EDITED AND HOSTED BY THE GREANVILLE POST
The cold, reptilian eyes of William Colby
One of the persisting delusions of the modern liberal thought states that the humanity has succeeded in overcoming its worst primitive instincts and is happily sailing towards some kind of liberal utopia populated by reasonable, objectively-minded, educated technocrats who are capable of reducing any problem to a linear combination of variables to be modelled and resolved rationally. In spite of the pre-eminence of this delusion (I could call it the Dawkins delusion) in the Anglo-Saxon world, one only needs to scratch the surface to discover that not only is humanity as prone to superstition and feral hatred towards others as they have ever been but that same old racial and religious tropes which should have died a long time ago under the onslaught of modernity are not only alive but thriving and successfully being used by the Empire in its total war against potential challengers. Nothing ever changes…
If the above were true, the world would not have been rocked by a series of fratricidal wars instigated by the United States and its vassals ever since the end of WWII.[1] More recently, the final phase of the push towards the East began in the Balkans with the neutralisation of the Serbs as a possible pro-Russian counter to the fascist NATO’s takeover of Europe. Once the European flank was secured, the United States moved to destabilise Russia’s immediate neighbourhood, namely Georgia and the Ukraine. The shift towards the Middle East was prompted by Israel’s ambition to decapitate any Arab government willing and able to assert its independence from the Anglo-Zionist nexus (this is the first time I have used Saker’s label—it fits). A number of Arab countries were destabilised or destroyed rendering the geopolitical position of multi-polar forces difficult. The undeclared war of aggression of a belligerent and imperialist West against anybody who might pose a challenge to its supremacist ambitions goes on and to understand how best to defend themselves, the nations under attack must have no illusions about the nature of the enemy.
The phenomenon I am going to discuss here is in my opinion crucial for understanding the melding of super-modern military technology and primitive murderous instincts which characterise modern warfare. The deadly secrecy and the blurring of the boundaries between combatants and non-combatants, the ruthless dehumanisation of the enemy with elements of medieval torture and unforgivable crime of the murder of a large number of innocent people combined with a bureaucratic and technical mini empire whose sole purpose was to find the targets for the killings and record the kills accurately—those were the characteristics of the infamous Phoenix Programme designed by the CIA in the mid-1960s with the aim of decapitating the secret government established by the Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam. Known by the acronym of COSVN (Central Office of South Vietnam), this clandestine and elusive body was the brain behind the successful resistance to the American occupiers and their Vietnamese vassals.
As a brief prelude, even before Diem’s demise, the question posed by the US military experts was how to counteract the growing insurgency. It was clear even then that standard military approaches wouldn’t work against a popular battle-hardened guerrilla movement which did not follow the prescribed methods of waging war. A more sophisticated strategy was needed based on the experience of other empires in crushing rebellious peasants especially the British empire which at that time was fighting rear-guard battles around the world trying to stem or control various independence movements. Since the Americans lacked the necessary experience, Diem invited Sir Robert Thompson who had masterminded the defeat of the Communist insurgency in Malaya to advise him on counter-insurgency. Thompson proposed a number of relatively sensible measures which could have helped Diem including practicing cultural sensitivity and economy of force. Diem found it impossible to act rationally and the rest is history. In 1962, worried about his prospects in the face of a large-scale popular insurgency, Diem invited an Australian Military Advisory Team (Australian Army Training Team Vietnam) to help with the growing uprising. The first commander of this unit was Colonel Ted Serong, a staunch Roman Catholic of Portuguese ancestry whose anti-Communist fervour played an important part in the genesis of the Phoenix Programme.[2]
Company men Colby with GHW Bush: Murder by the wholesale, and for what?
