Moti Nissani, PhD
No Planet – No People

“Corporate Threat to Liberty.” DonkeyHotey

Part II of: Why does the Invisible Government Continue to Grow in Strength?

Summary: In a real democratic entity, the people themselves make all major political, legal, and judicial decisions.  The absence of real democracy provides one explanation for the growing strength of the Invisible Government—and for that Government’s successful campaigns against freedom, peace, living standards, spirituality, and the biosphere.  Revolutionaries and reformers should likewise strive to adopt real democracy in their organizations and nations. To objectively evaluate the overwhelming historical evidence and common-sense arguments in favor of real democracy, we must try to overcome cradle-to-grave propaganda against it. Cultural anthropology conclusively shows that throughout most of human existence, our ancestors lived in small, largely nomadic, hunting-and-gathering bands.  They ruled themselves, without chiefs, masters, or kings.  Their leaderless, close-knit systems prevented the disastrous ascent of psychopaths and freeloaders to positions of power.  They practiced economic egalitarianism and were remarkably happy.  Their happiness could perhaps be traced to their freedom and to a system that allowed them to live by the Golden Rule: living unselfishly under a system which rewarded unselfishness.  We next turn our attention to the literate and creative ancient Athenians, showing that, for its male citizens, democratic Athens was far better governed than either contemporary “democracies” or their totalitarian and oligarchic counterparts.  Two contemporary referenda and the system of governance of the Berlin Philharmonic forcefully show that real democracy could bear as many delicious fruits in the contemporary world as it did in ancient Athens and throughout most of human history.

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You can also listen to a radio interview (with Jeff Brown) on a similar topic here:

Moti Nissani’s Radio Sinoland Interview Part 2- 2015.7.5

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“Compared to the better known surviving monuments of ancient Athens, such as the Parthenon, the Pnyx is unspectacular. It is a small hill surrounded by parkland, with a large flat platform of eroded stone set into its side. But it is one of the most significant sites in the city, and indeed in the world. For the Pnyx was the meeting place of the world’s first democratic legislature, the Athenian ekklesia (assembly), and the flat stone is the bema or speaker’s platform.”

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Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.–Pericles of Athens

The question is, if they [America’s Controllers] would do this . . . if they would feed radioactive oatmeal to helpless children and lie to them and their parents about it for years . . . well gee, is there anything they wouldn’t do?—Melissa Dykes, 2016

“We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask.  Why in the world can’t we have it?”—Jack Finney

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Why is the Invisible Government steadily growing in strength?  Why are we being ruled by freeloaders and psychopaths?  How do these criminals manage to saddle us with growing income inequalities, diminishing liberties, perpetual wars, and growing threats to the very survival of humanity itself?  Among the many reasons accounting for this tragic decline, one stands out: Absence of real democracy.

Revolutionary strategists must also resolve two questions:  How can they best structure their own movement?  And: What kind of political framework should they aim for, once they relegate the Banking-Militarist Complex to the dustbin of history?  The answer to these two questions is the same: real democracy. [1]

Hence, this posting focuses on benefits of real democracy and its differences from representative democracy (its mangled stepchild).

Democracy, for the Greeks who coined the word (but not the system), meant “power to the people” or “rule of the people.”  Perhaps the best-known example of genuine democracy (but limited to the minority of male citizens) in a highly-advanced, highly-literate, polity, is Athens and her sister democracies of Ancient Greece.  There, all significant political, legal, and judicial decisions were made directly by the adult male citizens.  Democratic Athens went to war if, and only if, the majority of its citizens so voted; a man was exiled, or condemned to death, if, and only if, his fellow citizens so decreed. [2]

The USA, Britain, France—even better-governed Iceland and Switzerland—might or might not have free elections, but they are not democracies.  As a result, in the USA, even when elections are not rigged and the friends of the people are not killed, the winners, once in power, routinely defy voters’ sentiments.  Thus, for instance, most Americans did not wish go to war in 1917, were opposed to the repeated and vicious pulverization and colonization of Iraq, and have never been in favor of their country’s ongoing program of biospheric carnage.  But in a “democracy,” American style, the majority’s preferences are routinely ignored.

