accompany Jo to lunch at Camp Zenn — the Company B base camp on the outskirts of Bien Hoa.
Jo lunches with Company B enlisted men, who show more interest in signatures than sustenance; After chow, she hoists their Bunny flag.
After lunch, Jo put her best bedside manner to use as she paid a brief call on each of the men in Lieutenant Price’s ward. “A few of the fellows asked me to help them finish a letter home, others wanted a light for their cigarette; but most of them just wanted to talk awhile with a girl from their own native land. A couple of times I was sure I would break down and bawl like a baby, but I managed to control myself until they brought in a badly wounded buddy who asked if he could see me before going into surgery. When I got to his side, he was bleeding heavily from both legs and I didn’t know what to do or say to comfort him. Then he looked up at me with his best tough-guy grin and simply said, ‘Hi, gorgeous.’ After that, I lost all control and the old tears really flowed.”
Before leaving Bien Hoa, Jo made additional bedside tours at the 93rd Medical Evacuation Hospital and the 3rd Surgical Hospital, where the doctors on duty decided to add some Playmate therapy to their own daily diet by piling into the nearest empty beds during her final rounds. Not until their day’s tour had ended and their chopper was warming up for the flight back to Saigon did Jo and her companions suddenly realize how close to actual combat they’d been for the past several hours. “We were all ready to go and standing outside the Brigade Officers’ Club when I first heard the sound of shots coming from fairly close by,” explains Jo. “Then a few mortar shells went off, but it still didn’t sink in how near the action we really were. I guess we’d all been too busy meeting wounded soldiers and talking to the men on the base to notice anything before. Then, right before our chopper lifted off, a series of flares went off and lit up everything for miles. I kept thinking how great it would have been if all those boys had been back home watching a Fourth of July celebration instead of out there in the jungle fighting for their very lives.”
Before leaving Bien Hoa, Jo makes a tour of other companies’ “Playboy Clubs” (“We ran across these ‘clubs’ at every GI base”). With her own whirlybird safely flanked by two gunships (left), Jo listens in on conversation between chopper jockeys.
GI Jo arrives at Special Forces camp atop Black Virgin Mountain.
Wednesday, the group headed out toward some of the more crucial combat zones in the Saigon military theater. First on the day’s itinerary was a stopover at Nu Ba Den, a strategic communications outpost under the command of Special Forces troops who had long since renamed their precarious hilltop position “Black Virgin Mountain.” Rising some 3200 feet above the surrounding countryside and under continuous assault from Viet Cong guerrillas hidden in the densely wooded areas below, Black Virgin Mountain is defended by a small detachment of Special Forces personnel and the South Vietnamese regulars placed in their charge. But despite the precariousness of their position, these wearers of the famed Green Berets greeted the Playboy group with a typical show of Special Forces readiness: crowning Jo upon arrival with her own green beret, escorting her to various lookout points around the installation and serving as interpreters when Vietnamese soldiers asked to meet her.
Visiting Playmate queen is crowned with a green beret (left) by Special Forces man assigned to this critical mountain outpost, signifying she bears this famed guerrilla-fighting group’s very special seal of approval; our GI Jo on-the-job instruction (right) in mortar firing.
From Black Virgin Mountain the “Playboy Special” flew its charges to the Special Forces encampment at Lay Ninth, whose boundaries encompass the majestic Cao Dai Temple — seat of the Cao Dai religion, which combines the teachings of Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism. “The temple itself was right out of a fairy tale,” remembers Jo. “But its presence right in the middle of a combat theater made everything about it that much more strikingly unusual. We entered barefooted and were met by a different world, full of ornate columns, uncaged white birds and young headshaven priests, while just outside men in uniform walked about with their guns always ready at their sides.”
Another 85 miles over enemy lines brought the passengers of the “Playboy Special” to the village of Bu Dop, one of the most strategically critical military outposts in the entire Vietnam war zone. Located on the Cambodian border and protected by the 5th Special Forces Group, this vital base had, only three months earlier, been the scene of an ambush that cost the lives of all the men then assigned to its defense. “The Green Berets at Bu Dop went out of their way to try and maintain a relaxed air around us,” Jo later said, “but you could still cut the tension with a knife. We were introduced to just about everyone there was to meet—from the group commander to most of his American and South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters—but it seemed as though none of them ever left his field position or took his eyes off the surrounding jungle. Some of the edge was taken off our nerves when the village chief and his two wives came by to welcome us, since they all projected the feeling of complete calm by nonchalantly walking about the community with nothing on from the waist up.”
Whatever tranquilizing effect the sight of a Vietnamese village chieftain and his two topless ladies fair might have had on the threesome was short-lived, however, for the next stopover on their tour took them well outside the barbed-wire gates of Bu Dop and across the same jungle trail they had just been told was often swarming with Viet Cong. “Like most red-blooded female cowards,” jokes the 20-year-old Playmate of the Year, “Joyce and I hit the panic button the minute we caught sight of all the bullet holes in the side of our truck. And we both swear we saw Larry’s shutter finger shake through an entire roll of film, but he refuses to admit it.” As it turned out, the purpose of this overland junket into the unknown was to let some of Jo’s fighting South Vietnamese fans—stationed 15 minutes away in a small Montagnard hamlet — get a glimpse of their green bereted glamor girl before she left.The final item on Wednesday’s agenda was a flight to Vung Tau, a scenic coastal village on the Mekong Peninsula where American and South Vietnamese troops can enjoy a few days of muchneeded rest and rehabilitation before their next tour of duty in the interior. “At first,” says Jo, “I was afraid to ask any of the fellows how they felt about going back into combat after having a chance to get away from it all. I figured they’d all like to forget about war and just lie on the beach there until everything got settled. It didn’t take me long to find out otherwise. Many of our boys in Vietnam may only be 17-and 18-year-olds who don’t know much about world politics, but I came away from places like Vung Tau convinced that they know why they’re there. Nobody’s going to make them throw in the towel.”
Arriving at Bu Dop, a strategic supply base near the Cambodian border, Jo poses with fellow Green Berets (left) while Special Forces shutterbug in the foreground snaps away for post’s scrapbook. then meets General Williamson (right), who proclaims her the first female Sky Soldier.
Jo’s last day in Vietnam wound up being the busiest of all. With a gallant assist from Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson — American Airborne Commander in Vietnam — she got a second chance to complete her mission as planned when the front-line troops from Company B were called back to Bien Hoa for a 24-hour lifetime subscribers’ leave and a long-awaited look at the Playmate of their choice. One by one, the combat-weary paratroopers filed off their choppers and hurried over for a hard-earned hello from Jo — a few even produced crumpled-up copies of her December 1964 Playmate photo they’d been carrying in their helmet liners in hope of someday having them autographed. “When I saw all those happy faces running toward me from every direction, I knew we’d finally gotten our job done,” she said.
One more trip to the front was on the agenda before Jo would be ready to head back to Saigon and a Hawaii-bound jet. Landing in War Zone D, Jo was escorted to combat headquarters, where a grateful general was waiting to hand her a farewell memento of her short stay in Vietnam — a plaque upon which had been inscribed the words: “Know ye all men that, in recognition of the fact that Playmate Jo Collins traveled to the Republic of Vietnam to deliver a Lifetime Subscription to playboy magazine to sky soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and demonstrated exceptional courage by volunteering to travel into hostile areas to visit its men and in doing so exhibited the all-the-way spirit typical of true airborne troopers…I, Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson, do appoint her an honorary Sky Soldier, done this 13th day of January, 1966.”The day after her Saigon departure, Jo received further praise from high places for the job she had done. Between visits in Honolulu to Tripler Army Hospital and Pearl Harbor, she was called on the phone by Ambassador Averill Harriman, who wished to express his and Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s congratulations on all the good reports they’d heard concerning her morale-lifting mission. Needless to say, Jo was highly honored by the tributes of so dignified a brace of statesmen, but, as she put it, “The finest compliments I could ever receive have already been sent in the letters of over 200 fellows I was lucky enough to meet somewhere near Saigon.”It remained for the men of Company B to pay their Playmate postmistress the highest honor, however, by renaming their outfit “Playboy Company” and thus assuring Jo that her presence south of the 17th Parallel would not be soon forgotten. When asked how she felt about becoming the official mascot for this troop of front-line sky soldiers, a jubilant Jo replied, “I’ve never been prouder.” As the company’s new namesake, Playboy seconds that statement.
The "Apocalypse Now" Playmate scene is a dramatic construction!
The True Story of the 'Apocalypse Now' Playmate Scene
The reality was different as the story about Jo Collins in her trip to Vietnam and covered in Playboy makes clear. The Apocalypse Now version is set up to tell a different truth, using the crazy, surreal (as in hyper-real) situation of a Las Vegas style show helicoptered into a colonised and contested jungle. When it comes to show business and the Vietnam War, the reality was Bob Hope's annual USO tour of Southeast Asian military bases, including Vietnam, a reality emphatically situated in another age. This video of Bob Hope's Christmas Special of 1967 features Raquel Welch, Elaine Dunn, Phil Crosby, Barbara McNair, and Miss World, Madeleine Hartog Bell.
Given that the difference in time between this USO tour of 1967 and the beginning of the filming of Apocalypse Now in 1976 was less than ten years, Francis Ford Coppola's film, constructed as it is, an exaggerated, surreal and dreamlike vision of a modern hell, the film is, as Coppola says in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the 1991 American documentary film about the production of Apocalypse Now:
It's NOT about Vietnam! It IS Vietnam!
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane"
Where there is construction there is the potential for de-construction and détournement!
STEREOGUM features Aldous Harding's “Blend” Video in this webpage June 12 2017 with a commentary by Tom Breihan. He writes:In Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Apocalypse Now, there’s a phantasmagorical, iconic scene where the movie’s soldiers suddenly find themselves out of the chaos of the jungle and at a USO show, where a trio of Playboy Playmates emerge from a helicopter and spend a few minutes dancing for the troops before a riot breaks out. In the new video for her song “Blend,” the New Zealand singer/songwriter Aldous Harding references that scene, dressing in the lead Playmates cowboy-bikini gear and doing the same sorts of herky-jerk go-go dances. The difference is that with the blank white background and the sparse beauty of Harding’s songs, the spectacle becomes even more eerie and unearthly. Charlotte Evans, who also helmed Harding’s “Imagining My Man” video, directs.
Art as an un-veiling?
Q. What's behind the "blank white background"?
A. Hidden truth?
In the Opinion piece by Amber Batura for The New York Times, quoted at the top of this article and in the title of this Re:LODE Radio blog page, she refers to the surprising role Playboy has played in the legacy of one of America's longest wars.
Long after the war ended, Playboy funded documentaries on the war, Agent Orange research and post-traumatic stress disorder studies. It is a commitment that testifies to this enduring relationship between the publication and the (American) soldier.
Re:LODE Radio adds (in brackets) the qualification "American", to the above quotation "the (American) soldier", as the use of the term "soldier" exemplifies the ideological structure of Visibility versus Invisibility in the ongoing Americanisation of the World.
Show business as usual?
The scene of Playmates performing in Apocalypse Now occurs about half way through the movie, and works dramatically to foreground a kind of symmetry that exists in the facts and history of the Vietnam War, and the process of making the film itself, show business. The first half of the movie has echoes of the inspiration afforded to the director Coppola by Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), as much as the original concept that John Milius came up with for adapting the plot of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War setting.
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane"
The journeys along the rivers in Conrad's novella, and in Herzog's film, are journeys through "jungle", a kind of nature that, to the extent that it is "strange" and potentially hostile, a territory to be controlled, colonised yet resisting, so in its pristine and untameable state becomes a kind of enemy. The Indigenous People, inhabitants of a landscape, either to be conquered in a quest for a City of Gold, or in the Congo, mercilessly exploited for the trade in ivory and the monopolistic extraction of rubber from the forests, they are merges with this nature. They are an unseen enemy, invisible, with "primitive" projectiles, arrows and spears, wreaking havoc from its source, the jungle. A jungle that is itself the "unfamiliar", the "other", upon which countless paranoias, generated from the denial and guilt of the oppressor, are projected.
The fact of the racial "otherness" of Indigenous People in the project of the stabilisation of colonial appropriation in Vietnam, just as in the Amazon or the Congo, and along this other river, the Nung, includes a necessary process, fundamental to colonial and capitalist strategies, the de-humanisation of the "other". Or, as in the case of Apocalypse Now, a near complete erasure of the actual history of the Vietnamese peoples from the account.
An American war!
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a U.S. national memorial in Washington, D.C., honouring service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War. The 2-acre (8,100 m2) site is dominated by a black granite wall engraved with the names of those service members who died as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia during the war. The wall, completed in 1982, has since been supplemented with the statue The Three Soldiers and the Vietnam Women's Memorial.The instigation for this memorial came from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Inc. (VVMF), incorporated as a non-profit organization, to establish a memorial to veterans of the Vietnam War. Much of the impetus behind the formation of the fund came from a wounded Vietnam War veteran, Jan Scruggs, who was inspired by the film The Deer Hunter, with support from fellow Vietnam veterans such as West Point and Harvard Business School graduate John P. Wheeler III. Eventually, $8.4 million was raised by private donations.On July 1, 1980, a site covering two acres next to the Lincoln Memorial was chosen and authorised by Congress where the World War I Munitions Building previously stood.