Following the introduction of US combat troops into Vietnam in 1965 (they had been there long before this but hey!) the newly installed head of the US military command, General William Westmoreland thought that the best way to eliminate the Communist threat was to blast the hell out of the Vietnamese countryside by means of massive air raids by B-52s (“Arclight”) and large-calibre artillery bombardments which were followed by “search and destroy” deployments of large military units reinforced by tanks, BTRs helicopters and fighter jets.[3] Whole districts were declared “kill zones” (“free-fire” zones in the perverted parlance of the Pentagon) allowing psychopathic generals to satisfy their racial hatred and ideological bloodthirst by destroying vast tracts of fertile land and more importantly, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Given the horrific impact of the Westmorland’s slash and burn policy, it is a minor miracle that the puppet government in Saigon lasted as long as it did.
This was truly slaughter on the industrial scale which created a massive demographic shift measured in millions of migrants from the destroyed villages into the cities and caused social problems which eventually contributed to the rapid fall of the Saigon regime. However, in spite of the fearsome firepower unleashed against the guerrillas (and increasingly North Vietnamese regular soldiers), victory eluded an exasperated Lyndon Johnson. The enemy was tactically sophisticated and fully aware of the power differential which favoured the Americans. It weaved and bobbed into and out of flooded rice fields, forests and jungles to strike the enemy when he least expected it. Well-equipped and highly motivated fighters harassed the American behemoth relentlessly while avoiding major battles.
The need for a strategic turn in Vietnam was exacerbated by a substantial societal change taking place within the United States. Not content with blind Dullesian Cold War patriotism, younger generations of Americans began to question the wisdom of their country’s engagement in Vietnam, especially when the draft and possible death by a punji stick started to threaten the cosseted white middle class. All of a sudden, the war ceased to be cool and a beleaguered Cardinal Spellman was finding it hard to sustain the crusading zeal that characterised Diem’s rule in the 1950s.[4]
The Phoenix (or Phung Hoang) Programme was a brainchild of William Colby the then Chief of CIA Station in Saigon.[5] This is a slight exaggeration because other people on the lower rungs of the greasy pole also played their part (e.g. Nelson Brickham and many others). Phoenix, which was supposed to symbolise the rebirth of the American war effort was a complex administrative, logistical, intelligence and enforcement system supposed to facilitate what CIA and belatedly President Johnson saw as the task number one and the solution for the incipient quagmire in which America was increasingly bogged down. The task was to decapitate the clandestine “infrastructure” of the resistance movement in South Vietnam by any means possible. The definition of “infrastructure” was vague from the beginning.
What the planners in the CIA had in mind was the political personnel or cadre—the individuals who supported the insurgency at any level of the organisational hierarchy—from a hamlet party treasurer, district and province party functionary to the party leader for the South Vietnam. The problem (not that Colby saw it as one) was that these individuals were civilian non-combatants. Thus, in order to be successful, the Phoenix had to abjure the laws of war as well as the Geneva convention which prohibits the targeting of civilians. Naturally, CIAs clandestine agent and assassin networks had been active in South Vietnam ever since the 1950s. The difference this time was that a civilian (of a strong religious persuasion) was going to conduct a war of extermination against other civilians belonging to a different religion or none.
In order to understand the depth of Colby’s involvement with this murder programme, it must be remembered that he was an old Vietnam hand first sent into the country in 1959 to support the Catholic dictator Diem at the time when the disgruntled Buddhists and members of the Viet Minh started to rebel openly against his bloody repressive regime. Unlike Edward Lansdale who enjoyed the limelight, Colby worked in the shadows. His links with the Diems were deep. He became close friends with Diem’s brother Ngo Dihn Nhu, the ultra-Catholic eminence grise, chief ideologue and puppet master of the regime whose secret intelligence apparatus sowed terror and fear throughout the country through another of Colby’s friends—Tran Kim Tuyen, chief of Diem’s intelligence service. It was these structures and the relationships between them and their American advisers that formed the basis of the Phoenix programme that was to arise from the ashes of Tet six years later.
