[THS] William Blum: Terminally Dumb People

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25435.htm

Terminally Dumb People

By William Blum

May 13, 2010 "Information Clearing House"  Terminally-dumb people have always
been with us of, course.  It can’t be that we’ve suddenly gone stupid.

If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the
Teaparty followers of Sarah “Africa is a country” Palin and other intellectual giants like
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh 
 If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the
latest silly lies and fantasies like “Obama the Marxist” and “Obama the antichrist” 

If you share Noam Chomsky’s feeling: “I have never seen anything like this in my
lifetime” 
 keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as
mean-spirited.  Consider some of the behavior of the same types for half a century
during the Cold War with its beloved — albeit imaginary — “International Communist
Conspiracy”.

* 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of
employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed presidential-nominating petitions
for former Vice President Henry Wallace, running under the Progressive Party.  This,
and a number of other lists of “communists”, published in the mainstream media,
resulted in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their children
abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering various other
punishments.

Around 1950: The House Committee on Un-American Activities published a pamphlet,
100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A.  This included
information about what a communist takeover of the United States would mean:

Q: What would happen to my insurance?
A: It would go to the Communists.
Q: Would communism give me something better than I have now?
A: Not unless you are in a penitentiary serving a life sentence at hard labor.

* 1950s: Mrs. Ada White, member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission,
believed that Robin Hood was a Communist and urged that books that told the Robin
Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.

* As evidence that anti-communist mania was not limited to the lunatic fringe or
conservative newspaper publishers, here is Clark Kerr, president of the University of
California at Berkeley in a 1959 speech: “Perhaps 2 or even 20 million people have
been killed in China by the new [communist] regime.”  One person wrote to Kerr: “I
am wondering how you would judge a person who estimates the age of a passerby
on the street as being ‘perhaps 2 or even 20 years old.’  Or what would you think of a
physician who tells you to take ‘perhaps 2 or even twenty teaspoonsful of a remedy’?”

* Throughout the cold war, traffic in phoney Lenin quotes was brisk, each one
passed around from one publication or speaker to another for years.  Here’s U.S.
News and World Report in 1958 demonstrating communist duplicity by quoting Lenin:
“Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.”  Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles used it in a speech shortly afterward, one of many to do so during the cold
war.  Lenin actually did use a very similar line, but he explicitly stated that he was
quoting an English proverb (it comes from Jonathan Swift) and his purpose was to
show the unreliability of the bourgeoisie, not of communists.

    First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle
the United States, which will be the last bastion of capitalism.  We will not have to
attack.  It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.

This Lenin “quotation” had the usual wide circulation, even winding up in the
Congressional Record in 1962.  This was not simply a careless attribution; this was an
out-and-out fabrication; an extensive search, including by the Library of Congress
and the United States Information Agency failed to find its origin

* A favorite theme of the anti-communists was that a principal force behind drug
trafficking was a communist plot to demoralize the United States.  Here’s a small
sample:

Don Keller, District Attorney for San Diego County, California in 1953: “We know that
more heroin is being produced south of the border than ever before and we are
beginning to hear stories of financial backing by big shot Communists operating out
of Mexico City.”

Henry Giordano, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1964, interviewed
in the American Legion Magazine:

    Interviewer: “I’ve been told that the communists are trying to flood our country
with narcotics to weaken our moral and physical stamina.  Is that true?”

    Giordano: “As far as the drugs are concerned, it’s true.  There’s a terrific flow of
drugs coming out of Yunnan Province of China. 
 There’s no question that in that
particular area this is the aim of the Red Chinese.  It should be apparent that if you
could addict a population you would degrade a nation’s moral fiber.”

Fulton Lewis, Jr., prominent conservative radio broadcaster and newspaper
columnist, 1965: “Narcotics of Cuban origin — marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin
— are now peddled in big cities and tiny hamlets throughout this country.  Several
Cubans arrested by the Los Angeles police have boasted they are communists.”

We were also told that along with drugs another tool of the commies to undermine
America’s spirit was fluoridation of the water.

* Mickey Spillane was one of the most successful writers of the 1950s, selling millions
of his anti-communist thriller mysteries.  Here is his hero, Mike Hammer, in One
Lonely Night, boasting of his delight in the grisly murders he commits, all in the name
of destroying a communist plot to steal atomic secrets.  After a night of carnage, the
triumphant Hammer gloats, “I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of
it.  I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of bastards you ever saw. 
 They were
Commies. 
 Pretty soon what’s left of Russia and the slime that breeds there won’t
be worth mentioning and I’m glad because I had a part in the killing.  God, but it
was fun!”

* 1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization because it was tainted with “atheism and communism” and was
“subversive” because it preached internationalism.  Any attempt to introduce an
international point of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and
loyalty to the United States.  A bill in the US Senate, clearly aimed at UNESCO, called
for a ban on the funding of “any international agency that directly or indirectly
promoted one-world government or world citizenship.”  There was also opposition to
UNESCO’s association with the UN Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that
it was trying to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving covenant
of human rights.

