The seeds of fascism, part 3

Part 1 opened with the September 10 murder of Charlie Kirk, a Christian Conservative hitherto unknown to me but with a large following in the USA. The crime led Johns Hopkins historian Todd Stoermer to find commonality between America’s post 9/11 authoritarianism and the early months after January 1933 in Germany, when Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor. Having described Todd’s focus as “narrowly political” (not in any way a pejorative) I went on to write Part 2 on socio-economic conditions, namely a West in rapid decline, favourable to fascism.

This post returns to the Kirk shooting as viewed by another American academic, now retired but still active as an erudite scourge of the dark heart of empire. As I’ve noted before – not, I hope, too many times or in too whinging a way – an occupational hazard of what I do is the loss of friends: at times inevitably, at times through tactlessness and the poor judgment of my lawless heart. But I’ve also gained them. Some – like ex trade unionist, soldier and systems engineer Dave Hansell; journalist, 911 sceptic, bringer of cricket to Scotland and much else John Booth; writer, entomologist, Osho escapee and life-loving prophet of ecological doom Anne Gerachty – I’ve gone on to meet in person. With others – the two Davids at Media Lens and Jan Oberg at TFF, to name but two from a lengthening list – I’ve yet to have that pleasure.

A third person in the latter category is Ed Curtin, a former professor of English literature. We’ve followed one another’s work for some time, a connection reinforced by shared appreciation of two North American songsters of rare depth and insight, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. A few days ago Ed posted on his Behind the Curtain site a piece which, as had Todd Stoermer’s, sites the Kirk slaying, its antecedents and unfolding consequences in crimes greater by far. But while Todd’s focus is indeed ‘narrowly political’, Ed’s is a cultural-psychological deep dive to find the ghost of Joe McCarthy free once more to roam, in new and darker form, the empire metropolis.

A New and Darker McCarthy Era Descends with the Night

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. . . . What’s madness but nobility of soul,
At odds with circumstance? . . . . A steady storm of correspondences!

Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time

We are all obscurantists now, deep in crepuscular propaganda, looking for light. “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”, as Bob Dylan sings in Not Dark Yet. “Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain.”

It’s a sentiment more and more people can identify with as dark, dangerous, and duplicitous news reports loot the public’s mind of any sense of logical understanding by presenting stories that contradict themselves, while inducing great anxiety. Double-binds, Catch 22s, contronymal cages meant to trap the public in impossible conundrums.

(A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee, and clip, which means to attach and to detach.)

Chaos reigns, as it is meant to do, as the Bill of Rights is stripped, Palestinians are slaughtered, nuclear war becomes more likely, and the crackdown on dissent increases dramatically under the second Trump administration. Today’s operation chaos, with its spying on American citizens, etc., makes the CIA’s previous illegal Operation Chaos (1967-74) spying operation seem quaint by comparison. Today’s surveillance is synonymous with the Internet and digital technology. It is getting very dark indeed.

The American oligarchic political system that is endlessly debated and fixates people’s attention is a contronymal system that contains positive and negative poles that cancel each other out while keeping the believer frozen and frustrated. It is essentially Orwell’s Doublethink with a twist, which is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accept both as true; such is a mainstay of effective propaganda. Once you are in it, you are trapped because there are no outside references – the simulated system of thought is your cage. Biden vs. Trump is an example of this cage, a cage created to keep people ensnared in confusion.

The Trump administration, working for the 1% and Israel, is creating a strategy of tension between social groups not seen since the CIA run Operation Gladio throughout Europe after WWII that involved assassinations, bombings, etc. that were blamed on communists. In other words, false flag operations meant to inflame the public through deception.

The official government and corporate media (but I am repeating myself) stories about the brutal public assassination of the influential young conservative Charlie Kirk and his subsequent sanctification as a great American martyr is an example of the contronymal cage at work. The stories are preposterous, as in the word’s etymological sense of before-behind, and therefore contradictory and absurd. The stories are like matrushka dolls; when the largest lie starts to fall apart you remove it and present fallback position number two and so on to the next hidden doll, if necessary. These stories are created before to be used after. Paul Craig Roberts described it thus:

James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence for three decades, long ago explained to me that intelligence services create stories inside stories, each with its carefully constructed trail of evidence, in order to create false trails as diversions. Such painstaking work can serve a variety of purposes. It can be used to embarrass or discredit an innocent person or organization that has an unhelpful position on an important issue and is in the way of an agenda. It can be used as a red herring to draw attention away from a failing explanation of an event by producing an alternative false explanation. I forget what Angleton called them, but the strategy is to have within a false story other stories that are there but withheld because of “national security” or “politically sensitive issues” or some such. Then if the official story gets into trouble, the backup story can be released in order to deflect attention into a new false story or to support the original story. Angleton said that intelligence services protect their necessary misdeeds by burying the misdeed in competing explanations.

I discern a trend in all the Charlie Kirk commentaries that suggests something else may be involved. Maybe Israel killed Kirk. Maybe not. I don’t know. There is no definitive evidence that they did. But as in the sentence Ralph Waldo Emerson ascribed to Henry Thoreau – “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk” – Netanyahu’s repeated denials seem very odd if Israel did not kill Kirk.