The chosen design for the monument was a proposal submitted by Maya Lin, the 21 year old undergraduate from Yale, studying architecture.
The public design competition saw 2,573 entrants register for selection with a prize of $20,000 as the competition award. On March 30, 1981, 1,421 designs were submitted. The designs were displayed at an airport hangar at Andrews Air Force Base for the selection committee, in rows covering more than 35,000 square feet (3,300 m2) of floor space. Each entry was identified by number only. All entries were examined by each juror; the entries were narrowed down to 232, then to 39. Finally, the jury selected entry number 1026, which had been designed by Maya Lin.
Her design specified a black granite wall with the names of 57,939 fallen soldiers carved into its face (hundreds more have been added since the dedication), to be v-shaped, with one side pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the other toward the Washington Monument The memorial was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated in November 1982.
According to Maya Lin, her intention was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the pain caused by the war and its many casualties. "I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, and with the passage of time, that initial violence and pain would heal," she recalled.
Maya Lin's selected design proved controversial, in particular, its unconventional minimalist design quality, the use of the black granite as the dominant colour and its lack of ornamentation. Newspaper critics, politicians, and some veterans recoiled. Opponents blasted the design as "a black gash of shame," "a scar," even "a tribute to Jane Fonda." Two prominent early supporters of the project, H. Ross Perot and James Webb, withdrew their support once they saw the design. Said Webb, "I never in my wildest dreams imagined such a nihilistic slab of stone." James Watt, secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan, initially refused to issue a building permit for the memorial due to the public outcry about the design. However, since these early years, criticism of the Memorial's design has faded. In the words of Jan Scruggs, "It has become something of a shrine."
The timeline for the memorial begins on the 1st of November 1955, marked by the formation of the Military Assistance Command Viet Nam, better known as MACV.
The first official death in Vietnam was Technical Sergeant Richard Bernard Fitzgibbon Jr., United States Air Force, of Stoneham, Massachusetts, who was murdered by another U.S.A.F. airman on October 21, 1957.
The first US Army soldier to be killed in the line of duty in the Vietnam War was Capt. Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr., a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, who was killed near Nha Trang, Vietnam on October 21, 1957.
On July 8, 1959, while watching The Tattered Dress, five US Army officers became American casualties of the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong attacked the mess hall where Dale R. Buis, Chester M. Ovnand and three other officers were watching the movie. M/Sgt Ovnand, who was in charge of the projector, switched on the lights to change to the next reel, when Viet Cong guerrillas poked their weapons through the windows and sprayed the room with automatic weapons fire. M/Sgt Ovnand was hit with several 9mm rounds. He immediately switched the lights off and headed to the top of the stairs, where he was able to turn on the exterior flood lights. He died from his wounds on the stairs. Major Buis, at that time, was crawling towards the kitchen doors. When the exterior flood lights came on, he must have seen an attacker coming through the kitchen doors. He got up and rushed towards attacker, but was only able to cover 15 feet (4.6 m) before being fatally hit from behind.
His actions startled the attacker who was about to throw his satchel charge through the door. The attacker's satchel charge had already been activated and his moment of hesitation allowed the satchel charge to explode, killing him. Two South Vietnamese guards that were on duty that night were also killed by the Viet Cong. The wounded were, Captain Howard Boston (MAAG 7) and the Vietnamese cook's eight-year-old son.
Chester M. Ovnand and Dale R. Buis are listed Nos. 1 and 2 at the time of the memorial wall's dedication. Ovnand's name is spelled on the memorial as "Ovnard," due to conflicting military records of his surname.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs uses May 7, 1975, the Fall of Saigon, as the official end date for the Vietnam War era, but the last servicemen listed on the memorial timeline are the 18 U.S.servicemen killed on the last day of a rescue operation known as the Mayaguez incident with troops from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Named casualties? Un-named casualties? Unseen casualties?Invisible casualties?
On May 29 2017 US News reported that the names of three American service members were added to the wall this month.
The additions bring the total number of names on the memorial to 58,318.
The Wikipedia article on Vietnam War casualties states that:
Estimates of casualties of the Vietnam War vary widely. Estimates include both civilian and military deaths in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The war persisted from 1955 to 1975 and most of the fighting took place in South Vietnam; accordingly it suffered the most casualties. The war also spilled over into the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos which also endured casualties from aerial and ground fighting.Civilian deaths caused by both sides amounted to a significant percentage of total deaths. Civilian deaths were partly caused by assassinations, massacres and terror tactics. Civilian deaths were also caused by mortar and artillery, extensive aerial bombing and the use of firepower in military operations conducted in heavily populated areas.
Mỹ Lai massacre
Photo taken by United States Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on 16 March 1968, in the aftermath of the Mỹ Lai Massacre showing mostly women and children dead on a road.
A number of incidents occurred during the war in which civilians were deliberately targeted or killed. The most prominent of these events were the Huế Massacre and the Mỹ Lai Massacre.R. J. Rummel's mid-range estimate in 1997 was that the total deaths due to the Vietnam War totalled 2,450,000 from 1954–75.
Rummel calculated Viet Cong(VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) deaths at 1,062,000 and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and allied war deaths of 741,000, with both totals including civilians inadvertently killed.
He estimated that victims of democide (deliberate killing of civilians) included 214,000 by North Vietnam/VC and 98,000 by South Vietnam and its allies. Deaths in Cambodia and Laos were estimated at 273,000 and 62,000 respectively.
Nick Turse, in his 2013 book, Kill Anything that Moves, argues that a relentless drive toward higher body counts, a widespread use of free-fire zones, rules of engagement where civilians who ran from soldiers or helicopters could be viewed as VC, and a widespread disdain for Vietnamese civilians led to massive civilian casualties and endemic war crimes inflicted by U.S. troops. One example cited by Turse is Operation Speedy Express, an operation by the 9th Infantry Division, which was described by John Paul Vann as, in effect, "many My Lais".
Air force captain, Brian Wilson, who carried out bomb-damage assessments in free-fire zones throughout the delta, saw the results firsthand. "It was the epitome of immorality...One of the times I counted bodies after an air strike — which always ended with two napalm bombs which would just fry everything that was left — I counted sixty-two bodies. In my report I described them as so many women between fifteen and twenty-five and so many children — usually in their mothers' arms or very close to them — and so many old people." When he later read the official tally of dead, he found that it listed them as 130 VC killed
The Vietnamese? . . .
The use of another kind of derogatory terminology for Vietnamese people by U.S. military personnel, regardless of whether they were insurgent, innocent villager, or fighting a colonial war as a Viet Cong cadre would, generally apply. This was the derogatory term "gook", used by for people of Asian descent, a pernicious and de-humanising racial slur, a term that may have originated among U.S. Marines during the Philippine-American War (1899 – 1902). If so, according to the Wikipedia article:
It could be related to the use of "gook" as a slang term for prostitute during that period. Historically, U.S. military personnel used the word to refer to non-Americans of various races. The earliest published example is dated 1920 and notes that U.S. Marines then in Haiti used the term to refer to Haitians.
U.S. occupation troops in South Korea after World War II called the Koreans "gooks". After the return of U.S. troops to the Korean Peninsula, so prevalent was the use of the word gook during the first months of the Korean War that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur banned its use, for fear that Asians would become alienated to the United Nations Command because of the insult.
It acquired its current racial meaning as a result of movies dealing with the Vietnam War. Although mainly used to describe non-European foreigners, especially East and Southeast Asians, it has been used to describe foreigners in general, including Italians in 1944, Indians, Lebanese and Turks in the '70s, and Arabs in 1988.
In modern U.S. usage, "gook" refers particularly to communist soldiers during the Vietnam War and has also been used towards all Vietnamese and at other times to all Southeast Asians in general. It is a highly offensive-humanising and racist term.
In a highly publicized incident, Senator John McCain used the word during the 2000 presidential campaign to refer to his North Vietnamese captors when he was a prisoner of war:
"I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live… I was referring to my prison guards and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend."
A few days later, however, he apologized to the Vietnamese community at large.
The elision of a 19th century slang term for "a low prostitute" into a generalised and racial slur, especially against Southeast Asians in general, is part of a pernicious mixing and exchanging of sexual and sexualised terms with a racist and American exceptionalism, plus an added pinch of delusional superiority complex.
Do all lives matter? An American General explains . . .
This video montage cuts and pastes scenes from the award winning documentary film on the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds (1974), directed by Peter Davis. The film's title is based on a quote from President Lyndon B. Johnson:
"the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there".The montage begins with an interview that takes place 1.43.09 into the film with General William Westmoreland — commander of American military operations in the Vietnam War at its peak from 1964 to 1968 and United States Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972 — telling a stunned Davis that:
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
After an initial take, Westmoreland indicated that he had expressed himself inaccurately. After a second take ran out of film, the section was reshot for a third time, and it was the third take that was included in the film. Davis later reflected on this interview stating, "As horrified as I was when General Westmoreland said, 'The Oriental doesn’t put the same value on life,' instead of arguing with him, I just wanted to draw him out... I wanted the subjects to be the focus, not me as filmmaker."This interview is followed in the sequence by a clip of the napalm attack upon the village of Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972.
The next cut taken from an earlier part of the Hearts and Minds film, documents American military personnel searching for paid sex on the streets of Saigon (0.14.51). The next cut (0.44.57) shows American military personnel interacting with Vietnamese sex workers. This sequence continues into scenes that shows American forces setting fire to Vietnamese villagers homes.
The next cut from the film Hearts and Minds (1.38.08) shows the collateral tragedy and human grief caused by the indiscriminate bombing campaign on the civilian population of North Vietnam. This sequence continues with scenes of grief and mourning for South Vietnamese military personnel at their funeral ceremonies. A sobbing woman is restrained from climbing into the grave after the coffin. This funeral scene is juxtaposed with the shocking interview with General William Westmoreland. This sequence is a repeats of the opening sequence of this montage, but continues with a sequence that shows the aftermath of the napalm attack on the village of Trảng Bàng. This includes film footage of the nine year old Phan Thị Kim Phúc OOnt, depicted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken at Trảng Bàng by AP photographer Nick Ut, that shows her running naked on the road after being severely burned on her back by a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack.
This harrowing footage is followed by moving testimony from a U.S. veteran who explains that although he never used the horrific weapon of napalm he was responsible for dropping anti-personnel cluster bombs. He reflects on the possibility of his own children suffering a napalm attack and quietly breaks down in front of camera. The montage ends with the sound of grieving in the burial grounds of a cemetery.
Apocalypse Now, along with most dramas and documentaries on the Vietnam War, becomes an American story of an American war, an American madness, a madness, that like a virus, left unchecked, will destroy the world it seeks to dominate.
Paranoias and the invisible enemy . . .
This video montage begins with the opening sequence of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The Spanish conquistadors descend from the mountains to the river below, and to another world, and the rainforest. In the second scene the film follows the expedition as it drifts down river on a raft to the film's finale, with all except Aguirre having perished as a result of the "madness" of his impossible dream-quest. Herzog's film ends with Aguirre the lone survivor on the drifting raft. The camera moves toward the raft, in a narrowing gyre, emphasising the futility of a promised enterprise. But the audience knows that, in the course of a generation, this vision is fulfilled. After all, this entire continental territory is NOW what we know as Latin America! The last scene in this montage is from Apocalypse Now, and shows the American crew of a military patrol boat (PBR), a socially and racially diverse group, "going nuts" as they travel up river on the Nung. The Nung river is a major tributary of the Mekong river, and having spent weeks on this river, the PBR reaches the remote U.S. Army outpost by the Do Lung Bridge. The characters Willard and Lance enter the outpost after nightfall, seeking information on what is upriver and receive a dispatch bag containing official and personal mail. Unable to find any commanding officer at Do Lung, Willard orders the Chief to continue as an unseen enemy assaults the bridge. Willard learns via the dispatch that another MACV-SOG operative, Special Forces Captain Richard Colby, was sent on an earlier mission identical to Willard's and has since joined Kurtz. As the crew read letters from home, Lance activates a smoke grenade while under the influence of LSD, attracting the attention of an unseen enemy, and Mr. Clean is killed. Further upriver, Chief is impaled by a spear thrown by Montagnards and attempts to kill Willard by impaling him on the spear point protruding from his own chest. Willard, struggling to survive, suffocates Chief.
Strange lands, river journeys, and . . .
One of the strategies that the Americans adopted in an attempt to defeat an "invisible enemy" was to deny the Vietcong the cover provided by the lush forest canopy in across Vietnam by deploying herbicides and defoliants to utterly remove and destroy it.