The efficacy of Colby’s killing machine depended on a successful synchronisation of conflicting local interests and bureaucratic norms. Put simply, the Phoenix mechanism consisted of three major components: intelligence gathering, capture and interrogation. The first two tasks were entrusted to so-called Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) which consisted mainly of zealous Catholic anti-communists, criminals and converted Viet Minh fighters.[6] They were dressed in black, well-armed and led by American “advisors”. Their training took place in a former Catholic seminary on the Vung Tau peninsula where the future killers and torturers were initiated into the program in a faux mystical torch-lit ceremony resembling the initiation into the Waffen SS.
Their job was to scour the countryside following tips from agents and search for anybody resembling the blurry printout of a face or a description by an agent. PRUs were infamous for their cruelty and are as close as any unit in the modern history to the Nazi Einsatzgruppen (Extermination squads). Their ideology (anticommunism), purpose (elimination of the Communist civilian infrastructure) and modus operandi (indiscriminate killing of civilians) were identical. The crimes of PRUs have been described in detail by Douglas Valentine in his book about the Phoenix Programme: they would often break into thatched peasant huts in the middle of the night and kill all people inside before ascertaining whether any of them actually belonged to Viet Cong. They measured their kills by strings of ears they would show their American commanders as proofs required for a monetary reward. Needless to say, most of those ears were innocent of any Communist affiliation. In some ways, those killed in bed had it easy. Many suspected Viet Cong cadres were taken in for interrogation and it is this aspect of the Phoenix program that chills the blood the most.
The essence of Phoenix was the vast system of interrogation centres that dotted the country. The speed with which these were built boggles the mind. Most districts had one as did most provinces and regions (including the country centre in Saigon). These centres were staffed by Vietnamese officers and soldiers and overseen by CIA advisors. In reality the anonymous architecture and anodyne titles hid some of the worst torture centres known to modern history. In the warped minds of Colby and his many Catholic minions, the only way to purge South Vietnam of “godless communism” was to bring back a turbo-charged version of the Holy Inquisition. The bow-tie wearing Savonarola understood that his war was only as good as the reports he sent to Robert Komer (the old CIA hand and Head of Pacification in Vietnam) and Johnson. To ensure a co-ordination of information, the centres were connected by telephone and teleprinter to other centres and the collation of the huge amounts of information produced by the tens of thousands of tortured prisoners was performed by super modern computers located in a dedicated centre in Saigon. This is what gave Phoenix its specific “flavour”—the blending of medieval cruelty and super-modern technology.[7]
And the torture was truly medieval. The prisoners were left to the tender mercies of criminal ARVN staff who employed everything from electroshocks to the genitals, deadly beatings and removal of nails, waterboarding, rape, sleep deprivation and other techniques still used by the CIA to extremely sadistic acts that remind one of the Sack of Magdeburg or Pavelic’s extermination camps. Kenneth Barton Osborn, an army military intelligence officer who worked with Phoenix in 1967 and 1968 flatly told the US House Operations Subcommittee that not a single VC suspect survived interrogation under his supervision. He discussed two of the murders that he witnessed personally: on one occasion, a piece of wood was inserted into the ear canal of a detainee and hammered into his brain; in another, a woman was simply left in a small cage to starve to death.[8]
The idea that the Americans were innocent bystanders in all this is another myth that is difficult to shatter. US special forces (the Green Berets) and the Navy Seals were intimately involved in the hunt for, interrogation and elimination of suspected communist cadres. According to a former Navy Seal Elton Manzione who was interviewed by Douglas Valentine: “We wrapped [detonator] cord around [prisoners’] necks and wired them to the detonator box. And basically what it did was blow their heads off [… the] general idea was to waste the first two. They planned the snatches that way. Pick up this guy because we’re pretty sure he’s VC cadre — these other guys just run errands for him. Or maybe they’re nobody; Tran, the farmer and his brother Nguyen. But bring in two. Put them in a row. By the time you get to your man he’s talking so fast you got to pop the weasel just to shut him up. I guess you could say that we wrote the book on terror.” Some like the infamous Phoenix co-ordinator John Paul Vann deserve (and have been given) much more attention.