Eduardo Galeano whimsically captures the essence of contemporary “democracies:”

“The other day, I heard about a cook who organized a meeting of birds—chickens, geese, turkeys, peasants, and ducks.  And I heard what the cook told them.  The cook asked them with what sauce they would like to be cooked.  One of the birds, I think it was a humble chicken, said:  ‘We don’t want to be cooked in whichever way.’  And the cook explained that ‘this topic was not on the agenda.’  It seems to me interesting, that meeting, for it is a metaphor for the world.  The world is organized in such a way that we have the right to choose the sauce in which we shall be eaten.” [my translation]

Overlapping Conceptual Barriers against Genuine Democracy

Our task is not simply proving the superiority of genuine democracy over all other known political systems, but also letting go of ingrained prejudices. [3]

Barrier 1: Cradle-to-Grave Propaganda System.

Genuine democracy—along with compassion and rationality—pose the greatest threat to the enemies of the biosphere and the open society.  No wonder then that since infancy we have been inculcated against it.  We have been lied to incessantly about the virtues of the Roman republic on the one hand, and about the horrors of “mob rule” on the other hand.

Such self-interested, ideologically- and philosophically-bankrupt, propaganda campaigns often meet with great success.  For example, the oligarchs led us to revere such enemies of democracy in the Greek world as Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the “Great.”  At the same time, the oligarchs managed to obliterate the writings and all but erase from our memories such champions of liberty and decency as Democritus and Antisthenes.

Barrier 2:  Opposition of Misguided or Bought Intellectuals

Throughout the ages, genuine democracy has been laughed at by self-serving, brilliant, oligarchs.  A historian of Ancient Greece, writing in 1900, remarks that “few sights are stranger” than the spectacle of some Athenian intellectuals and first-rate thinkers “turning their eyes from their own free country to regard with admiration the constitution of Sparta,” where a free thinker “would not have been suffered so much as to open his mouth.”

The self-serving falsification of the historical record is widespread.  Karl Popper:

“The history of the Peloponnesian war and the fall of Athens is still often told, under the influence of Thucydides’ authority, in such a way that the defeat of Athens appears as the ultimate proof of the dangerous weaknesses of the democratic system.  But this view is merely a tendentious distortion, and the well-known facts tell a very different story. The main responsibility for the lost war rests with the treacherous oligarchs who continuously conspired with Sparta. . . . The fall of Athens, and the destruction of the walls, are often presented as the final results of the great war which had started in 431 B.C.  But in this presentation lies the main distortion, for the democrats fought on.  At first only seventy strong, they prepared under the leadership of Thrasybulus and Anytus the liberation of Athens, where Critias was meanwhile killing scores of citizens; for during the eight months of his reign of terror the death-role contained nearly a greater number of Athenians than the Peloponnesians had killed during the last ten years of war.”

“But after eight months (in 403 B.C.) Critias and the Spartan garrison were attacked and defeated by the democrats who established themselves in the Piraeus, and both of Plato’s uncles lost their lives in the battle.  Their oligarchic followers continued for a time the reign of terror in the city of Athens itself, but their forces were in a state of confusion and dissolution.  Having proved themselves incapable of ruling, they were ultimately abandoned by their Spartan protectors, who concluded a treaty with the democrats.  The peace re-established the democracy in Athens.  Thus the democratic form of government had proved its superior strength under the most severe trials, and even its enemies began to think it invincible.”  [4]

Barrier 3: The Ruling Faction of America’s Revolutionaries was thoroughly Anti-Democratic

For Americans, there is still one more block on their ideological journey towards genuine democracy.  Some founding fathers came close to being genuine democrats, but the winning faction falsely (and self-servingly) equated democracy with mob rule.