As the song has it . . .
For American servicemen and their families, along with the entire Vietnamese people, it turns out that . . .
. . . the actual "invisible enemy" was the U.S. government and U.S. capitalist corporations!
And Agent Orange!
Back to Sexy Stewardesses!And Playboy removing the veil?
Behind the GLORIOUS PICTORIAL it was the Playboy Press that in 1980 published one of the first investigations into the impact of Agent Orange with Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign's book:
GI Guinea Pigs: How the Pentagon Exposed Our Troops to Dangers More Deadly Than War: Agent Orange and Atomic Radiation.
These shocking revelations were picked up in the 1984 film Vietnam: The Secret Agent directed by Jacki Ochs, and pointing to the invisible agent dioxin.
"Dioxin, a compound found in Agent Orange, is recognized as the most toxic man-made chemical. We dumped it on Vietnam and we dumped it on the dusty backroads of Southern Missouri."
This video montage includes some clips from this film followed by a performance by Country Joe McDonald of the Agent Orange song.
". . . and I had to look . . . and to realise that my own government could have done this . . . that corporate America . . . for the love of the almighty dollar, had sacrificed my child."
"I didn't ask any questions when I was an 18 year old boy growing up on Long Island, but I am asking a hell of a lot of questions now, as a 34 year old man sitting paralysed in a wheelchair for the last 13 years dealing with an insensitive government that could care less if I lived or died, or these people here lived or died . . ."
Listen to the people! And then listen . . .
The Wikipedia article on the Effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people The use of Agent Orange as a chemical weapon has left tangible, long-term impacts upon the Vietnamese people that live in Vietnam as well as those who fled in the mass exodus from 1978 to the early 1990s. Hindsight corrective studies indicate that previous estimates of Agent Orange exposure were biased by government intervention and under-guessing, such that current estimates for dioxin release are almost double those previously predicted Census data indicates that the United States military directly sprayed upon millions of Vietnamese during strategic Agent Orange use. The effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese range from a variety of health effects, ecological effects, and sociopolitical effects.
Accountability? Or, capitalism's culture of denial?
Difficulty in maintaining judicial and civil transparency persists despite decades passing since the use of Agent Orange by the United States military. Corporations indicted for their blindness to normal ethical standards have responded defensively and aggressively, in moves described as "antagonistic and focused on technological arguments" (Kernisky, Debra A (1997). "Proactive Crisis Management and Ethical Discourse: Dow Chemical's Issues Management Bulletins 1979-1990". Journal of Business Ethics).
The first legal proceeding taken on behalf of Vietnamese victims was undertaken in January 2004 in a New York district court. Ultimately the district court held that "herbicide spraying . . . did not constitute a war crime pre-1975" and that international law prevented the companies that produced Agent Orange from being liable.
Alternative models for reconciling the harms done by the dioxin on the Vietnamese people with reparations have also been proposed. Some have called for the defoliation and destruction to be deemed an "environmental war crime". Law reviews have even called for a revision to the litigation process in the US due to the harmful implications regarding justice, reparations, and accountability as a result of the political sway of large conglomerate, and connected private interests.
Since at least 1978, several lawsuits have been filed against the companies which produced Agent Orange, among them Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Diamond Shamrock.
Attorney Hy Mayerson was an early pioneer in Agent Orange litigation, working with environmental attorney Victor Yannacone in 1980 on the first class-action suits against wartime manufacturers of Agent Orange. In meeting Dr. Ronald A. Codario, one of the first civilian doctors to see affected patients, Mayerson, so impressed by the fact a physician would show so much interest in a Vietnam veteran, forwarded more than a thousand pages of information on Agent Orange and the effects of dioxin on animals and humans to Codario's office the day after he was first contacted by the doctor. The corporate defendants sought to escape culpability by blaming everything on the U.S. government.In 1980, Mayerson, with Sgt. Charles E. Hartz as their principal client, filed the first U.S. Agent Orange class-action lawsuit in Pennsylvania, for the injuries military personnel in Vietnam suffered through exposure to toxic dioxins in the defoliant.
Attorney Mayerson co-wrote the brief that certified the Agent Orange Product Liability action as a class action, the largest ever filed as of its filing. Hartz's deposition was one of the first ever taken in America, and the first for an Agent Orange trial, for the purpose of preserving testimony at trial, as it was understood that Hartz would not live to see the trial because of a brain tumor that began to develop while he was a member of Tiger Force, special forces, and LRRPs in Vietnam. The firm also located and supplied critical research to the veterans' lead expert, Dr. Codario, including about 100 articles from toxicology journals dating back more than a decade, as well as data about where herbicides had been sprayed, what the effects of dioxin had been on animals and humans, and every accident in factories where herbicides were produced or dioxin was a contaminant of some chemical reaction.The chemical companies involved denied that there was a link between Agent Orange and the veterans' medical problems. However, on May 7, 1984, seven chemical companies settled the class-action suit out of court just hours before jury selection was to begin. The companies agreed to pay $180 million as compensation if the veterans dropped all claims against them. Slightly over 45% of the sum was ordered to be paid by Monsanto alone.
Many veterans who were victims of Agent Orange exposure were outraged the case had been settled instead of going to court and felt they had been betrayed by the lawyers. "Fairness Hearings" were held in five major American cities, where veterans and their families discussed their reactions to the settlement and condemned the actions of the lawyers and courts, demanding the case be heard before a jury of their peers. Federal Judge Jack B. Weinstein refused the appeals, claiming the settlement was "fair and just".
By 1989, the veterans' fears were confirmed when it was decided how the money from the settlement would be paid out. A totally disabled Vietnam veteran would receive a maximum of $12,000 spread out over the course of 10 years. Furthermore, by accepting the settlement payments, disabled veterans would become ineligible for many state benefits that provided far more monetary support than the settlement, such as food stamps, public assistance, and government pensions. A widow of a Vietnam veteran who died of Agent Orange exposure would receive $3,700.In 2004, Monsanto spokesman Jill Montgomery said Monsanto should not be liable at all for injuries or deaths caused by Agent Orange, saying: "We are sympathetic with people who believe they have been injured and understand their concern to find the cause, but reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects."
It turns out that it is citizen-to-citizen dialogue, and for individuals to call for accountability by the United States government, that addresses this discrepancy in the justice system. The first of these initiatives was established in 2006 by the Ford Foundation. Citizens sought a legal avenue by which private citizens and policy makers could work together to form a coherent plan of action in addressing the legacy of Agent Orange.
The US-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin, composed of members of the Aspen Institute, Vietnam National University, and Vietnam Veterans Association, is the most notable example of this civic response. Long-term programs and continued check-ups on the state of current plans to address Agent Orange are heavily monitored.Questions of governmental accountability have been raised towards who should be responsible for allowing the use of the chemical dioxin despite knowing the risks. Those who said that the use (at the time of the Vietnam War) of Agent Orange was merely a means of defeating the Viet Cong did not believe that the defoliant violated the Geneva Protocol. However, the 1925 Geneva Protocol and Geneva Weapons Conventions signed by all members of the UN ban the use of chemical and biological weapons specifically. The 1925 Geneva Convention Gas Protocol corroborated and reinforced this ban.
This video montage includes a trailer for the 2020 film THE PEOPLE VS. AGENT ORANGE.
This film documentary is a profile of two women who have dedicated their lives to terminating the use of a deadly chemical herbicide that cost the lives of both Americans and Vietnamese.You didn’t have to be in Vietnam to get sick or die from Agent Orange. Unbelievably, after its use was banned in 1971, it eventually was sprayed by the millions of gallons in Western Oregon upon the soil that once held millions of trees. After they were cut down, Agent Orange was used to kill the weeds left behind as an aid to reforestation.Around that time, a woman named Carol Van Strum moved close to the forest with her four young children in a kind of “back to nature” retreat so common in the 60s and 70s. Not long after building a house and a barn for the animals she was raising, the children began to complain about various illnesses that remained a mystery. It was only after driving her car closer to the clear cut forest that she noticed a sickly odor. Suspecting the worst, she took samples from the soil and water, sent it off to a lab, and finally learned that entire area was drenched with Agent Orange, whose main toxin is called dioxin. The EPA, which tends to give back-handed support to corporations like Dow Chemical that manufacture it, categorised it as a carcinogen. As soon as she discovered the source of her children’s ailments, as well as others living near the forest, she went on a crusade against the corporations and the “experts” who sanctioned the poisonous herbicide.The film’s other fearless heroine is Tran To Nga, who is a septuagenarian like Van Strum. She comes from a family that opposed both the French and American colonizers, first as leaders in the Viet Minh and then with the NLF. Nga was in the Vietnamese forests when American planes were showering them with Agent Orange. As a result, her first-born child died in infancy. Her health has been affected as well. Long after the war ended, her body contains traces of Dioxin that some scientists view as much of a threat to human health for generations as plutonium.She is now suing the American chemical industry for poisoning her in Vietnam – a lawsuit she filed in 2014 against the corporations that produced and sold the dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange. The suit includes U.S. multinational companies Dow Chemical and Monsanto, now owned by the German conglomerate Bayer.As Nga's landmark trial begins in Paris, a trial which could see the chemical manufactures held responsible for the devastation caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam, the film follows the claimants, as incriminating documents disappear, activists and their children are threatened and die. A helicopter technician secretly films the contamination of reservoirs, while a massive industrial cover-up continues.The film was co-directed by Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna. In the press notes, the directors state:Documents are a leitmotif. Storms, rain and flowing surface water are a recurring visual theme that evokes the lethal dioxin run-off and dioxin contamination. Similar images tie together the contamination of Vietnam and America’s Pacific Northwest as helicopters spray the ancient mangrove forests of Vietnam and Oregon’s majestic conifers. The scenes of the deformed and handicapped Vietnamese child victims, difficult as they are to watch and as sensitively as we try to present them, are a stark testimony to the film’s core message. We chose not to shy away from images the world might rather not see. They are indelible evidence of corporate greed and man’s inhumanity to man.
The trailer for this film is followed by the the documentary Toxic Rain - The Legacy of Agent Orange (2005), a film that focuses on the consequences of the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War upon the Vietnamese in Vietnam, directed by James Pastouna, camera: Constantin Titineanu.
The montage then returns to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with an educational video posted by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund on the ongoing toll on Vietnam veterans as a consequence of exposure to Agent Orange. Callie Wright, VVMF's Director of Education, talks to students at The Wall That Heals about Agent Orange.
The struggles . . .
The first use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War is thought to have occurred on August 10, 1961.
On August 10, 2020, VVMF held its first-ever Agent Orange awareness event.
Bring Light . . .
“Bring Light” illuminated the entire Vietnam Veterans Memorial site with orange candlelight — from The Wall itself to The Three Servicemen statue, the flagpole, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial statue and the In Memory plaque.
Collateral damage and the Americanisation of the world . . .
. . . begins in May 1961, when T. C. Schelling wrote an article titled Dispersal, Deterence, and Damage, which referred to the term "collateral damage":
The USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide defines the term [that is, 'collateral damage'] "unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel, occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces".
The emergence during the 1960's of the use of this term, even though originating in a more general use much earlier, became ideologically useful as an example of military jargon. As a convenient euphemism, the phrase "collateral damage" came into its own during the Vietnam War, especially when referring to countless examples of casualties of friendly fire or the intentional killing of non-combatants and destruction of their property.
As a term, it functions in a way that dehumanises non-combatants killed or injured during combat, and can also be used to reduce the perceived culpability of military leadership in failing to prevent non-combatant casualties.
The light that glows from the candles in the "Bring Light" awareness event concerning the collateral damage caused by Agent Orange cannot illuminate the immense number that exists in some future monument. This is the number of those who have died as a result of collateral damage, in the Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Guam, Korea, New Zealand, Philippines, Johnston Atoll, Okinawa (Japan), Thailand and the United States.
How do human rights, the wider values of society, civilisations and culture stand in relation to this notion of collateral damage?
Harry Lime (The Third Man) knows!
The famous so-called "Swiss cuckoo clock" speech occurs in the1949 British film The Third Man, a cold war drama penned by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed.
In this famous scene, Lime meets Martins on the Wiener Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park.
Victims? . . .
Looking down on the people below from his vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, and says that it would be insignificant if one of them or a few of them "stopped moving, forever". Back on the ground, he notes:
You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles added this remark – in the published script, it is in a footnote. Greene wrote in a letter, "What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence." Welles apparently said the lines came from "an old Hungarian play" — in any event the idea is not original to Welles, acknowledged by the phrase "what the fellow said".
From a distance! A version of "realism" in the capitalist "West"?
Cool visual detachment?Returning to Playboy's "high priest of pop cult and metaphysician of media Marshall McLuhan", in The Gutenberg Galaxy (Gutenberg - as in the technology of the mechanised printing of texts and images) he has this chapter heading:
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.