Needless to say, the programme soon fell victim to bureaucratic entropy. It was not the torture that let Colby down but the inability of the programme to benefit from it. Inadequate or false information was fed to the central database giving a distorted picture of the success of the programme or lack thereof. In order to save or boost their careers, both Vietnamese executioners and their CIA mentors targeted innocent people and faked their “kills”. Corruption and sloth soon set in and Phoenix became a synonym for senseless and mindless murder of innocent civilians. By 1970, as Paul Ham notes in his Vietnam: The Australian War, “Phoenix had degenerated into “squads of wild-eyed, often drugged, Vietnamese killers roam[ing] the countryside and indiscriminately round[ing]up and tortur[ing] suspects or civilian sympathisers”.
From the book “The Betrayal” by William Corson: “Almost immediately in the wake of the first operations of the Phoenix hit squads in I Corps, the rapport in the CAP (Combined Action Programme) hamlets between the Marines, the PFs (Popular Forces, a local anti-communist militia), and the people, as well as the intelligence flow, dried up. Upon examination we found out that the people and the PFs were scared shitless that the Phoenix hoodlums would come and take them away, or kill them. The Phoenix tactics reeked of the same kind of terrorism practiced by Ngo Dinh Nhu’s thugs in the Delta region during the early 60s, and I knew it had to be stopped, at least in the CAP hamlets.” So, not only did the crazed assassins of Phung Hoang target innocent civilians, but were slaughtering their own allies, not dissimilar to Pavelic’s ustashe whose thirst for Serb blood caused serious problems to their Nazi masters.
It is this period between 1967 and 1971 that recorded the worst excesses of the “Bird of happiness (the meaning of the Vietnamese sacred bird Phung Hoang which was used to symbolise a Phoenix to the Vietnamese)”. Anybody could be suspected of being a secret communist cadre and end up in one of the PICs having his/her nails pulled or worse. The fear and loathing of the Phoenix created an atmosphere of… fear and loathing. Following the murderous offensives by the US military in in 1967, millions of displaced country dwellers poured into Saigon and regional cities creating unprecedented problems for the puppet government of Nguyen van Thieu (whose Catholicism was not advertised loudly) and for the country more generally. The younger generations succumbed to the lure of the dollar and gave the nation large numbers of drug dealers, smugglers and prostitutes. The climate of fear and corruption hung over the country like a dark cloud when at the end of January 1968, the Viet Minh (with the help of reinforcements from the North) executed a fantastically bold co-ordinated attack on the South Vietnamese and US military, intelligence and propaganda assets. Despite the fact that the offensive was eventually defeated, its psychological impact was immense. Not only did it contribute to the view that the United States could not win the war but it also intensified attempts to strangle the leadership of the armed resistance. Phoenix was spreading its deadly wings especially since the Tet offensive had exposed many secret Viet Minh agents especially in the Saigon area. Prisons, camps, interrogation centres and execution sites were heaving with barely-alive victims—many if not most of whom were completely innocent.
Despite the impressive statistics conjured up by computer scientists sitting in the hyper-modern collation centre in Saigon, very few if any high-level COSVN functionaries were ever caught. Instead, innocent suspects were held in the so-called “Tiger cages”—remnants of the French colonial cruelty which were simply holes topped by metal cage doors. Exposed to elements, starvation and torture, most prisoners perished without ever having had a proper trial. To make things slightly easier for its torturers, the CIA initiated another programme through its cut-outs USIS and USAID, namely, Cheu Hoi or “Open hands”. This was an attempt to get the weaker-willed members of the resistance to surrender and recant.