Citizens of the USA are taught to admire the revolutionary founders of their republic.  Americans are not, however, often reminded how averse some of these founders were to the Bill of Rights, how they betrayed their countrymen by establishing the Rothschild-controlled First Bank of the United States, how they brutally suppressed popular uprisings, how the money lenders were already exerting influence at the Constitutional Convention, [5] and how close their country came, during the Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, or Obama presidencies, to establishing a dictatorship.  These betrayals have been glossed over by the official record, so Americans find it hard to believe that their brilliant, idealistic–and wealthy–founding fathers chose a second-best political system for their contemporaries and descendants.

The Evidence from Anthropology

Marvin Harris’ “Life without Chiefs” shows that the current economic/political system—a system characterized by have and have-nots, rulers and ruled—is a historical aberration:

Once we are clear about the roots of human nature, for example, we can refute, once and for all, the notion that it is a biological imperative for our kind to form hierarchical groups.  An observer viewing human life shortly after cultural takeoff would easily have concluded that our species was destined to be irredeemably egalitarian except for distinctions of sex and age. That someday the world would be divided into aristocrats and commoners, masters and slaves, billionaires and homeless beggars would have seemed wholly contrary to human nature as evidenced in the affairs of every human society then on Earth.

1. The Natural State for Human Beings is Life in Nomadic Tribes or Villages

For about 98 percent of our existence as a species (and for four million years before then), our ancestors lived in small, largely nomadic hunting-and-gathering bands.

2. The Natural Political System is Real Democracy and the Absence of Rulers

To the extent that political leadership exists at all among band-and-village societies, it is exercised by individuals called headmen.  These headmen, however, lack the power to compel others to obey their orders. . . .  Among the !Kung, each band has its recognized leaders, most of whom are males. These men speak out more than others and are listened to with a bit more deference.  But they have no formal authority and can only persuade, never command.  When Lee asked the !Kung whether they had headmen—meaning powerful chiefs—they told him, “Of course we have headmen!  In fact, we are all headmen.  Each one of us is headman over himself.”

Native Americans enjoyed similar freedoms. Speaking of the Iroquois at the time, Cadwallwer Coldwell said:

They hold “such absolute notions of liberty that they allow of no kind of superiority of one over another, and banish all servitude from their territories.”

Charles Mann, in his book “1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” quotes Jesuit Priest Louis Henneppin:

Native Americans were “born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”

They brand us [Europeans] as slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having.  Individual Indians “value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for it, that one’s as much master as another, and since men are all made of the same clay there should be no distinction or superiority among them.”

Likewise,

Among the Eskimos of northern Canada there was no law except public opinion.  Although no one had authority, each person had influence according to the respect won from a community which had intimate knowledge of everybody.

3. Real Democracy Prevents the Ascent of Freeloaders and Psychopaths to Positions of Power

One of the chief characteristics of modern societies is the power of psychopaths.  Martha Stout describes the Sociopath Next Door:

Imagine – if you can – not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.  Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fool.  Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs.  Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.  You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your coldbloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.  You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?  What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?  The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same.  Some people – whether they have a conscience or not – favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dullwitted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. . . .

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.

If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people’s hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. . . .

Crazy and frightening – and real, in about 4 percent of the population”….

Our ancestors had a fantastic system for sidelining such dangerous people.  Marvin Harris:

Inevitably there were freeloaders, individuals who consistently took more than they gave and lay back in their hammocks while others did the work.  Despite the absence of a criminal justice system, such behavior eventually was punished. . . . quarrelsome, stingy people who do not give as well as take had better watch out.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson:

It is nearly impossible, when you know how primitive society works under communistic anarchy, to conceive of anyone with the combination of indolence and strength of character which would make it possible for a healthy man to remain long a burden on the community.  Those who were useful to the community, who fitted well into the community pattern, were leaders.  It was these men who were so often wrongly identified by the careless early-civilized traveler and the usual trader as chiefs.  They were not chiefs, for they had no authority; they had nothing but influence.  People followed their advice because they believed it to be sound.  If you tried to keep more than your share you became unpopular.  If you were persistently selfish, acquisitive, and careless of the general good you gradually became too unpopular.  Realizing this, very likely you would try moving to another community and starting life there over again.  If you persisted in your ways and stayed where you were there would come a period of unanimous disapproval.  You might survive for a year or even a few years as an unwanted hanger-on; but the patience of the community might at any time find its limit, and there would be one more execution of a troublemaker.