The view from the Wiener Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park in The Third Man, runs in a line from, and was pre-figured, according to McLuhan by Shakespeare. He writes:
Shakespeare seems to have missed due recognition for having in King Lear made the first, and so far as I know, the only piece of verbal three- dimensional perspective in any literature.
The arbitrary selection of a single static position creates a pictorial space with a vanishing point. This space can be filled in bit by bit, and is quite different from non-pictorial space in which each thing simply resonates or modulates its own space in visually two-dimensional form.Now the unique piece of three-dimensional verbal art which appears in King Lear is in Act IV, scene vi. Edgar is at pains to persuade the blinded Gloucester to believe the illusion that they are at the edge of a steep cliff:
Edgar. . . . Hark, do you hear the sea?
Gloucester. No, truly. Edgar. Why then, your other senses grow imperfect
By your eyes' anguish... .
Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
Far from being a normal mode of human vision, three-dimensional perspective is a conventionally acquired mode of seeing, as much acquired as is the means of recognizing the letters of the alphabet, or of following chronological narrative. That it was an acquired illusion Shakespeare helps us to see by his comments on the other senses in relation to sight. Gloucester is ripe for illusion because he has suddenly lost his sight. His power of visualization is now quite separate from his other senses. And it is the sense of sight in deliberate isolation from the other senses that confers on man the illusion of the third dimension, as Shakespeare makes explicit here. There is also the need to fix the gaze:
Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down Hangs one that gathers sampire—dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge, That on th' unnumb'red idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong
. . . and yond tall anchoring bark
Detail from Pieter Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (probably an early copy of Bruegel's lost original, c. 1558).
What Shakespeare does here is to place five flat panels of two-dimensions, one behind the other. By giving these flat panels a diagonal twist they succeed each other, as it were, in a perspective from the "stand still" point. He is utterly aware that the disposition to this kind of illusionism results from the separation of the senses.
The stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synesthesia may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology. This process of separation and reduction of functions had certainly reached a critical point by the early seventeenth century when King Lear appeared. But to determine how far such a revolution in the human sense life could have proceeded from Gutenberg technology calls for a somewhat different approach from merely sampling the sensibility of a great play of the critical period.
King Lear is a kind of medieval sermon-exemplum or inductive reasoning to display the madness and misery of the new Renaissance life of action. Shakespeare explains minutely that the very principle of action is the splitting up of social operations and of the private sense life into specialized segments. The resulting frenzy to discover a new over-all interplay of forces ensures a furious activation of all components and persons affected by the new stress.
In McLuhan's chapter headed:
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.
He says:
Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere, to give him an eye for an ear. The Chinese culture is considerably more refined and perceptive than the Western world has ever been. But the Chinese are tribal, people of the ear. "Civilization" must now be used technically to mean detribalized man for whom the visual values have priority in the organization of thought and action. Nor is this to give any new meaning or value to "civilization" but rather to specify its character. It is quite obvious that most civilized people are crude and numb in their perceptions, compared with the hyperesthesia of oral and auditory cultures.
Later on in this chapter McLuhan references J. C. Carothers, previously cited in a preceding chapter headed:
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.
J. C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry (November, 1959 ) on "Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word," . . .
. . . reiterates that the Westerner depends on a high degree of visual shaping of spatio-temporal relations without which it is impossible to have the mechanistic sense of causal relations so necessary to the order of our lives. But the quite different assumptions of native perceptual life have led him to ask (p. 311) what has been the possible role of written words in shifting habits of perception from the auditory to visual stress:When words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world. Like most of the elements of the visual world, they become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much of the personal element, in the sense that the heard word is most commonly directed at oneself, whereas the seen word most commonly is not, and can be read or not as whim dictates. They lose those emotional overtones and emphases which have been described, for instance, by Monrad-Krohn. . . Thus, in general, words, by becoming visible, join a world of relative indifference to the viewer — a world from which the magic 'power' of the word has been abstracted.
McLuhan then refers to Carothers turning to David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd; for further orientation in his queries concerning the effects of writing on non-literate communities. Riesman had characterized our own Western world as developing in its "typical members a social character whose conformity is insured by their tendency to acquire early in life an internalized set of goals." Riesman made no effort to discover why the manuscript culture of the ancient and medieval worlds should not have conferred inner direction, nor why a print culture should inevitably confer inner direction. That is part of the business of the present book. But it can be said at once that "inner direction" depends upon a "fixed point of view." A stable, consistent character is one with an unwavering outlook, an almost hypnotized visual stance, as it were. Manuscripts were altogether too slow and uneven a matter to provide either a fixed point of view or the habit of gliding steadily on single planes of thought and information. As we shall see, manuscript culture is intensely audile-tactile compared to print culture; and that means that detached habits of observation are quite uncongenial to manuscript cultures, whether ancient Egyptian, Greek, or Chinese or medieval. In place of cool visual detachment the manuscript world puts empathy and participation of all the senses. But non-literate cultures experience such an overwhelming tyranny of the ear over the eye that any balanced interplay among the senses is unknown at the auditory extreme, just as balanced interplay of the senses became extremely difficult after print stepped up the visual component in Western experience to extreme intensity.
The view from the shambles!
The word "shambles", used generally, and informally today to refer to situations of total disorder, was originally, and now an obsolete term, for an open-air slaughterhouse and meat market. Streets with this name were so called from having been the sites on which butchers killed and dressed animals for consumption. One source suggests that the term derives from "Shammel", an Anglo-Saxon word for shelves that stores used to display their wares while another indicates that by AD 971 "shamble" meant a 'bench for the sale of goods' and by 1305, a 'stall for the sale of meat'.
So, "war" and "shambles" belong together, and both "besmeared with sluttish time".
As highlighted before in this article, in the film , Hearts and Minds (1974), directed by Peter Davis General William Westmoreland — commander of American military operations in the Vietnam War at its peak from 1964 to 1968 and United States Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972 — tells a stunned Davis that:
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
In contrast to the montage of the famous so-called "Swiss cuckoo clock" speech in The Third Man, Re:LODE Radio chooses to juxtapose this montage (and edit) of Wayne Wang's title sequence to his 1989 film Life Is Cheap... But Toilet Paper Is Expensive.
"Life is cheap . . .
The Re:LODE Radio edit begins with the title sequence, followed by a sustained episode involving a chase, a device that Wayne Wang uses to probe the urban and social fabric of this era of Hong Kong during the late 1980's.
By the early 1990s, Hong Kong had established itself as a global financial centre and shipping hub. The colony faced an uncertain future as the end of the New Territories lease approached, and Governor Murray MacLehose raised the question of Hong Kong's status with Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Diplomatic negotiations with China resulted in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which the United Kingdom agreed to transfer the colony in 1997 and China would guarantee Hong Kong's economic and political systems for 50 years after the transfer. The impending transfer triggered a wave of mass emigration as residents feared an erosion of civil rights, the rule of law, and quality of life. Over half a million people left the territory during the peak migration period, from 1987 to 1996.
Lastly the edit ends with an earlier sequence in the film where the main protagonist ventures out on foot to the "wet markets" and "shambles" of this "old Hong Kong", from where the title sequence, in a documentary style, was filmed.
Wikipedia's summation of the film's plot is contained within this short sentence: "A man is hired, by people he believes to be gangsters, to deliver a briefcase from America to Hong Kong". Re:LODE Radio chooses to present an edit of scenes from the film to juxtapose the combination of arrogance, ignorance and cool detachment of an American General (factual), an American black marketeer (fictional), and the values of a Chinese butcher in capitalist Hong Kong.
The butcher points out that in the "shambles" of this British colony, the values of everyday life where everything is reduced to a price in the market, other values end up meaning not very much. The film begins with this title scene of brutal realism, something that Re:LODE Radio connects to McLuhan's thought on the differences between the cool visual detachment of most civilized people, made crude and numb in their perceptions, compared with the hyperesthesia of oral and auditory cultures, such as found in five thousand years of Chinese culture.
Re:LODE Radio considers that Wayne Wang's film begins the film with this scene, that also provides the title of the film, because it exposes a fundamental contradiction of modern life. This Chinese "everyman" puts empathy and participation of all the senses in everyday life ahead of the nihilistic absurdity that produces a system where "life is cheap but toilet paper is expensive".
Cold War II?
The making of this film in the Hong Kong of the late 1980's is significant, given the the impending outbreak of a new cold war where the contestation for global hegemony between the West and the East is taking a different turn from the way the ideological battlegrounds of the Vietnam War were conducted.
Throughout the Re:LODE and Re:LODE Radio project many references have been made to the historical contexts relevant the LODE Zone Line that include the present contenders for global power and influence, China and the United States of America. The LODE Zone Line includes the world's oldest colony, Puerto Rico, still a colony of the United States of America. Nevertheless, reference to the United States is relevant along the the length and breadth of the LODE Zone Line because of capitalist globalisation, and how the hegemony of the U.S. has played out in the lives of people living everywhere.
The historical significance and influence of China has also been referenced along the LODE Zone Line, and when it comes to Cold War II, the contestation for global hegemony is between the United States as the dominant, but possibly declining superpower, and China, with an economy on the rise.
A U.S. v. China "Cold War II", however ideological, is not a competition between socialism and capitalism!
While the U.S. military industrial complex is governed by the short term, be it a monopolistic economic advantage, or skewing the system so that competition is rigged, United States global power is based on variations of the theme of globalised capitalism. So what about China? Richard D. Wolff, an American Marxian economist, known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis, has put a variant of this question in a recent article (August 22, 2020) for Asia Times:
Socialist or capitalist: What is China’s model, exactly?
The subheading for this article runs:
In China today, like the USSR a century ago, transition to a post-capitalist society has been stalled
A float featuring the Communist Party of China passes through Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 2019 during a parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Richard D. Wolff writes:
Near the end of his life, Lenin gave a speech that referred to the USSR as a transitional society. He explained that socialists had taken state power and could thereby take the post-revolutionary economy – which he labeled “state capitalism” – further. The socialists’ state could achieve transition to a genuinely post-capitalist economy.