After a gruelling interrogation, they would be offered clemency and a chance to join ARVN. However, many if not most Cheu Hoi returners were Viet Minh soldiers or cadre who would spend some time in different ARVN units to rest, recuperate and gather information on the enemy only to escape and return again in six months’ time. Essentially, the programme such as Phoenix could have never worked. The sympathy of the people for the Viet Minh was real and even where it didn’t exist, there was little enthusiasm for the American occupiers and their Saigon vassals. The close familial bonds between the conflicted sides were so strong that many top South Vietnamese officials and top ARVN generals had close relatives in the Viet Minh and the hellish reincarnation of the Holy Inquisition could do little to sever them.
At the helm of this religious purge stood a quiet man in glasses and bow tie who would eventually reach the very top of the US intelligence pyramid—William Colby—a descendant of Irish immigrants whose religious zeal was matched only by his hatred for “godless communism”. The question of how Colby together with many other right-wing Irish Americans achieved such prominence at the apex of the American deep state has been partially addressed in a couple of my previous essays. This is still something of a taboo and I hope to shed more light on this important subject. Despite his Ivy League education, Colby was an ultramontane Catholic who attended mass every day even as a CIA station head in Saigon. I shall never understand how he managed to reconcile his religiosity with the sadistic and satanic system of murder, torture and extortion that he controlled from the US embassy annex.
This is an aspect of the US engagement in Vietnam that has been kept away from the prying eyes of the media—not that they have been particularly interested. From its inception, the Republic of South Vietnam depended completely for its survival on a tight-knit Roman Catholic network of officers, priests, politicians and agents. Although their allegiance was maintained by access to loot and power, the ultimate binding agent that kept the apparatus going was their membership of the Catholic Church. Of course, in a country which was 80-90% Buddhist, the system would not have functioned without the tacit collusion of a number of corrupted Buddhists who were ready to overlook the persecution of their co-religionists in exchange for wealth and promotion (e.g. Nguyen Cao Ky).
It is this rich resource put in place by the CIA through its man on the ground, namely Diem, that led directly to Phoenix and its excesses. Torture, forced relocation, public recantations, cold-blooded murder of innocent people, mass conversions and other forms of religious persecution—it was all there by the time Colby unleashed the CIA’s Hellboyish brainchild.[9] The primary motivator for the cruelty and sadism that characterised Phoenix was the fear by the mainly Catholic apparatus of repression of the justice that would eventually be meted by the victorious Viet Minh. This resembled the fear of retribution experienced by most German soldiers withdrawing from the scene of their giga-crime in the Soviet Union.
Unsurprisingly, these crusaders were helped and supported by the Vatican and the West. The Catholics in Vietnam knew they were an absolute minority and that their dominance and safety could only be safeguarded by means of a bloody dictatorial regime inspired by their faith. Although the foundations of the system were laid by the French, the consensus is that they were amateurs compared with the Americans and “their Vietnamese”.[10] As mentioned in part I, many Catholics found the excesses of Diem and his successors unpalatable and this led to an increase in the Catholic participation in the liberation movement.
However, the religious orgy of mindless killing and torture could not go on forever. The death of Pius XII in 1959 signalled a change of tack by the Vatican towards a less bellicose posture towards its enemies. Although attempts at a détente and lowering of tensions were being made in the West, the exotique places such as Vietnam were safe from prying eyes, at least for the time being. One can speculate that with Pius’s death Diem lost his main supporter and became supremely vulnerable from that moment on. However, all was not lost for the Catholic cause, for Pius’s first lieutenant for the Americas, Cardinal Francis Spellman was well and more belligerent than ever and the loyal soldier of the Vatican, William Colby, was hurriedly dispatched to Vietnam to bolster Diem’s murderous dictatorship. Spellman’s support for the American intervention was such that to the young non-conformist generation of the 1960s, the War in Vietnam became known as “Spellman’s war”. There was no stunt, religious or otherwise that Spellman wouldn’t pull in order to strengthen the case for a continued slaughter of innocent Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. His continued advocacy of the war and immense power over the faithful ensured that at least for a while, Colby was free to run the programme as he saw fit. His moment came in 1968, when he was pulled from his new job as the Chief of the CIA’s Soviet Block Division and sent to Vietnam to co-ordinate Phoenix.