4. Economic Egalitarianism, Civility, and Hospitality

“The absence of private possession in land and other vital resources means that a form of communism probably existed among prehistoric hunting and collecting bands and small villages.”

Stefansson describes Inuit society in the first decade of the 20th century:

The system which I watched breaking down under the combined influence of Christianity and the fur trade was on its economic side communism.  Natural resources and raw materials were owned in common, but made articles were privately owned.

Canassetego, a Mohawk, captures one difference between real and self-described democrats (as retold by Benjamin Franklin):

You know our Practice.  If a white Man in travelling thro’ our Country, enters one of our Cabins, we all treat him as I treat you; we dry him if he is wet, we warm him if he is cold, we give him Meat & Drinks that he may allay his Thirst and Hunger, and spread soft Furs for him to rest & sleep on: We demand nothing in return. But if I go into a white Man’s House at Albany, and ask for Victuals & Drink, they say, where is your Money?  And if I have none; they say, Get out you Indian Dog.

5. Overall, Hunter-Gatherers were Happier than we are

Here are two examples:

[The Copper Eskimos were] “to all appearances so much happier than any other people whom I have ever known.” On the basis of my years with the Stone Age Eskimos I feel that the chief factor in their happiness was that they were living according to the Golden Rule. It is easier to feel that you can understand than to prove that you do understand why it is man gets more happiness out of living unselfishly under a system which rewards unselfishness than from living selfishly where selfishness is rewarded. Man is more fundamentally a co-operative animal than a competitive animal. His survival as a species has been perhaps through mutual aid rather than through rugged individualism. And somehow it has been ground into us by the forces of evolution to be “instinctively” happiest over those things which in the long run yield the greatest good to the greatest number.

I wondered if all the thousands of intervening years had brought the measure of happiness to some of us that these people enjoy, for they do enjoy life every day, dancing and chanting, visiting one another, hunting when necessary.  This is their life, simple in all its elements, from the day of birth until death claims their pygmy bodies.” [6]

6. Were Freedom and the Golden Rule a Key to our Ancestors’ Happiness?

Stefansson writes:

On the basis of my years with the Stone Age Eskimos I feel that the chief factor in their happiness was that they were living according to the Golden Rule.

It is easier to feel that you can understand than to prove that you do understand why it is man gets more happiness out of living unselfishly under a system which rewards unselfishness than from living selfishly where selfishness is rewarded. Man is more fundamentally a co-operative animal than a competitive animal. His survival as a species has been perhaps through mutual aid rather than through rugged individualism. And somehow it has been ground into us by the forces of evolution to be “instinctively” happiest over those things which in the long run yield the greatest good to the greatest number.

7. How Paradise Was Lost

With agriculture and storage of food, according to Harris, eventually stratification arrived.  Gradually, real chiefs and inequality arose, leading to our present hierarchical system:  “Chiefdoms would eventually evolve into states, states into empires.”

But, one must ask: Can such a system work among literate people?  We shall now show that, among other things, a version of real democracy flourished in ancient Athens: the most creative and culturally-advanced country that has ever graced our weary planet.

Athenian Democracy

“Man’s law of nature is equality.”—Euripides

Some of the advantages of genuine democracy are immediately apparent.   Unlike contemporary western republics, in Athens, promises to the people could not be as readily broken, for the people were always in charge.  Influential Athenians (especially the oligarchic variety) were just as bribable as their contemporary western counterparts, but in a system where real power, at any given moment, resided with the citizenry, the damage was more limited.   The information system in Athens was never taken over by the oligarchs and life was simpler, so the people could more readily vote for their interests and convictions.  For the most part, Athenians breathed cleaner air, drank chemical-free water, and ploughed healthier soils for their sustenance; their schools were private (not state-run), and they exercised daily; they were thus in better mental and physical shape than contemporary Americans or Greeks. Hence, in ancient Athens, human beings came close to their truer intellectual, artistic, and civic potential.  In a partially real democracy like Athens, dissident organizations could not be readily co-opted, elections and trials could not be as readily rigged, and politically-motivated assassinations were rare.  Overall, the Athenian system served the public interest far better than American oligarchy.