I do know that the official reports about the alleged assassin Tyler Robinson raise as many questions as they don’t answer. But from ex-CIA commentators to Council of Foreign Relation members to the conservative Ron Unz and others across the political spectrum, they are saying or intimating that not only has Israel probably killed Kirk but a number of them are making sure to add that it killed JFK, RFK and did 9/11, etc., and in all these commentaries the Central Intelligence Agency is never once mentioned. Very strange. Very, very strange. It’s as if the CIA has handed off all assassinations to the Mossad. So why? Why so much talk about the Mossad but none about the CIA?

And then you have Trump and Netanyahu, saying Israel’s hands are clean in the Kirk killing and more, which means Kirk was killed by a lone nut like JFK, Malcom X, MLK, Jr., and RFK. So it was Israel or a lone nut in all these assassinations. So who says otherwise, who says the CIA was behind the 1960 assassinations? Who says the lone nut scenarios are bullshit? Who says 9/11 was a U.S. inside job? Very few. I do. But more importantly, a man with a new book – Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcom X, Martin, and RFK – coming out in a month, James W. Douglass. Both of us are also sharp critics of Israel. Interesting comments before publication! What will come after?

It should be self-evident that Israel is run by fanatical Zionists and it is committing genocide of the Palestinians and has a long history of assassinating its alleged enemies. Netanyahu and his ilk have zero compunction when it comes to carrying out the most evil deeds (nor does the CIA). And Donald Trump is Israel’s fervent ally in all this, including the targeting of Iran.

The great journalist Max Blumenthal’s recent articles at The Grayzone about Charlie Kirk’s break with Netanyahu and his cutout funders in the U.S.A. shine a bright light on the backstory to Kirk’s killing. Blumenthal, a man of the left and a long-time analyst of Kirk, Israel, and Palestine, reports that Kirk, a man of the right, was in the weeks and months before his assassination moving away from his previous full-throated support of Israel because of its genocide of the Palestinians and his revulsion for Netanyahu. Previously, Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), was fully backed by the Zionist government and its cutout backers in the U.S. It was essentially an arm of Israeli propaganda and an important support for Trump aimed at young American conservatives. But in recent months, as Kirk suffered pangs of conscience, he had started criticizing Israel and turned down a massive offer of money from Netanyahu and more from pro-Israel backers into TPUSA. He was turning away from his previous support for the Netanyahu Zionist forces and was afraid for his life, especially after an August meeting in the Hamptons on Long Island convened by the Israel backer billionaire Bill Ackman where Kirk was harshly attacked for his change of heart. Blumenthal reports all this and more, noting that Kirk was terribly shaken by the Hamptons’ rabid attack on him and was fearful for his safety.

Whether the Kirk story will fade into the background, I do not know. It is clear that Israel, Trump, and TPUSA have claimed him as a fallen martyr for their own purposes. Already we see that the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, and the investigation into Kirk’s death, is receding from public view. I would claim – purposely. The lone nut meme will no doubt live on, as many bizarre theories will proliferate as usual. Despite its historical record as a ludicrous lie, the lone nut story endures. Until it doesn’t, and then the next matrushka doll will be pulled out, offering a glimpse of truth to conceal the greater lie. We can expect a bowl of slop explanations to proliferate. So it goes.

Blumenthal is a very solid reporter and believes his many sources for his reporting on the Kirk story are reliable and truthful. I agree. There is always the small chance in this world of endless propaganda that he has been played, but logic and his track record make this extremely unlikely. I urge readers to listen to him spell out his reporting in great detail and most brilliantly when interviewed by Chris Hedges recently. Not only does he detail his reporting on the matter but places it in a larger historical perspective that is essential.

There is no doubt we are moving deeper into a dark period in U.S. American history, one that may make the 1950s look tame. A new/old strategy of tension is underway – Blumenthal says it has been building since 2020 but I would say longer – pitting people against each other while the 1%, the killers, and the warmongers roll on and over ordinary people as they crack down on civil liberties, dissent, and everything a free people hold sacred.

On a final note and as an example of the way the system of control works, you will remember that Trump was elected in part on his pledge to end Biden’s war against Russia via Ukraine. He said he would do so within his first 24 hours in office. Many bought this clear bullshit, even some on the left. Others didn’t because they knew there would be a continuity between Biden’s and Trump’s foreign policy. I was one on them and so in February I wrote Hold the Applause for Trump, the “Peacemaker.” Now we will shortly enter his ninth month in office and he just stood in front of the U.N. and declared that the war is winnable and Ukraine needs our support to do so. Like a conman barker at a carnival’s spinning wheel, he wishes the crowd “good luck” as he announces the following on his Truth Social site:

When a president can utter such blatant aggressive nonsense that is contradicted by all the facts, you know a dark night for truthful souls is coming, along with a direct NATO war with Russia and a U.S./Israel attack on Iran.

It’s not fully dark yet, but we’re getting there.

* * *