As stated above, the orgy of killing and torture went on for a couple of years fuelled by the need to avenge the embarrassment of Tet. However, times were changing—if not substantially. The fake patriotic fervour of the 1950s bolstered by the right-wing certainties of the era was eroding fast especially in contact with a never-ending procession of coffins of young (increasingly middle-class) Americans. The main supporter of the war, Spellman, died in 1967 and the shaky consensus regarding the importance of the war began to crumble. Let me stress that the shift away from the gung-ho approach by Kennedy (no, he actually hugely increased the number of US “advisers”) and Johnson was not motivated by any reflection or consideration of ethical precepts.[11] Rather, the war was beginning to take unprecedented toll on an exhausted America. Those were the years of strife, deadly riots, loss of confidence and assassinations and the financial situation was becoming dire. Not even the exquisitely-timed launches of different flavours of Apollo could restore the faith in the righteousness of the American cause. Add to that the publication of the Pentagon Papers by that enfant terrible of the US deep state Daniel Ellsberg which documented the lies and subterfuge inflicted on the American people by its government and things were starting to unravel fast.
The crimes committed by the Americans in Vietnam could not be hidden any longer, especially after the atrocity at My Lai when over 500 innocent men, women and children were murdered in cold blood, gang raped, tortured and mutilated by a company of crazed grunts led by a sadistic captain (Ernest Medina). There is evidence that the unit responsible was linked to the Phoenix programme and needless to say, it was later congratulated by the murderer-in-chief Westmoreland (another Catholic convert). More important, a young black major named Colin Powell made sure that no serious inquiry took place thus clearing a smooth path to promotion, a debt he would be asked to repay once again in 2003 before the eyes of an unbelieving world.
Increased scrutiny of the Phoenix programme and the loss of Colby in 1971 meant that the programme was quickly atrophying helped by the paramount goal of Richard Nixon to withdraw the US troops from Vietnam. The enthusiasm of the early days was replaced by cynicism and defeatism. The programme passed into the South Vietnamese hands (under the strategy of “Vietnamisation”) and limped on for another couple of years. By that time, the writing was on the wall and after witnessing the North Vietnamese troops’ liberation of Saigon, Colby himself was dismissed from his post as Head of the CIA. Time had come to put the skeletons back into the closet. A man of huge chutzpah, Colby wrote two books about his experiences and denied that any atrocities had taken place within Phoenix. His victims were unavailable for comment.
In spite of Colby’s best efforts, the gargantuan and technologically superior war machine of the US Empire ground to a halt and slowly withdrew under the ever-bolder jabs by the resistance. Phoenix was wound down under political and fiscal pressures and finally burst into flames sometime in 1972 generating a never-ending debate on how successful it was, notwithstanding the fact that it was an extrajudicial inquisition successful only in propagating horror and suffering.
Although America’s Vietnamese inquisition died in infamy, it never really died. Like the mythical bird which is reborn periodically, the Phoenix Programme has been reincarnated many times since the halcyon days of PRUs and PICs. The lessons of Phoenix survived the nadir of the early 1970s and were faithfully implemented in South America (Operation Condor—see e.g. Alfredo Astiz) and later in the Middle East and the Ukraine. Techniques of torture have been perfected with the help of the American Psychological Association (thank God for small mercies) and as a result of convulsions experienced following My Lai, the power of the media to question the criminal transgressions of the US military has been curtailed. And while the CIA still pulls the strings, most of the fighting these days is left to its various (mainly RC and Islamist) proxies.