The ancient Greeks recognized the link between genuine democracy and greatness.  The historian Herodotus, himself not an Athenian, clearly perceived the causal connection between freedom and excellence:

“Thus did the Athenians increase in strength.  And it is plain enough, not from this instance only, but from many everywhere, that freedom is an excellent thing since even the Athenians, who, while they continued under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all. These things show that, while undergoing oppression, they let themselves be beaten, since then they worked for a master; but so soon as they got their freedom, each man was eager to do the best he could for himself.  So fared it now with the Athenians.”

Pericles, an influential Athenian before and during part of the Peloponnesian War, put it this way:

Pericles of Athens, 495 (?)-429 BC

“Our political system does not compete with institutions which are elsewhere in force. We do not copy our neighbors, but try to be an example.  Our administration favors the many instead of the few: this is why it is called a democracy. The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar. . . The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and do not feel called upon to nag our neighbor if he chooses to go his own way. . .  But this freedom does not make us lawless.  We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right. . .

“Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner. . . We are free to live exactly as we please, and yet are always ready to face any danger. . . We love beauty without becoming extravagant, and we cultivate the intellect without lessening our resolution. . . To admit one’s poverty is no disgrace with us; but we consider it disgraceful not to make an effort to avoid it.  An Athenian citizen does not neglect public affairs when attending to his private business. . . We consider a man who takes no interest in the state not as harmless, but as useless; and although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.  We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. . . We believe that happiness is the fruit of freedom and freedom of valor, and we do not shrink from the danger of war. . . To sum up, I claim that Athens is the School of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian grows up to a happy versatility and to a readiness for varied emergencies—to self-reliance.”

Unlike the United States, which has always foisted oligarchic governments in its empire, the Athenians supported genuine democracies in theirs.

Athenian lawmakers understood human weaknesses, and they knew from bitter experience how bribery could undermine justice.  Obviously, it is easier to bribe, and deform a passion for justice in, a judge than a jury, and hence, all trials involved a jury of one’s peers.  The people, not paid experts, were deemed most qualified to decide judicial cases.  There was no presiding judge telling jurors that their task was to serve an abstract law (as opposed to simple justice).  Nor was there a jury-free appeal system, which often, in America, nullifies the people’s verdict.

But Athenian jurors were definitely corruptible too.  To minimize that problem, juries in important cases were randomly selected from the entire citizen body and numbered 201-501 or more (roughly 0.7%-1.7% or more of the 30,000 or so adult male citizens). [7]  Often the caseload was too heavy, and so the number of jurors for each particular trial was reduced to fifty.  Now, a rich man might try to bribe all fifty, so the legal system placed a safeguard against that eventuality: The decision as to which 50 jurors of the 500 would be assigned to any given case was often made by lottery, just before the trial began.

Steven Johnstone summarizes the Athenian judicial system: [7]

Athenians performed democracy daily in their law courts.  Without lawyers or judges, private citizens, acting as accusers and defendants, argued their own cases directly to juries composed typically of 201 to 501 jurors, who voted on a verdict without deliberation. This legal system strengthened and perpetuated democracy as Athenians understood it, for it emphasized the ideological equality of all (male) citizens. . . .  Laws against bribery, panels of several hundred jurors, and random assignment to the courts, effectively curtailed the direct influence of wealth on trials.”

The Athenians knew that power-seekers could not be trusted, so they filled many important public offices by lot.  Moreover, most office holders maintained their positions for extremely short durations.  Athens thereby bypassed, to a certain extent, a key problem in all other extant political systems: The ascendancy of freeloaders and psychopaths.