He never spelled out exactly what that meant, but he clearly saw that transition as the revolution’s goal. In any event, conditions inside and outside the USSR in effect halted further transition. Josef Stalin’s USSR came to define socialism as state power in socialists’ hands overseeing an economy that mixed private and state enterprises with market and state planning mechanisms of distribution.The state capitalism originally conceived as a transitional stage en route to a socialism different from and beyond state capitalism came instead to define socialism. The transition had become the end.*The “different from and beyond” faded into a vague goal located in a distant future. It was a “communism” described by slogans such as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It named a party with communism as its goal, but socialism as its present reality.The hallmark of capitalism, what distinguished it from feudalism (lord/serf) and slavery (master/slave), was the employer/employee relationship structuring its enterprises. In Stalin’s USSR and since, the employer/employee relationship became, instead, a necessary, unquestioned presumption common to any and all “modern” economies, capitalist and socialist alike (rather like machinery or raw materials).That Stalinist view of the universality of the employer/employee relationship was also the view of all major strains of economic thought in the capitalist world outside the USSR.China’s Communist Party largely replicated the USSR’s history in terms of constructing a state capitalism overseen by the party and the government it controls. One key difference from the USSR has been China’s ability to engage with the world market in ways and to degrees the USSR never could. China also allowed a far larger component of private enterprises, foreign and domestic, alongside state-owned and -operated enterprises than the USSR did.Yet China today, like the USSR a century ago, faces the same transition problem: Transition to a post-capitalist society has been stalled.In China since at least the 1970s, the Communist Party and the government it controls have managed state-owned and supervised private enterprises. Both kinds of enterprise exhibited the same employer/employee structure.Chinese state capitalism is a hierarchy with the party and government at the top, state and private employers below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom. Western private capitalism has a slightly different hierarchy: private employers at the top, parties and government below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom.China’s economy has grown or “developed” much faster over recent decades and now rivals the North American and European economies. China was better prepared for and better contained the damages flowing from the 2000 dot-com crisis, the 2008-09 Great Recession, and the 2020 Covid-19 crisis.The party and government in China mobilized private and public resources to focus on prioritized social problems that also included reduced dependence on exports and massive infrastructural expansion.China’s party and government have produced a huge, well educated labor force working for private and state enterprises, foreign and domestic. Popular support for China’s existing economic system seems widespread notwithstanding considerable criticism and some opposition.Rising labor productivity yielded rising average real wages (also rising far faster than in the West). Across these years, no Chinese troops fought in any foreign wars. Housing, education, health care and transportation received massive investments; their supplies often grew ahead of Chinese demand for them.A key lesson of Chinese development is that economic objectives are better met faster if a dominant social agency prioritizes achieving them and can mobilize the maximum resources, private as well as public, to that end. China’s party and government were that agency.In Western capitalism, no comparably empowered social agency possessed that power. Private and public sectors stayed separate.Ideology and politics generally kept the public subordinate to the private. The private employers’ differing particular interests and profit-driven goals discouraged many kinds of coordinated behavior among them as did their system’s structures of competition. Party and state apparatuses depended on corporate donations and corporate-media supports.Thus, in Western capitalism, no social agency played the national resource-mobilizing role that the party and government played in China.Some Western capitalist countries embraced social democracy (as in much of Western Europe). There states provided major social supports (national health insurance, subsidized schools, transport, housing, etc) that enabled some state-mobilized national resources for social priorities.The less capitalist countries embraced social democracy – the more committed to laissez-faire ideology and private-sector dominance – the less they could mobilize national resources. The United States and UK are prime examples of such countries; hence their poor preparations for and containments of the Covid-19 pandemic and the capitalist crash of 2020.A second lesson China offers the world concerns the relationship between the basic structure its private and public enterprises share and the nature of its socialism. Almost all enterprises in China have an employer/employee internal structure; they differ in who the employers are. In state-owned and operated enterprises, state officials occupy the employer position. In private enterprises, the employers are private citizens; they occupy no position within the state apparatus.China’s economic system differs sharply from a Western capitalist system. First, it has a larger sector of state-owned and operated enterprises than what Western capitalisms display. Second, it accords a dominant political and social role to the party and government. The latter together direct the economy’s development and coordinate how economy, politics and culture interact to achieve its goals.China’s economic system is also clearly not a communism in the sense of having overcome the employer/employee structure or mode of production. To the extent that such overcoming once occurred during the era of communes early in the history of the People’s Republic of China, it mostly vanished.Employer/employee structures of enterprises are today’s Chinese norm. China is not post-capitalist. China is, as the USSR was, socialist in the sense of a state capitalism whose further transition to post-capitalism has been blocked.There is an alternative way of drawing a second lesson from China’s remarkable history over the last half-century. We could infer that by “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” China means its system of a socially dominant party and state directing a mix of private and state-owned enterprises, both organized in the typically capitalist structure of employer and employee.Western European “socialisms” (Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, etc) would thus also, like China, fall somewhere in the blocked transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. Despite Europe’s different politics and multiple-party system, most of its parties accept and reinforce a commitment to a kind of state capitalism.The socialisms of the USSR, China, and Western Europe were and are transitional. They all embody a process that got stopped or stalled en route to a post-capitalist society barely imagined.“Actually existing socialisms” were actually state capitalisms ruled, more or less, by persons and associations who wanted to go somewhere further, beyond, to a society much more different from capitalism. Hence the gap felt deeply by so many socialists and socialist organizations (parties, etc) between what motivates their commitment (socialist ideals) and what they can and must do in their practical lives.The Cold War waged against the USSR added to the pressures that blocked transition from going beyond state capitalism. A cold war now against China will do the same. Even without cold wars, internal pressures in the USSR and China likely sufficed then and suffice now to stall any transition beyond state capitalism.And so it is as well with Western European–type socialisms. The only way the transition can be resumed would be if some force within the private and/or state capitalisms emerged that defined its project as precisely that resumption.Global capitalism today exhibits historic difficulties: pandemic closures, global depressions (in 2008 and worse in 2020), extreme and deepening inequalities within nations, unsustainable government, corporate and household debts, and collapsing coordination among blocs.Long-deferred social problems (global warming, racism, labor migration, and gender inequality) are exploding as partial effects and partial further causes of those difficulties. Everywhere social movements are emerging or struggling to emerge in response to the difficulties and problems besieging modern societies.All those movements share the problem of defining just what they will do to solve the problems motivating them. Many will yet again see government as the solution. Their program will give the state more power to oversee, regulate, control, and spend for the solution.Those people may or may not label their views as “socialism.” Either way, their proposals advocate for or sustain another blocked transition: from a private to a state capitalism or from a lesser to a greater degree of state capitalism.Over the past century, many attracted to socialism have come to understand that blocked transitions did not and do not suffice to solve the problems created by modern capitalism. Those people can now become the new social force to unblock the socialist transition. From below, they can demand an end to the employer/employee structure of enterprises, public as well as private.That end would help define the new society to which an unblocked socialist transition can and must now proceed. That society would be post-capitalist: different from and beyond all actually existing socialisms. It will have displaced the employer/employee structure of enterprises in favor of the democratic, worker-cooperative structure.Stalled revolutionsIn the late 18th century, the French and American Revolutions marked the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Leaders of those revolutions believed that they would bring into being a new society characterized by liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy.But that transition also stalled: It did achieve the change from lord/serf to employer/employee, but it did not achieve the further changes to that desired new society. Socialism mostly represented the continuation of the drive toward those further changes.But the socialisms of the USSR, China and Western Europe stalled too. Their advocates and leaders had believed that a transition from private to state capitalism would bring those further changes that capitalism never did. The lessons of Soviet and Chinese socialisms offer a profound critique of stalled socialism, their own and others’.The completion of the passage from capitalism and beyond socialism as a transitional stage requires a micro-level economic revolution. The dichotomous employer/employee relationship inside enterprises must give way to a democratically organized community of workers who collectively employ themselves as well as direct the enterprise.That economic foundation – what communism concretely means – offers us a better chance to realize the goals of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy than capitalism or socialism ever could.*A full exposition of this argument concerning the rise and fall of the USSR is available in Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2002.This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times.
Fun, Travel, Adventure?
Sir! . . .
Or CLASS WAR?
This montage shows a trailer for the film Sir, No Sir, followed by a clip from the film Born on the Fourth of July.
Sir! No Sir! is a 2005 documentary by Displaced Films about the anti-war movement within the ranks of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War, produced, directed, and written by David Zeiger. The film brings to life the history of the GI Movement and the stories of those who were part of it through interviews with veterans plus hitherto unseen archival material. Archival materials include news reports from local and national television broadcasts, images from newspapers and magazines, and Super-8 and 16mm film footage of events in the GI Movement shot by GIs and civilian activists. Recently shot interviews with individuals involved in the struggle include soldiers imprisoned for refusing to fight, to train other soldiers, or to ship out to the frontlines; Vietnam veterans who became antiwar activists or joined the 500,000+ soldiers whom the Pentagon listed as deserters during the war; the leader of the Presidio 27 Mutiny, also known as the Presidio mutiny; and soldiers who went on strike while in Vietnam, plus other interviews, including with Hollywood activist Jane Fonda. Exclusive footage from documentary coverage of the movement includes highlights from the FTA Show, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland's antiwar stage revue that traveled to military bases around the world, F.T.A. the feature-length film about that tour; Vietnam veterans hurling their medals onto the Capitol steps; the refusal by troops to engage in combat at Firebase Pace (which sped up the final withdrawal of U.S. ground forces); and an audio recording made by the journalist Richard Boyle, who was also the author of The Flower of the Dragon and the Oliver Stone film Salvador.
The following scene is from Born on the Fourth of July (1989), a biographical anti-war drama film based on the eponymous 1976 autobiography by Ron Kovic, directed by Oliver Stone, and written by Stone and Kovic. The scene shows how in 1972 Ron Kovic, having joined the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War, travels to the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida. As Richard Nixon is giving an acceptance speech for his presidential nomination, Ron expresses to a news reporter his hatred for the war and the government for abandoning the American people. His comments enrage Nixon supporters, and his interview is cut short when police attempt to remove and arrest him and other protestors. Ron and the veterans manage to break free from the officers, regroup, and charge the hall again, though not successfully.
Re:LODE Radio considers the way this drama unfolds is not necessarily following a trajectory of emerging political consciousness and awareness, as evidenced in Sir, No Sir. It's the total collapse of trust and belief in authority by a significant grouping, a community of shared experience, that shapes a view of government that doesn't care, and a sense that there's corruption at the heart of this democracy. Democracy in the U.S. is a low intensity sort of democracy at the best of times, and so the gap widens between the powerful and those who feel powerless. This also chimes with the emergence of a matrix of conspiracy theories that originate in this period too.
Paranoid styles and conspiracy theories!
Left and Right! True and False!
The left and the right in politics is dominated now by fake news and conspiracy theories, some of which may actually be true, however outlandish, while many are the extension of grotesque psychological projections that expose some ugly truths, as with the work of William Blum, an inspiration for Stone's work, and discussed below.
Oliver Stone has become a controversial figure in American filmmaking, with critics accusing him of promoting conspiracy theories, and of misrepresenting real-world events and figures in his works.In 1991 Oliver Stone released the epic political thriller film JFK, that examines the events leading to the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. It focusses on an alleged cover-up dramatised through the experience of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. Garrison filed charges against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for his alleged participation in a conspiracy to assassinate the President, for which Lee Harvey Oswald was found responsible by the Warren Commission.In modern times, multiple conspiracy theories concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 have emerged. Vincent Bugliosi estimated that over 1,000 books had been written about the Kennedy assassination, at least ninety percent of which are works supporting the view that there was a conspiracy. As a result of this, the Kennedy assassination has been described as "the mother of all conspiracies". The countless individuals and organizations that have been accused of involvement in the Kennedy assassination include the CIA, the Mafia, sitting Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, the KGB, or even some combination thereof. It is also frequently asserted that the United States federal government intentionally covered up crucial information in the aftermath of the assassination to prevent the conspiracy from being discoveredAccording to Wikipedia, Stone has been described as having left-wing political views. He has also drawn attention for his opinions on controversial world leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Hugo Chávez. In Showtime's The Putin Interviews, Stone called Joseph Stalin "the most famous villain in history, next to Adolf [Hitler]", who "left a horrible reputation, and stained the [Communist] ideology forever ... it's mixed with blood, and terror."
Stone has endorsed the works of author William Blum, saying that his books should be taught in schools and universities.In 1969 Blum wrote and published an exposé of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which were revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 CIA employees. He worked as freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. In 1972–1973, Blum worked as a journalist in Chile where he reported on the Allende government's "socialist experiment". In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with ex-CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates "on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds". He supported himself with his writing and speaking engagements on college campuses. One of Blum's stories on Iraq was listed by Project Censored as one of "The Top Ten Censored Stories of 1998"
In his books and online columns, Blum has devoted substantial attention to CIA interventions and assassination plots. Noam Chomsky has called Blum's book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, "far and away the best book on the topic."
Blum supported Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns. He circulated a monthly newsletter by email called "The Anti-Empire Report".
An Unreasonable Man
Quoted here are the first two paragraphs of this article/opinion piece, followed by the last section headed:
Some Further Thought Regarding the 9/11 Truth MovementWilliam Blum writes:
I recommend the new documentary about Ralph Nader, which was recently shown on PBS television, “An Unreasonable Man”. Its primary focus is on Nader’s argument for having run in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections despite the alleged harm done to the Democratic Party candidates. As I’ve written earlier: The choice facing people like myself was not Ralph Nader or Albert Gore or John Kerry. The choice facing us was Ralph Nader or not voting at all. If Nader had not been on the ballot, we would have stayed home. It’s that simple. The film shows a clip of a TV network newscast just after the 2000 election in which star news anchors Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw are discussing this very question, and much to my surprise they both come to this same conclusion — Nader did not cost the Democrats many votes at all. If he had not been on the ballot, the great bulk of his supporters would NOT have voted Democratic instead.