To prove me wrong, the great Clint Eastwood has filmed an ode to the Hmong (sorry, I waited for so long).[12]
- One possible argument is that the world would be better off if people behaved rationally. Perhaps, but it is a bit like the choice between a dormant Swiss town and the explosion of life in all its forms one encounters in India and elsewhere. ↑
- According to some sources, Serong was a member of the CIA and a keen promoter of his fellow RC criminal Colby’s assassination programme. From https://newmatilda.com/2009/05/12/australias-vietnam-style-killing-program/: “”Yes,” he said, “we did kill teachers and postmen. But it was the way to conduct the war. They were part of the Viet Cong Infrastructure. I wanted to make sure we won the battle.” Another Australian Catholic officer David Kilcullen argued as late as 2004 that Phoenix had been “unfairly maligned”. ↑
- According to Avro Manhattan, Westmoreland whom many consider a premier war criminal converted to Catholicism at some point (like Tony Blair, Shiro Ishii, Adolf Eichmann and many other war criminals). ↑
- To illustrate the degenerate bloodthirst of the demonic Spellman, here is a quote from Ron Capshaw’s article available on http://libertymagazine.org/article/the-war-within. “A priest approaches the weapon, blesses it, and then sprinkles holy water on it. He does so because the weapon will be used for “Christ’s war.” The scene is not from the Middle Ages, but given the mind-set of the priest, it might as well be. It’s 1965.The weapon blessed is a B-52 bomber about to go on a mission. “Christ’s war” is the American effort in Vietnam. The priest is Cardinal Francis Spellman.” ↑
- William Colby like many of other heads of the CIA was a zealous and ruthless Roman Catholic who hid his total devotion to the aims of the Vatican and murderous instincts behind a studied façade of horn-rimmed glasses and bow ties. In this, he emulated other RC murderers and their useful idiots such as Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and Allen Dulles. However, with Colby, this attempt to project respectability fails the moment you look into his cold, merciless, reptilian eyes. ↑
- Other ethnic groups including the Hmong were trained by the US Special Forces to fight the Viet Minh. ↑
- Any similarity with Abu Ghraib, CIA black prisons and rendition centres, Guantanamo and Ukrainian SBU centres in the Donbass is accidental. ↑
- From Douglas Valentine’s book “The Phoenix Program”. About 50000 people are known to have been killed by Phoenix (the true number could be double that) from 1968 until 1972. A much larger number (up to half a million) were tortured and imprisoned without trial. ↑
- If you think I am being flippant, think again. The blockbuster “Hellboy” was directed by ultra-Catholic Guillermo del Torro and starred ultra-Catholic master actor John Hurt (great actor!). In it, a cabal of black-clad Nazis attempts to summon a demon from the depths of Hell in order to stop and reverse the downfall of the Reich. In this, they are guided by none other than the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin(!). This device satisfies both the Roman Catholics and Zionists in Holywood who will happily agree on the irredeemable evil of the Russian Orthodox faith as well as the need to shift the blame for collaborating with the Nazis from the likes of Pius XII, Petain, Franco, Menachem Begin and Vladimir Zhabotinsky onto their common enemy—a completely innocent Russian monk. The key is that the little baby demon called “Hellboy” is adopted by an ultra-Catholic academic (played by an ultra-Catholic actor) who works for a CIA-like secret institute. Hellboy is then used by the deep state (with the guidance by his mentor) to fight evil (or rather life forms which refuse to conform to the diktat of the “Judaeo-Christian” empire). Hellboy’s real name is An Ung Rama—a clear slight directed at the Hindu deity. ↑
- As became known during the war in Algeria, the French had nothing to learn when it came to manipulating a blowtorch and a pair of pliers. ↑
- A quick scan of the numbers suggests that JFK was responsible for a 20-fold increase in troop levels. In 1959, there were 760 US personnel in Vietnam. In 1963, there were 16300. So much for the liberal paeans to the “peacemaker” Kennedy. ↑
- The Hmong are an indigenous ethnic group (neither RC nor Islamist) from the central highlands of South Vietnam that fought on the side of the Americans (the film is called “Gran Torino”). ↑
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