The Athenians did not give their rich people tax cuts and bailouts.  They thus avoided an ever-growing mal-distribution of wealth.  Athenians respected private property and wealth, but expected their leisure class to make greater contributions to the public, by sponsoring musical festivals or dramas (another Greek word), for example.  When the majority decided to go to war, the rich had to risk their lives too.  Moreover, in times of war, each rich man was expected to contribute one battleship to the navy of the city—that is where our word liturgy came from (public service; literally, a public building).

The contemporary decline of oligarchies like the USA or Norway can be explained in part by their system of banking and money creation.  In these nations, the bankers in charge of money creation try to fabricate the impression that the private, for-profit, central banks are under public control.  Witness for example the names they choose for their key institutions—Bank for International Settlements, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Federal Reserve, Bank of England, First Bank of the United States. In reality, these institutions are controlled by a few banking families.  The politicians, media, the bought economic profession, pretend that these privately-controlled institutions serve the public interest, but the reality is the exact opposite: The only goal of these institutions is to further enrich and empower their owners, and they accomplish these goals by impoverishing and enslaving the vast majority. These institutions do not serve a nation—they parasitize it. They are worse than the black plague, because they never go away.  Instead, they steadily, mercilessly, and incessantly devour their host.  They are, by far, public enemy number one.  This, along with the fraudulent fractional reserve system, permit the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the banking octopus and its military, academic, drug, death squads, industry, health, farming, mining, and “religious” tentacles. It also permits destructive and deliberate manipulations of the money supply, and the devastating boom-and-bust economic cycles which further enrich and empower a few banking families and enslave the public at large.  I wrote about this banking plague elsewhere, but for the moment let me just say this: If I were forced to choose between the current rule of bankers or the rule of the Mafia, I’d choose the Mafia, any day, any time.

The Athenians, by contrast, did not have that parasitic fifth column in their midst.  They had access to plenty of silver in their own national territory, and the state (not private interests) issued the national silver or copper currency.  The state did not accumulate debt as a matter of course, did not suffer the depredations of fractional reserve money creation, nor planned booms and busts.  The Athenians thus avoided the horrors of a bankers-dominated economic and political system.

Another salient feature of Athenian democracy involved ostracism (their word).  Athenian democrats well knew that their worst enemies were the oligarchs within their own walls. In rare cases, these traitors were brought to trial and executed.  But the Athenians did try to live up to their ideal of moderation.  Individuals who were deemed a threat to the democracy were selected by an anonymous vote of the assembly and ordered to leave the city for ten years.  They retained their citizenship and possessions but were required to remain in exile.  By law, only one person could be ostracized in any given year. As a matter of historical record, though, ostracism was rarely applied.

The remarkable political maturity, compassion, and tolerance of a free people can perhaps be best captured through two specific historical examples.

The first involves post-war reconciliation.  A contemporary legal scholar holds that the first well-documented example of a

“self-conscious transitional justice policy is provided by the classical Athenians’ response to atrocities committed during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants . . . The Athenians carefully balanced retribution and forgiveness . . . remembering and forgetting.”

Another historian comments on the same historical occurrence:

“In 404 BCE the Peloponnesian War finally came to an end, when the Athenians, starved into submission, were forced to accept Sparta’s terms of surrender.  Shortly afterwards a group of thirty conspirators, with Spartan backing (“the Thirty”), overthrew the democracy and established a narrow oligarchy.  Although the oligarchs were in power for only thirteen months, they killed more than 5 percent of the citizenry and terrorized the rest by confiscating the property of some and banishing many others.  Despite this brutality, members of the democratic resistance movement that regained control of Athens came to terms with the oligarchs and agreed to an amnesty that protected collaborators from prosecution for all but the most severe crimes.”

Does this exceptional act of amnesty (their word) and forgiveness sound like mob rule?