This escapes Nader’s critics, such as the two featured in the film, Nation magazine columnist Eric Alterman and author and 60s icon Todd Gitlin. NASA should check them out — just mention “Ralph Nader” and they go ballistic. They engage in an orgy of angry name calling, labeling Nader an egomaniac, irrational . . . “prefabricated purity” . . . “borders on the wicked” … responsible for the Iraq war and the destruction of the environment . . . They don’t directly challenge anything of substance amongst the views of Nader or his supporters. They’re not at all impressed with what I find most exhilarating — the unique phenomenon of a noted public political figure consistently standing on principle. Nader’s critics can’t admit that there’s principle involved in all this, for fear of revealing their own lack of that quality, as they cling to defending the indefensible — the idea that the Democratic Party is a force for even liberal change, never mind progressive.Some Further Thought Regarding the 9/11 Truth MovementWhen I say, as I did in last month’s report, that I don’t think that 9-11 was an “inside job”, it’s not because I believe that men like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, et al. are not morally depraved enough to carry out such a monstrous act; these men each has a piece missing, a piece that’s shaped like a social conscience; they consciously and directly instigated the current Iraqi and Afghanistan horrors which have already cost many more American lives than were lost on 9/11, not to mention more than a million Iraqis and Afghans who dearly wanted to remain amongst the living. In the Gulf War of 1991, Cheney and other American leaders purposely destroyed electricity-generating plants, water-pumping systems, and sewage systems in Iraq, then imposed sanctions upon the country making the repair of the infrastructure extremely difficult. Then, after twelve years, when the Iraqi people had performed the heroic task of getting these systems working fairly well again, the US bombers came back to inflict devastating damage to them all once more. My books and many others document one major crime against humanity after another by our America once so dear and cherished.So it’s not the moral question that makes me doubt the inside-job scenario. It’s the logistics of it all — the incredible complexity of arranging it all so that it would work and not be wholly and transparently unbelievable. That and the gross overkill — they didn’t need to destroy or smash up ALL those buildings and planes and people. One of the twin towers killing more than a thousand would certainly have been enough to sell the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, and Homeland Security. The American people are not such a hard sell. They really yearn to be true believers. Look how they scream hysterically over Hillary and Obama.To win over people like me, the 9/11 truth people need to present a scenario that makes the logistics reasonably plausible. They might start by trying to answer questions like these: Did planes actually hit the towers and the Pentagon and crash in Pennsylvania? Were these the same four United Airline and American Airline planes that took off from Boston and Newark? At the time of collision, were they being piloted by people or by remote control? If people, who were these people?Also, why did building 7 collapse? If it was purposely demolished — why? All the reasons I’ve read so far I find not very credible. As to the films of the towers and building 7 collapsing, which make it appear that this had to be the result of controlled demolitions — I agree, it does indeed look that way. But what do I know? I’m no expert. It’s not like I’ve seen, in person or on film, numerous examples of buildings collapsing due to controlled demolition and numerous other examples of buildings collapsing due to planes crashing into them, so I could make an intelligent distinction. We are told by the 9/11 truth people that no building constructed like the towers has ever collapsed due to fire. But how about fire plus a full-size, loaded airplane smashing into it? How many examples of that do we have?But there’s one argument those who support the official version use against the skeptics that I would question. It’s the argument that if the government planned the operation there would have to have been many people in on the plot, and surely by now one of them would have talked and the mainstream media would have reported their stories. But in fact a number of firemen, the buildings’ janitor, and others have testified to hearing many explosions in the towers some time after the planes crashed, supporting the theory of planted explosives. But scarce little of this has made it to the media. Likewise, following the JFK assassination at least two men came forward afterward and identified themselves as being one of the three “tramps” on the grassy knoll in Dallas. So what happened? The mainstream media ignored them both. I know of them only because the tabloid press ran their stories. One of the men was the father of actor Woody Harrelson.
Blum, who died in December 2018, described his life's mission as:
"If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It's causing so much suffering around the world."
In an interview with C-SPAN in 2006, Blum stated: "Speaking about U.S. foreign policy, which is my specialty, the authors I would most recommend would be Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman and Howard Zinn and Alexander Cockburn."America for the the Americans?
To quote Diego Portales on the Monroe Doctrine (December 2, 1823), a Chilean businessman and minister, wrote to a friend:"But we have to be very careful: for the Americans of the north [from the United States], the only Americans are themselves".Oliver Stone has had an interest in Latin America since the 1980s, when he directed Salvador, and later returned to make his documentary South of the Border about the left-leaning movements that had been taking hold in the region. He has expressed the view that these movements are a positive step toward political and economic autonomy for the region. He supported Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and admired the Colombian militant group FARC.Stone has criticized the U.S.–supported Operation Condor, a state terror operation that carried out assassinations and disappearances in support of South America's right-wing dictatorships in Argentina (see Dirty War), Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
Clickbait? Two of a kind?
Ex-Playboy model accuses Stone of grabbing her boob!
Boobs, an ex-Playboy model and a rogue left-wing film director, who needs taking down a peg or two, has the capacity to draw some attention in the "information environment".
A headline from Variety from 2017 runs . . .
Variety magazine ran this story (Oct 13, 2017)Oliver Stone Accused of Groping Former Playboy Model in ’90sMaane Khatchatourian reported:After coming to disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s defense, Oliver Stone is now facing a sexual assault allegation of his own.Former Playboy model Carrie Stevens has accused the renowned director of groping her at a party 26 years ago.Stevens wrote in a Facebook post that Weinstein and Stone are (Re:LODE Radio's emphasis):
“two of a kind.”
Stevens, who was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in June 1997 and has had small acting roles since then, said the filmmaker grabbed her breast at a party.“I was only 22 years old. Oliver walked past me and grabbed my boob as he waltzed out the front door of a party,” the now 48-year-old wrote on Thursday.“I still remember the cocky grin on his face like he got away with something,” she added. “These douchebags are not above the law, and they should be held to the same standard as every other man. It’s common decency NOT to grab boobs, pu–ies (like our President does) … or any other body part of another, uninvited. They should go back to preschool, because they must’ve missed the lesson … ‘keep your hands to yourself.'”Too right!
If true, then Stone was responsible for a sexual assault, in a clear equivalence to the misogynistic power-play and abuse found at the Playboy Mansion, and in the type of behaviour that led to the jailing of Harvey Weinstein.
But! Hush! Caution! Echoland!
Is this, and other stories, simply "news", or furthering other, or hidden, agendas? Time for a conversation? A long conversation? And to find out more about Carrie Stevens Google "Carrie Stevens today".
UNRATED
They were just a couple of tweets, . . .
. . . but they propelled actress and Playboy playmate Carrie Stevens into the headlines, as stories swirled about sexual harassment in the movie industry and the alleged affairs of some of the most powerful men in America.
Besieged by the media, Carrie was shocked and astounded at the frenzy those tweets aroused.
"It convinced her that she needed to write her memoir."
Her thought process was “If they think these stories are sensational, just wait until they hear about my life’s crazy adventures!” The result is Unrated: Revelations of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Centerfold, the memoir of an unimaginable evolution from small-town girl, to an extraordinary life in the fast lane. A life in which she had intimate encounters with marquee celebrities from all walks of life - rock stars, Oscar-winning actors, royalty, a future president, sports legends, a sultan and billionaires.
It’s a life she shared with the privileged and the powerful that took her from Kiss' tour bus to the Playboy Mansion, hopping on private jets at a moment’s notice and cruising the Mediterranean on mega yachts, and even spending six months as a “guest” in the exotic harem of the prince of Brunei. Carrie candidly admits that because she couldn’t escape being treated like a sex object, she chose to become one. With humor and wisdom, she takes you on an unapologetic, whirlwind adventure of debauchery, dysfunction, and heartache.Carrie reflects on the tornado of emotional torture she’s endured and the choices she has made, including life as a single mother. Her story is more than that of survival. It’s about soulmates. In her quest for what matters most in life, (and almost 30 years after his passing) Carrie can’t let go of her love for her late boyfriend Eric Carr, drummer for the rock band Kiss. Yet, through the years, she has found a way to embrace the loss and use it as her guiding light. Eric will always be the heart and soul of her story.
A paranoid style in politics?
"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is an essay by American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964.
Hofstadter's essay:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.
Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. . . . The laws of probability would dictate that part of . . . [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:As early as 1865–66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America. . . . For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. . . . Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:. . . It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism. . . . The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States. . . . These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here. . . .These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.
The Eye of Providence . . .
. . . or the all-seeing eye of God, seen here on the US$1 bill, has been taken by some to be evidence of a conspiracy involving the founders of the United States and the Illuminati
Illuminism and MasonryI begin with a particularly revealing episode — the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.Americans first learned of Illuminism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.” It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion — a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a stench bomb — a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statemen who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, it was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man. . . . It may truly be said to be Hell’s master piece.”The Jesuit ThreatFear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation . . . we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: “Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here. . . . She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly. . . . ” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.”Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,(1) the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.Why They Feel DispossessedIf, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country — that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall as the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government” — note the care and scrupulousness of that “almost.” He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago, “I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Milton was “actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” — a conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”Emulating the EnemyThe paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.(2) Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons — later, Negroes and Jews — have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.Renegades and PedantsA special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.The Double SuffererThe paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
Notes from Hofstadter's essay1. Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited “having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun.”2. In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.” Shadegg comments: “In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.” “I would suggest,” writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? “that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not."
Black helicopters
The first item of interest on the Wikipedia page that contains a List of conspiracy theories is:
1.1 Black helicopters
This conspiracy theory emerged in the US in the 1960s. The John Birch Society originally promoted it, asserting that a United Nations force would soon arrive in black helicopters to bring the US under UN control. The theory re-emerged in the 1990s during the presidency of Bill Clinton, and has been promoted by talk show host Glenn Beck. A similar theory concerning so-called "phantom helicopters" appeared in the UK in the 1970s. Hofstadter's essay for Harpers includes, in the right hand margin this example of:
The Paranoid Style in Action
The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor, . . . The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs. . . .
The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin . . . said an “avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)
Birch official John Rousselot said, “We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”
—San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964
That was then . . .
. . . this is NOW!
What Are Black Helicopters?Black Helicopters (BH) are not just helicopters with a black paint-job as you may have been told. They are, in fact, autonomous agents -- lifeforms -- created by New World Order (NWO) agencies via nanobiotechnology. Their primary purpose is to spy on the activities of average citizens in order to gather tactical information and discover "subversives" who are not bowing to the will of the Liberati's UN-backed Federal Government. Furthermore, when the NWO Invasion takes place in the not-too-distant future, they will round up citizens for internment in concentration camps or carry out the elimination of the more vocally anti-Liberati.
Q. Is this the TRUTH?
A. No! It's a HOAX!
It's also not so far from a Sci-Fi or Horror genre script "idea" for a Hollywood 'B' movie.
"Serving The Paranoid Since 1997"
The Pacific Northwest tree octopus is an Internet hoax created in 1998 by a humor writer under the pseudonym Lyle Zapato. This fictitious endangered species of cephalopod was given the Latin name "Octopus paxarbolis" (the species name being coined from Latin pax, the root of Pacific, and Spanish arbol meaning "tree"). It was purportedly able to live both on land and in water, and was said to live in the Olympic National Forest and nearby rivers, spawning in water where its eggs are laid. Its major predator was said to be the Sasquatch. Since its creation, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus website has been commonly referenced in Internet literacy classes in schools and has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility regarding online sources of information.
This TRUTH, like many conspiracy theories, relates to clandestine government plans and elaborate murder plots. Conspiracy theories usually deny consensus or cannot be proven using the historical or scientific method.In principle, conspiracy theories are NOT ALWAYS FALSE by default and their validity depends on evidence just as in any theory. However, they are often discredited a priori due to their cumbersome and improbable nature.
Psychologists attribute finding a conspiracy where there is none to a form of cognitive bias called:
Hofstadter's legacy?
In a 2007 article in Harper's, Scott Horton wrote that "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was "one of the most important and most influential articles published in the 155 year history of the magazine."
Thomas Frank, in a 2014 essay for Harper's, suggested that Hofstadter's method had popularized a "pseudopsychological approach to politics."Laura Miller writes in Salon.com that "'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' reads like a playbook for the career of Glenn Beck, right down to the paranoid's 'quality of pedantry' and 'heroic strivings for 'evidence'..."
Economist Paul Krugman titled a 2018 op-ed in The New York Times "The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics" and explicitly referred to the 1964 essay.Researcher Travis View, who has extensively studied and written about the QAnon conspiracy theory for The Washington Post has described it in 2019 as "an example of the paranoid style as described by Hofstadter.".Several academics have suggested that Hofstadter's argument has been outpaced by events. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has observed that Hofstadter's essay assumes "a presumptive 'we' -- apparently still practically everyone," who regards conspiracy theories "from a calm, understanding, and encompassing middle ground." Sedgwick, and later Gordon Fraser, argued that conspiracy theories after the middle of the twentieth century proliferated to such a degree that Hofstadter's imagined, rationally liberal audience no longer exists, if it ever existed in the first place.
America, democracy and revolution?
The Americanisation of the World is, understandably, entirely connected to the history of "America", the name given to a so-called "new world" by a German map maker. Part of this history is covered in the Re:LODE Radio page on:The Americanisation of the WorldThis page includes Samir Amin's historical explanation as to why there is no Workers Party in the U.S. despite the emergence of many working class and trades union movements over the last one hundred and fifty years or so.
Re:LODE Radio suggests that there is a possible connection between the absence of a Workers Party, and a communitarian demography that predominates in politics and ideology, produces the perfect conditions for politicised conspiracy theories and a culture of paranoia. Hence the present culture war invoked by the RIGHT against the WOKE. This is NOW a GLOBAL problem, and along the LODE Zone Line there is abundant evidence to support this theory, especially in India and Indonesia. A question is begged:
Why are there no "workers' parties" in the two largest democracies in the world, India and the USA?
The American dream? - OR - Once Upon a Time in America?
The American ideology that Samir Amin identifies, and that for him is the foundation of the liberal virus that is leading to the Americanization of the world, is, for Amin, strengthened by the successive waves of immigration that have taken place in the USA over the last two centuries. He says:The immigrants were certainly not responsible for the misery and oppression that caused their departure. On the contrary, they were the victims of it. But circumstances led them to abandon the collective struggle to change the common conditions of their classes or groups in their own country, in favour of adhering to the ideology of individual success in the host country. This adherence was encouraged by the American system, which suited it perfectly. it delayed the development of class consciousness, which, scarcely had it started to develop, had to face a new wave of immigrants that prevented its crystallization. But simultaneously, immigration encouraged the communitarianization of American society, because individual success does not exclude strong integration into a community of origin (the Irish, the Italians, and others), without which individual isolation could become unbearable. Yet, here again the strengthening of this dimension of identity, which the American system uses and encourages, is done at the expense of class consciousness and the education of the citizen. While in Paris the people got ready to assault the heavens (here I refer to the 1871 Commune), in the United States gangs formed by successive generations of poor immigrants killed each other, manipulated in a perfectly cynical way by the ruling classes.