* 1955: A US Army 6-page pamphlet, How to Spot a Communist, informed us that a
communist could be spotted by his predisposition to discuss civil rights, racial and
religious discrimination, the immigration laws, anti-subversive legislation, curbs on
unions, and peace.  Good Americans were advised to keep their ears stretched for
such give-away terms as “chauvinism”, “book-burning”, “colonialism”, “demagogy”,
“witch hunt”, “reactionary”, “progressive”, and “exploitation”.  Another
“distinguishing mark” of “Communist language” was a “preference for long
sentences.”  After some ridicule, the Army rescinded the pamphlet.

* 1958: The noted sportscaster Bill Stern (one of the heroes of my youth) observed
on the radio that the lack of interest in “big time” football at New York University, City
College of New York, Chicago, and Harvard “is due to the widespread acceptance of
Communism at the universities.”

* 1960: US General Thomas Power speaking about nuclear war or a first strike by the
US: “The whole idea is to kill the bastards!  At the end of the war, if there are two
Americans and one Russian, we win!”  The response from one of those present was:
“Well, you’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.”

* 1966: The Boys Club of America is, of course, wholesome and patriotic.  Imagine
their horror when they were confused with the Dubois Clubs.  (W.E.B. Du Bois had
been a very prominent civil rights activist.)  When the Justice Department required
the DuBois Clubs to register as a Communist front group, good loyal Americans knew
what to do.  They called up the Boys Club to announce that they would no longer
contribute any money, or to threaten violence against them; and sure enough an
explosion damaged the national headquarters of the youth group in San Francisco.
Then former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was national board chairman of the
Boys Club, declared: “This is an almost classic example of Communist deception and
duplicity.  The ‘DuBois Clubs’ are not unaware of the confusion they are causing
among our supporters and among many other good citizens.”

* 1966: Rhythm, Riots and Revolution: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music,
The Communist Master Music Plan by David A. Noebel, published by Christian
Crusade Publications, (expanded version of 1965 pamphlet: Communism, Hypnotism
and the Beatles).  Some chapters: Communist Use of Mind Warfare 
 Nature of Red
Record Companies 
 Destructive Nature of Beatle Music 
 Communist Subversion of
Folk Music 
 Folk Music and the Negro Revolution 
 Folk Music and the College
Revolution

* 1968: William Calley, US Army Lieutenant, charged with overseeing the massacre of
more than 100 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai in 1968, said some years later: “In all
my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings.  We
were there to kill ideology carried by — I don’t know — pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh.
I was there to destroy communism.  We never conceived of old people, men,
women, children, babies.”

* 1977: Scientists theorized that the earth’s protective ozone layer was being
damaged by synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons.  The manufacturers and
users of CFCs were not happy.  They made life difficult for the lead scientist.  The
president of one aerosol manufacturing firm suggested that criticism of CFCs was
“orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the KGB.”

* 1978: Life inside a California youth camp of the ultra anti-communist John Birch
Society: Five hours each day of lectures on communism, Americanism and “The
Conspiracy”; campers learned that the Soviet government had created a famine and
spread a virus to kill a large number of citizens and make the rest of them more
manageable; the famine led starving adults to eat their children; communist
guerrillas in Southeast Asia jammed chopsticks into children’s ears, piercing their
eardrums; American movies are all under the control of the Communists; the theme
is always that capitalism is no better than communism; you can’t find a dictionary
now that isn’t under communist influence; the communists are also taking over the
Bibles.

* The Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic
chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan — the so-called “yellow rain” — and
had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in
Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of
1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information).  Secretary of State
Alexander Haig was a prime dispenser of such stories, and President Reagan himself
denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches.
The “yellow rain”, it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of
honeybees flying far overhead.

* 1982: In commenting about sexual harassment in the Army, General John Crosby
stated that the Army doesn’t care about soldiers’ social lives — “The basic purpose of
the United States Army is to kill Russians,” he said.

* 1983: The US invasion of Grenada, the home of the Cuban ambassador is damaged
and looted by American soldiers; on one wall is written “AA”, symbol of the 82nd
Airborne Division; beside it the message: “Eat shit, commie faggot.” 
 “I want to
fuck communism out of this little island,” says a marine, “and fuck it right back to
Moscow.”

* 1984: During a sound check just before his weekly broadcast, President Reagan
spoke these words into the microphone: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell
you I have signed legislation to outlaw Russia, forever.  We begin bombing in five
minutes.”  His words were picked up by at least two radio networks.

* 1985: October 29 BBC interview with Ronald Reagan: asked about the differences
he saw between the US and Russia, the president replied: “I’m no linguist, but I’ve
been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.”  (The
word is “svoboda”.)

* 1986: Soviet artists and cultural officials criticized Rambo-like American films as an
expression of “anti-Russian phobia even more pathological than in the days of
McCarthyism”.  Russian film-maker, Stanislav Rostofsky, claimed that on one visit to
an American school “a young girl had trembled with fury when she heard I was from
the Soviet Union, and said she hated Russians.”