Another touching example of Athenian greatness, of compassion in the midst of a struggle for national and personal survival, is related by Thucydides:

“Immediately after the invasion of the Peloponnesians all Lesbos [a Greek island], except Methymna, revolted from the Athenians. . . .  However, the Athenians, distressed by the plague, and by the war that had recently broken out and was now raging, thought it a serious matter to add Lesbos with its fleet and untouched resources to the list of their enemies; and at first would not believe the charge, giving too much weight to their wish that it might not be true.   But when an embassy which they sent had failed to persuade the Mitylenians to give up the union and preparations complained of, they became alarmed, and resolved to strike the first blow.”  After a prolonged siege, the Athenians prevailed, and, at first, the assembly sent a trireme with the order to execute all the men of the rebellious island, and to enslave the women and children.  The following day the assembly reconvened, and narrowly voted to overturn the first vote, and spare the lives of most Lesbians:   “Another galley was at once sent off in haste, for fear that the first might reach Lesbos in the interval, and the city be found destroyed; the first ship having about a day and a night’s start.  Wine and barley-cakes were provided for the vessel by the Mitylenian ambassadors, and great promises made if they arrived in time; which caused the men to use such diligence upon the voyage that they took their meals of barley-cakes kneaded with oil and wine as they rowed, and only slept by turns while the others were at the oar. Luckily they met with no contrary wind, and the first ship making no haste upon so horrid an errand, while the second pressed on in the manner described, the first arrived so little before them, that Paches had only just had time to read the decree, and to prepare to execute the sentence, when the second put into port and prevented the massacre. The danger of Mitylene had indeed been great.”

Ask yourself: Have the Roman or American republics just once behaved thus? And if not, isn’t it high time that we reclaim as our own a political system capable of such wartime wisdom and compassion?

Other Key Features of Athenian Democracy were:

• Near economic self-sufficiency of the average household
• A genuine free enterprise system (largely absent in modern so-called capitalist societies)
• A less materialistic world view
• A small state
• Minimal taxation in times of peace
• Involvement of the majority in civic affairs

Athens was certainly no utopia.  Slavery was widespread and neither women, nor foreign immigrants, nor even the Athens-born descendants of these foreigners, enjoyed the full franchise. [8]

The Athenian Empire often exploited and lorded over its member states, at times brutally and cynically suppressing defections.  Influential Athenians were eminently bribable and often betrayed their city.  Athenians seemed unable to entertain the notion of a genuine union on equal terms with sister democracies (a proposal made by Isocrates, among others), and were thus, in the end, enslaved by the Macedonian dictatorship.  But Athens, I believe, still provides one starting point for the design of a free, rational, and compassionate society:

Within the body of citizens, the Athenians achieved a degree of political equality that minimized the claims of wealth to a degree unparalleled in most societies, certainly in our own.” [7]

We can adopt the basic framework of such genuine democracies as the illiterate Inuit or !Kung societies of two centuries ago, the semi-literate Iroquois, and the highly-literate Athenians, while rejecting their injustices, weaknesses, and superstitions.

Three Modern Examples of Genuine Democracy in Action

In some contemporary oligarchies, on rare occasions, the people are allowed to decide an issue directly (through a referendum), without massive rigging.  In such rare democratic outbursts, the people often vote wisely.  Here are two examples.

The Italian Demos vs. Nuclear Power

We have been warned about the menace of atomic energy right from the beginning of the nuclear age. Many years later, in 1977, for instance, Ralph Nader and John Abbot wrote:

“What technology has had the potential for both inadvertent and willful mass destruction . . . for wiping out cities and contaminating states after an accident, a natural calamity, or sabotage?  What technology has been so unnecessary, so avoidable by simple thrift or by deployment of renewable energy supplies?”

When the decision is left to the psychopaths, they of course choose short-term gains, empowerment, and raw materials for nuclear bombs, even though a nuclear power plant may consume more energy than it produces!  After them, they might think, is the deluge.  But when the people are allowed to decide, they often make the right decision, the bankers’ propaganda avalanche notwithstanding:

“Italy is a nuclear free zone since the Italian nuclear power referendum of November 1987. Following center-right parties’ victory in the 2008 election, Italy’s industry minister announced that the government scheduled the construction to start the first new Italian nuclear-powered plant by 2013. The announced project was paused in March 2011, after the Japanese earthquake, and scrapped after a referendum on 12–13 June 2011.”