The Gangs of New York and the New York City Draft Riots
The New York City draft riots (July 13–16, 1863).
Sometimes referred to as the Manhattan draft riots, and known at the time as Draft Week, were violent disturbances in Lower Manhattan, widely regarded as the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil and most racially charged urban disturbance in American history.
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln diverted several regiments of militia and volunteer troops after the Battle of Gettysburg to control the city. The rioters were overwhelmingly white working-class men who feared free black people competing for work and resented that wealthier men, who could afford to pay a $300 (equivalent to $6,300 in 2020) commutation fee to hire a substitute, were spared from the draft.
Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters, many of them Irish immigrants, attacking black people, in violence throughout the city.
The background to this communal violence was a classic case of a capitalist class society making necessary adjustments, via organised violence and corruption, to maintain the highest profit returns on vested capital interests.
New York in the 1860's
New York's economy was tied to the South; by 1822 nearly half of its exports were cotton shipments. In addition, upstate textile mills processed cotton in manufacturing. New York had such strong business connections to the South that on January 7, 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood, a Democrat, called on the city's Board of Aldermen to "declare the city's independence from Albany and from Washington"; he said it "would have the whole and united support of the Southern States." When the Union entered the war, New York City had many sympathisers with the South.
The city was also a continuing destination of immigrants. Since the 1840s, most were from Ireland and Germany. In 1860, nearly 25 percent of the New York City population was German-born, and many did not speak English. During the 1840s and 1850s, journalists had published sensational accounts, directed at the white working class, dramatizing the "evils" of interracial socializing, relationships, and marriages. Reformers joined the effort. Newspapers carried derogatory portrayals of black people and ridiculed "black aspirations for equal rights in voting, education, and employment". Pseudo-scientific lectures on phrenology were a popular means to justifying an explicitly white supremacist position, although this campaign was countered by some in the medical profession.
The Democratic Party Tammany Hall political machine had been working to enroll immigrants as U.S. citizens so they could vote in local elections and had strongly recruited Irish. In March 1863, with the war continuing, Congress passed the Enrollment Act to establish a draft for the first time, as more troops were needed. In New York City and other locations, new citizens learned they were expected to register for the draft to fight for their new country. Black men were excluded from the draft as they were largely not considered citizens, and wealthier white men could pay for substitutes.
New York political offices, including the mayor, were historically held by Democrats before the war, but the election of Abraham Lincoln as president had demonstrated the rise in Republican political power nationally. Newly elected New York City Republican Mayor George Opdyke was mired in profiteering scandals in the months leading up to the riots. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 alarmed much of the white working class in New York, who feared that freed slaves would migrate to the city and add further competition to the labor market. There had already been tensions between black and white workers since the 1850s, particularly at the docks, with free blacks and immigrants competing for low-wage jobs in the city. In March 1863, white longshoremen refused to work with black labourers and rioted, attacking 200 black men.
This is an excerpt from:
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863
by Leslie M. Harris:
The New York City Draft Riots of 1863
In September of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which would take effect January 1, 1863, and free slaves in those states or regions still in rebellion against the Union. If any southern state returned to the Union between September and January, whites in that state theoretically would not lose ownership of their slaves. Despite its limits, free blacks, slaves, and abolitionists across the country hailed it as one of the most important actions on behalf of freedom in the nation's history. The Emancipation Proclamation brought formal recognition that the war was being fought, at least in part, on behalf of black freedom and equality.
The enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 capped two years of increasing support for emancipation in New York City. Although Republicans attempted to keep abolitionists from taking a leading role in New York's antislavery politics during the early years of the war, by 1862 abolitionist speakers drew huge audiences, black and white, in the city. Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York's white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York's Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern blacks would supposedly flee north. To these New Yorkers, the Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears. In March 1863, fuel was added to the fire in the form of a stricter federal draft law. All male citizens between twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age were subject to military duty. The federal government entered all eligible men into a lottery. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. Blacks, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft.
In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government's intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the "nigger war." Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that "[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes." In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began.
The rioters' targets initially included only military and governmental buildings, symbols of the unfairness of the draft. Mobs attacked only those individuals who interfered with their actions. But by afternoon of the first day, some of the rioters had turned to attacks on black people, and on things symbolic of black political, economic, and social power. Rioters attacked a black fruit vendor and a nine-year-old boy at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street before moving to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets. By the spring of 1863, the managers had built a home large enough to house over two hundred children. Financially stable and well-stocked with food, clothing, and other provisions, the four-story orphanage at its location on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street was an imposing symbol of white charity toward blacks and black upward mobility. At 4 P.M. on July 13, "the children numbering 233, were quietly seated in their school rooms, playing in the nursery, or reclining on a sick bed in the Hospital when an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc. advanced upon the Institution." The crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food, and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. John Decker, chief engineer of the fire department, was on hand, but firefighters were unable to save the building. The destruction took twenty minutes.
In the meantime, the superintendent and matron of the asylum assembled the children and led them out to Forty-Fourth Street. Miraculously, the mob refrained from assaulting the children. But when an Irish observer of the scene called out, "If there is a man among you, with a heart within him come and help these poor children," the mob "laid hold of him, and appeared ready to tear him to pieces." The children made their way to the Thirty-Fifth Street Police Station, where they remained for three days and nights before moving to the almshouse on Blackwell's Island — ironically, the very place from which the orphanage's founders had hoped to keep black children when they built the asylum almost thirty years earlier.
The Irish man who castigated the mob for not helping the black children was not the only white person punished by rioters for seeming overly sympathetic to blacks. Throughout the week of riots, mobs harassed and sometimes killed blacks and their supporters and destroyed their property. Rioters burned the home of Abby Hopper Gibbons, prison reformer and daughter of abolitionist Isaac Hopper. They also attacked white "amalgamationists," such as Ann Derrickson and Ann Martin, two women who were married to black men; and Mary Burke, a white prostitute who catered to black men. Near the docks, tensions that had been brewing since the mid-1850s between white longshoremen and black workers boiled over. As recently as March of 1863, white employers had hired blacks as longshoremen, with whom Irish men refused to work. An Irish mob then attacked two hundred blacks who were working on the docks, while other rioters went into the streets in search of "all the negro porters, cartmen and laborers . . . they could find." They were routed by the police. But in July 1863, white longshoremen took advantage of the chaos of the Draft Riots to attempt to remove all evidence of a black and interracial social life from area near the docks. White dockworkers attacked and destroyed brothels, dance halls, boarding houses, and tenements that catered to blacks; mobs stripped the clothing off the white owners of these businesses.
Black men and black women were attacked, but the rioters singled out the men for special violence. On the waterfront, they hanged William Jones and then burned his body. White dock workers also beat and nearly drowned Charles Jackson, and they beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. Rioters also made a sport of mutilating the black men's bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams — jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones — while a crowd of men, women, and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging "vengeance on every nigger in New York." A white laborer, George Glass, rousted black coachman Abraham Franklin from his apartment and dragged him through the streets. A crowd gathered and hanged Franklin from a lamppost as they cheered for Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. After the mob pulled Franklin's body from the lamppost, a sixteen-year-old Irish man, Patrick Butler, dragged the body through the streets by its genitals. Black men who tried to defend themselves fared no better. The crowds were pitiless. After James Costello shot at and fled from a white attacker, six white men beat, stomped, kicked, and stoned him before hanging him from a lamppost.
With these actions white workers enacted their desires to eradicate the working-class black male presence from the city. The Longshoreman's Association, a white labor union, patrolled the piers during the riots, insisting that "the colored people must and shall be driven to other parts of industry." But "other parts of industry," such as cartmen and hack drivers, not to mention skilled artisans, also sought to exclude black workers. The riots gave all these workers license to physically remove blacks not only from worksites, but also from neighborhoods and leisure spaces. The rioters' actions also indicate the degree to which the sensational journalists and reformers of the 1840s and 1850s had achieved their goals of convincing whites, and particularly the Irish, that interracial socializing and marriage were evil and degrading practices. The riots unequivocally divided white workers from blacks. The act of rioting may itself have released guilt and shame over former interracial pleasures. Finally, and most simply, white workers asserted their superiority over blacks through the riots. The Civil War and the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln to power indicated to New York's largely Democratic white workers a reversal of power in the nation; black labor competition indicated a reversal of fortunes in New York City itself. White workers sought to remedy their upside-down world through mob violence.
Ironically, the most well known center of black and interracial social life, the Five Points, was relatively quiet during the riots. Mobs neither attacked the brothels there nor killed black people within its borders. There were also instances of interracial cooperation. When a mob threatened black drugstore owner Philip White in his store at the corner of Gold and Frankfurt Street, his Irish neighbors drove the mob away, for he had often extended them credit. And when rioters invaded Hart's Alley and became trapped at its dead end, the black and white residents of the alley together leaned out of their windows and poured hot starch on them, driving them from the neighborhood. But such incidents were few compared to the widespread hatred of blacks expressed during and after the riots.
In all, rioters lynched eleven black men over the five days of mayhem. The riots forced hundreds of blacks out of the city. As Iver Bernstein states, "For months after the riots the public life of the city became a more noticeably white domain." During the riots, landlords drove blacks from their residences, fearing the destruction of their property. After the riots, when the Colored Orphan Asylum attempted to rebuild on the site of its old building, neighboring property owners asked them to leave. The orphanage relocated to 51st Street for four years before moving into a new residence at 143rd Street between Amsterdam and Broadway, in the midst of what would become New York's predominantly black neighborhood in the twentieth century, Harlem. But in 1867, the area was barely settled and far removed from the center of New York City. Black families also fled the city altogether. Albro Lyons, keeper of the Colored Sailors' Home, was able to protect the boardinghouse on the first day of the riots, but soon fled to the neighborhood police station to seek an escort from the city for his wife and family. An officer accompanied the Lyons family to the Sailors' Home, where they gathered up what belongings they could carry before boarding the Roosevelt Street ferry, which took them to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. "From the moment they put foot on the boat, that was the last time they ever resided in New York City, leaving it forever." Other blacks fled to New Jersey and beyond. By 1865, the black population had plummeted to just under ten thousand, its lowest since 1820.
Those blacks who remained in the city found a somewhat chastened elite eager to help New York's black residents recover in the aftermath of the riots. The seven-month-old Union League Club (which had as one of its main tenets black uplift) and the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People spearheaded relief efforts to blacks, providing forty thousand dollars to almost twenty-five hundred riot victims and finding new jobs and homes for blacks. Just under a year later, Republican elites and New York City blacks publicly celebrated their renewed alliance. In December of 1863, the secretary of war gave the Union League Club permission to raise a black regiment. The Union League Club decided to march the regiment of over one thousand black men through the streets of New York to the Hudson River, where the ship that would take them south waited. On March 5, 1864, before a crowd of one hundred thousand black and white New Yorkers, the black regiment processed, making "a fine appearance in their blue uniform, white gloves and white leggings." They were preceded by the police superintendent, one hundred policemen, the Union League Club itself, "colored friends of the recruits," and a band. In a powerful display, the parade publicly linked blacks with the leaders of the new order being ushered in by the Civil War.
But the event could not completely erase the racial concerns that had been part of the draft riots, if indeed its organizers sought to. One account said of the soldiers, "a majority of them are black; indeed there are but few mulattoes among them," an attempt to downplay the obvious fears of racial mixing that white workers displayed before and during the riots, fears which many white elites may have shared. Observers also used the event to contrast the loyalty of blacks to the Union and their good behavior with the recent rioting as well as the general culture of white workers: "The 20th is emphatically an African regiment, and to its credit be it spoken, not one of its members disobeyed orders, no one broke ranks to greet enthusiastic friends, no one used intoxicating drinks to excess, no one manifested the least inclination to leave the service, and their marching was very creditable." The New York elite presented the black troops as symbols of the new orderly working class they desired: sober, solemn, obedient, and dedicated to the Union cause. But such simple symbolism obscured the complex divisions of status, class, outlook and aspiration that had been part of New York's free black community from its inception.
As the Union Army marched south, it brought with it black and white abolitionists (many affiliated with the American Missionary Assocition, others independent of organized efforts) who sought to reform southern blacks during and after the war. These largely middle-class activists carried ideas of racial uplift first promulgated in the northeast, from creating manual labor schools to moral reform to enhancing wage labor. They encountered newly free blacks eager for educational and economic betterment, but just as certainly shaping their own definitions of independence and equality. During the Civil War and Reconstruction years, black and white people from urban and rural areas in the north and south were challenged to create new opportunities for the freed people. But New York City had never unified to overcome the problems of racism and fully embrace black freedom; neither would the nation.