* 1986: Roy Cohn, who achieved considerable fame and notoriety in the 1950s as an
assistant to the communist-witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy, died, reportedly
of AIDS.  Cohn, though homosexual, had denied that he was and had denounced
such rumors as communist smears.

* 1986: After American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was arrested in Moscow for
“spying” and held in custody for two weeks, New York Mayor, Edward Koch, sent a
group of 10 visiting Soviet students storming out of City Hall in fury.  “The Soviet
government is the pits,” said Koch, visibly shocking the students, ranging in age from
10 to 18 years.  One 14-year-old student was so outraged he declared: “I don’t want
to stay in this house.  I want to go to the bus and go far away from this place.  The
mayor is very rude.  We never had a worse welcome anywhere.”  As matters turned
out, it appeared that Daniloff had not been completely pure when it came to his
news gathering.

* 1989: After the infamous Chinese crackdown on dissenters in Tiananmen Square in
June, the US news media was replete with reports that the governments of
Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba had expressed their support of the Chinese leadership.
Said the Wall Street Journal: “Nicaragua, with Cuba and Vietnam, constituted  the
only countries in the world to approve the Chinese Communists’ slaughter of the
students in Tiananmen Square.”  But it was all someone’s fabrication; no such
support had been expressed by any of the three governments.  At that time, as now,
there were few, if any, organizations other than the CIA which could manipulate
major Western media in such a manner.

NOTE: It should be remembered that the worst consequences of anti-communism
were not those discussed above.  The worst consequences, the ultra-criminal
consequences, were the abominable death, destruction, and violation of human
rights that we know under various names: Vietnam, Chile, Korea, Guatemala,
Cambodia, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and many others.1

Anti-Communism, alive and well

Anti-communism continues to have a detrimental effect upon the intelligence and
honesty of Americans.  In April, US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated that the
Castro brothers “do not want to see an end to the embargo and do not want to see
normalization with the United States because they would then lose all the excuses for
what hasn’t happened in Cuba in the last 50 years.”2

She doesn’t believe that herself.  But she thinks the rest or us are stupid enough to
swallow it.  If she did believe it, she’d advocate normalization of US-Cuban relations
just to stick it to the Castros and show them up for the frauds she says they are.  In
effect the American Secretary of State declared that the central element of US Cuba
policy for 50 years has done exactly the opposite of what it was intended to
accomplish.  Washington, for all practical purposes, has been a loyal — if unwitting —
ally of the Havana regime.

As to “what hasn’t happened in Cuba in the last 50 years” — to add to the mountain
of other evidence of the benevolence of Cuban society we now have Save the
Children’s “State of the World’s Mothers Report 2010“.  Save the Children, an
internationally acclaimed children’s advocate organization, annually ranks the best
and worst places to be a mother.  Amongst the 81 “Less Developed Countries”
analyzed, Cuba is ranked number one; i.e., the best place to be a mother.  (Amongst
the 43 “More Developed Countries” analyzed, the United States is ranked number
28.)

Cuban National Assembly president, Ricardo Alarcon, responded to Clinton’s
statement by saying: “If she really thinks that the blockade benefits the Cuban
government — which she wants to undermine — the solution is very simple: that they
lift it even for a year to see whether it is in our interest or theirs.”2

Israel, US foreign policy and my video

Last month I sent out the video that I wrote the script for “Be nice to America.  Or
we’ll bring democracy to your country.”

I, of course, received the usual right-wing frothing at the mouth, but I also heard
from five or six people on the left who expressed political criticism of it, two of them
asking to be removed from my mailing list.

All of them were upset for the same reason –- the video makes no mention of Israel.
More to the point, it makes no mention of how Israel is the driving force behind
[most? almost all? all?] US foreign interventions.  I sent each of my critics the
following letter:

So, let me see if I have this right.  It’s because of Israel that the US:

** invaded Grenada in 1983
** tried to overthrow the government of Suriname in 1982-4
** overthrew the government of Fiji in 1987
** invaded Panama in 1989
** overthrew the government of Afghanistan in the 1980s-90s
** suppressed the left in El Salvador 1980-92
** overthrew the government of Nicaragua in 1990
** supported the overthrow of Aristide in Haiti in 1991
** overthrew the government of Bulgaria in 1991
** overthrew the government of Albania in 1992
** invaded Somalia in 1993
** has supported the right-wing government of Colombia for the past 20 years
** bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999
** suppressed a leftist coup in Ecuador in 2000
** invaded Afghanistan in 2001
** has tried to destabilize the Chavez government in Venezuela for the past 10 years
** overthrew the government of Haiti in 2004

I received no reply from any of the comrades.

William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since
World War 2, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, West-Bloc
Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American
Empire. He can be reached at: bblum6 at aol.com. Portions of the books can be read,
and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

   1. Sources for almost all of the first section can be found in William Blum, Freeing
the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (2005), chapter 12; or the
author can be queried at bblum6 at aol.com.
   2. Agence France Presse, April 25, 2010.