Is communitarianism a stumbling block?
Samir Amin writes:
In the United States, there is no workers' party and there never has been. The communitarian ideologies were not and are not a substitute for a working-class socialist ideology, even the most radical of them in the Black community. By definition, communitarianism is part and parcel of the context of widespread racism, which it fights on its own ground, but nothing more.
(page 48)
Socialism in the United States began with utopian communities in the early 19th century such as the Shakers, the activist visionary Josiah Warren and intentional communities inspired by Charles Fourier. Labor activists—usually British, German, or Jewish immigrants—founded the Socialist Labor Party in 1877.
The Socialist Party of America was established in 1901. By that time, anarchism also established itself around the country while socialists of different tendencies were involved in early American labor organizations and struggles which reached a high point in the Haymarket affair in Chicago which started International Workers' Day as the main workers holiday around the world (except in the United States, which celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September) and making the 8-hour day a worldwide objective by workers organizations and socialist parties worldwide.
Under Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, socialist opposition to World War I led to the governmental repression collectively known as the First Red Scare. The Socialist Party declined in the 1920s, but nonetheless often ran Norman Thomas for President. In the 1930s, the Communist Party USA took importance in labor and racial struggles while it suffered a split which converged in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
In the 1950s, socialism was affected by McCarthyism and in the 1960s it was revived by the general radicalization brought by the New Left and other social struggles and revolts. In the 1960s, Michael Harrington and other socialists were called to assist the Kennedy administration and then the Johnson administration's War on Poverty and Great Society while socialists also played important roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Socialism in the United States has been composed of many tendencies, often in important disagreements with each other; it has included utopian socialists, social democrats, democratic socialists, communists, Trotskyists and anarchists.
The socialist movement in the United States has historically been relatively weak.
Unlike socialist parties in Europe, Canada and Oceania, a major social democratic party never materialized in the United States and the socialist movement remains marginal,"almost unique in its powerlessness among the Western democracies".Oshinsky, David (24 July 1988), "It Wasn't Easy Being a Leftist", The New York Times.
But change is NOT just coming!
It is already here NOW!
AOC - an American democratic socialist!
This is the official photographic portrait of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (born October 13, 1989), also known by her initials AOC, is an American politician and activist. She has served as the U.S. Representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019, as a member of the Democratic Party. The district includes the eastern part of the Bronx, portions of north-central Queens, and Rikers Island in New York City.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of an informal group of progressive freshmen members of Congress called "The Squad", along with Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. It was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who coined the "Squad" name in an Instagram post a week after the 2018 election. The use of the word "squad" originates in East Coast hip hop culture and describes "a self-chosen group of people that you want to identify with". So, Ocasio-Cortez in using this term, locates political vision in the context of a popular form of cultural expression, as well as being a playful reference to social cliques in a specific cultural setting. And Ocasio-Cortez's home borough of The Bronx is where hip hop originates.The photo, taken at a VoteRunLead event where the four founding members spoke, subsequently went viral.
Initially composed of the four women who appear in the Instagram image, all four having been elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections, they have since been joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri following the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections. The group is well known for being among the most progressive and left-wing members of the United States Congress.
All are under 50, have been supported by the Justice Democrats political action committee, and are on the left wing of the Democratic Party. All except Omar and Tlaib were initially elected to Congress after unseating incumbents in primary challenges. All members of this group represent safe seats.The group has been said to represent the demographic diversity of a younger political generation and the advocacy of progressive policies such as the Green New Deal, which have sometimes clashed with their party's leadership.On July 14, 2019, President Donald Trump attacked the Squad (which had only the original four members at the time) in a tweet, saying that they should "go back and help fix" the countries they came from rather than criticise the American government. He continued to make similar comments over the next several days, even though three of the women, including Ocasio-Cortez, were born in the United States. Ocasio-Cortez responded in a tweet that "the President's words [yesterday], telling four American Congresswomen of color 'go back to your own country' is hallmark language of white supremacists." She later added, "We don't leave the things that we love, and when we love this country, what that means is that we propose the solutions to fix it." Days later, Trump falsely asserted that Ocasio-Cortez called "our country and our people 'garbage'"; she had actually said that Americans should not be content with moderate policies that are "10% better from garbage". Trump also falsely claimed that Ocasio-Cortez said "illegal immigrants are more American" than Americans who tried to keep them out; she actually said that "women and children on that border that are trying to seek refuge and opportunity" in America "are acting more American" than those who tried to keep them out.Ocasio-Cortez is an American socialist, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and embraces the democratic socialist label as part of her political identity. In an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, she described democratic socialism as "part of what I am. It's not all of what I am. And I think that that's a very important distinction." In response to a question about democratic socialism ultimately calling for an end to capitalism during a Firing Line interview on PBS, she answered: "Ultimately, we are marching towards progress on this issue. I do think that we are going to see an evolution in our economic system of an unprecedented degree, and it's hard to say what direction that that takes."
Later at a conference she said:
"To me, capitalism is irredeemable."Ocasio-Cortez supports progressive policies such as single-payer Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and trade school, a federal job guarantee, the cancellation of all $1.6 trillion of outstanding student debt, guaranteed family leave, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ending the privatisation of prisons, enacting gun-control policies, and energy policy relying on 100% renewables.She is open to using Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as an economic pathway that could provide funding and enable implementation of these goals.Q. Who else wants this change?
A. Young Americans from diverse urban communities!
The demographic landscape, as far as the Black Lives Matter movement, and the campaigns for social justice and demands for action to tackle the causes of global heating, is changing. The demands are for structural and systemic change. Protesters are coming together from across society, and from different communities, and they are younger than Americans overall.
This report by the Pew Research Center by Amanda Barroso and Rachel Minkin (June 24, 2020) analyses the data under the headline:
Recent protest attendees are more racially and ethnically diverse, younger than Americans overall
Amanda Barroso and Rachel Minkin write:Large-scale protests and rallies for racial equality have captured public attention and amplified calls for policy reforms in recent weeks. Some 6% of U.S. adults say they have attended a protest or rally that focused on issues related to race or racial equality in the last month, and those who have are more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. They are also more likely to live in an urban area and to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.
Black Americans account for 17% of those who say they attended a protest focused on race or racial equality in the last month, compared with their 11% share of all adults in the survey. Hispanic Americans account for 22% of recent protest attendees, versus 15% of all adults. The difference is less pronounced but still statistically significant when it comes to the share of protesters who are Asian (8% vs. 5% of the adults surveyed). While 64% of U.S. adults are white, just 46% of those who said they attended a protest focused on race in the last month are white. About four-in-ten (41%) of those who say they recently attended a protest focused on race are younger than 30; among all U.S. adults, 19% are in this age group. In turn, those ages 50 and older are underrepresented among the protesters, while those ages 30 to 49 represent a similar share of those who have attended a protest as they do of the adult population overall.City dwellers, who represent 28% of the adults surveyed, make up 41% of those who say they have protested within the past month. Some 42% of people who participated in last month’s protests live in the suburbs (compared with 47% of all adults), and those who live in rural areas account for 17% of recent protesters, compared with 25% of the survey sample.
When it comes to political party affiliation, about eight-in-ten (79%) of those who say they participated in a protest or rally focused on race or racial equality in the last month identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 17% say they are Republican or Republican-leaning.
As is the case among the overall adult population, men and women each make up about half of those who say they attended a protest focused on race in the last month. Protesters also don’t differ considerably from the adult population in terms of income or educational attainment.
They share a common concern, a shared future!It's a "Woke Up" call!
AOC shares her thinking . . .
There is NO political party for the working class, in the United States, and along the length and breadth of the LODE Zone Line! And communitarianism still dominates the political discourse, especially in India and Indonesia, where religious identity is mobilised by an established patriarchy to maintain existing power and interests. But there is a growing generational and cross community demand for change all along the LODE Zone Line. The present situation echoes some of the features of the 60's and 70's counterculture, and, maybe, the times they are a changing' . . .
So come gather round people . . .
The coincidence of the Civil Rights movement with the Vietnam War helped to radicalise African American servicemen both in Vietnam and on their return. In this article, accessible from On-line resources - American Studies Resources Centre at Liverpool John Moores University, Brendan Gallagher considers how the two events are inextricably bound up.
In the opening paragraphs of this article Brendan Gallagher references a scene from Apocalypse Now:
When the Vietnam War escalated and was wholeheartedly backed by the White House, President Johnson failed to realise the racial nightmare that American involvement in Vietnam would create. Vietnam coincided with the protests of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of Black Power during 1960s America. Whilst African-Americans were discriminated at home but also within the U.S. armed forces, the effects of black power, the impact of the Civil Rights struggle and “the resurgence of black sub-cultural style, expressed through dress, language and gesture”, had been transferred to the war zone.
Amidst increasing tension, black soldiers embraced Black Power: culturally and politically. Vietnam was America’s first racially integrated conflict. Black soldiers had fought in all of America’s previous military encounters, but in segregated units. However, a small number of segregated units still existed, and “an officerless and forgotten platoon of anxious black G.I.s despairingly shooting into the darkness…in the last American outpost on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia” was movingly portrayed in the film Apocalypse Now.
The experience of American military personnel of African ancestry during the Vietnam War had received significant attention. For example, the website "African-American Involvement in the Vietnam War" compiles examples of such coverage, as does the print and broadcast work of journalist Wallace Terry whose book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984), includes observations about the impact of the war on the black community in general and on black servicemen specifically. Points he makes on the latter topic include: the higher proportion of combat casualties in Vietnam among African American servicemen than among American soldiers of other races, the shift toward and different attitudes of black military careerists versus black draftees, the discrimination encountered by black servicemen "on the battlefield in decorations, promotion and duty assignments" as well as their having to endure "the racial insults, cross-burnings and Confederate flags of their white comrades" — and the experiences faced by black soldiers stateside, during the war and after America's withdrawal.
Brendan Gallagher sets out the facts:
The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement:
As President Lyndon Johnson increased the focus of American foreign policy on the conflict in Vietnam, statistics soon presented stark evidence of racial discrimination. In 1965 there were 23,000 U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. By the end of 1967, the number rose dramatically to 465,000 – the result of Project 100,000, initiated by President Johnson in 1966. Qualification standards were lowered meaning that black Americans who had previously evaded the draft owing to poor education opportunities, were now eligible and so too, ironically, were racially intolerant, poor white men from the Southern States. 246,000 men were recruited between October 1966 and June 1969 – 41% were black, although black Americans represented only 11% of the U.S. population. 58,000 lost their lives in the conflict, 22% of whom were black. Less than 3% of the officers in the Army were black, less than 1% in the Marines.
Draft boards themselves were, by their very nature, divisive and discriminatory: in 1967 no black Americans were present on the boards in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Jack Helms, a member of the Louisiana draft board, was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan. He described the long established National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People black civil rights group, as “a communist-inspired, anti-Christ, sex-perverted group of tennis short beatniks.”
Soon rumours abounded that the U.S. government were using the Vietnam War as a form of genocide. Money was being pumped into Vietnam instead of poor black communities in America. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver noted the contradictory situation, and complained: “black Americans are asked to die for the system in Vietnam, in Watts (a poor black suburb of Los Angeles) they are asked to die by it.”
Lance Corporal William L. Harvey also voiced his concern to a Washington Post reporter: “Vietnam is a white man’s war. Black men should not go, only to return and fight whites at home.”
Black soldiers began to identify with the enemy: they saw the Vietnamese as, like themselves, victims of white colonial racist aggression. They were encouraged by anti-war demonstrations at home. White and black students, representing the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, regularly organised marches and disruptive sit-ins. Boxer, Muhammad Ali dared to speak out: “ I ain`t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.” and declared: “They want me to go to Vietnam to shoot some black folks that never lynched me. Never called me nigger, never assassinated my leaders.” His subsequent refusal to enlist as a serviceman led to a harsh rebuke from the American Government: he was subsequently fined and sentenced to prison - effectively stripping him of his World title.
Martin Luther King voiced his concerns and charged the U.S. Government with being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today ”, and urged dissenting blacks to seek the status of conscientious objectors (as indeed Ali had done). Furthermore, other groups uttered their discontent and disillusionment. “We recoil with horror,” said an S.N.C.C position paper in 1965, “at the inconsistency of a supposedly free society where responsibility to freedom is equated with the responsibility to lend oneself to military aggression.” Outrage over the war, and over the “disproportionate number” of young black men being drafted to fight it, contributed significantly to S.N.C.C’s embrace of Black Power.
Wikipedia says:
Civil rights leaders protested the disproportionate casualties and the overrepresentation in hazardous duty and combat roles experienced by African American servicemen, prompting reforms that were implemented beginning in 1967–68. As a result, by the war's completion in 1975, black casualties had declined to 12.5% of US combat deaths, approximately equal to percentage of draft-eligible black men, though still slightly higher than the 10% who served in the military.
Continued in PART 3.
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