The Icelandic Demos vs. the International Bankers

The global economic crisis is now in its eighth year, and, the propaganda system notwithstanding, the situation is getting steadily worse.  Real unemployment is nearing levels of the great depression while the middle class is steadily losing ground.  Given the growing misery of the American people, one would think that the USA would stop its extremely costly wars of aggression, yet the United States is spending even more on killing innocents abroad. One would think that the USA would stop producing weapons of mass destruction that could kill billions or even bring history to an end, but in fact they are building more such weapons and deliberately risking an all-out nuclear war. One would think that the USA would dismantle its extremely costly police state apparatus, but the bankers and their puppets are actually spending more money on subjugating, humiliating, incarcerating, and killing the American people.  One would think that, in such hard times, greater income equality would be attempted, but in fact the gap between rich and poor has grown by leaps and bounds from 2008 to 2016.  One would think that the DC syndicate would permit the bankruptcy of the international banks that caused the crisis to begin with, and which, moreover, according to this syndicate’s self-professed capitalist (let alone Christian) ideology, are too big to exist. But just the opposite is taking place: to prevent the deserved bankruptcy of these banks, our politicians (that is, the big bankers themselves or their pawns) have robbed the world’s people of trillions and they have, moreover, declared the robber bankers too big to jail.  Consequently, the economic hard times will continue unabated, or grow far worse, for years and years.

President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson

As of August 2016, there has been only one exception to this sad tale of gargantuan theft—Iceland. There, thanks to an inordinately courageous and decent president, the people were allowed to decide their fate, twice, despite the strenuous opposition of the international bankers.  “These were private banks,” said Iceland’s president, “and we didn’t pump money into them in order to keep them going; the state did not shoulder the responsibility of the failed private banks.”  The people voted and, consequently, Iceland is now in far better economic shape than countries such as Greece, Spain, or the USA.  In Iceland, too, some bankers actually ended up paying for their crimes, and the country has, in the wake of the crisis, moved in a more democratic direction.  The people of Iceland

“took a different path than the United States after their financial crisis and nationalized the banks, threw some the people responsible for the crash in jail, and bailed out the homeowners instead of worrying about only bailing out the banks. And now they’re coming back and their economy is growing again.”

Even the corporate press, on the rare occasions when it covers the Icelandic story, underscores the fabulous potential of genuine democracy:

“Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger. Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population . . . The island’s steps to resurrect itself since 2008, when its banks defaulted on $85 billion, are proving effective.   Iceland’s economy will this year [2012] outgrow the euro area and the developed world on average . . .   The island’s households were helped by an agreement between the government and the banks, which are still partly controlled by the state, to forgive debt exceeding 110 percent of home values. On top of that, a Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 found loans indexed to foreign currencies were illegal, meaning households no longer need to cover krona losses. . . . Iceland’s $13 billion economy, which shrank 6.7 percent in 2009, grew 2.9 percent last year and will expand 2.4 percent this year and next . . . The euro area will grow 0.2 percent this year and the OECD area will expand 1.6 percent, according to November estimates. . . . Iceland’s approach to dealing with the meltdown has put the needs of its population ahead of the markets at every turn. Once it became clear back in October 2008 that the island’s banks were beyond saving, the government stepped in, ring-fenced the domestic accounts, and left international creditors in the lurch. The central bank imposed capital controls to halt the ensuing sell-off of the krona and new state-controlled banks were created from the remnants of the lenders that failed. Iceland’s special prosecutor has said it may indict as many as 90 people, while more than 200, including the former chief executives at the three biggest banks, face criminal charges. . . . That compares with the U.S., where no top bank executives have faced criminal prosecution for their roles in the subprime mortgage meltdown.”

The Berlin Philharmonic

My chief goal in writing this article is the starry-eyed dream of helping, in a small measure, to save our species from its most probable fate–perpetual wars, growing economic inequalities, totalitarianism and, within a couple of centuries at the most, extinction.  This dire future can be directly traced to scandalously criminal political mismanagement of humanity and the biosphere; hence this article focused on real democracy as the organizing principle of all future political organizations.  I must make it clear, however, that direct democracy is, in my view, the best way of organizing each and every human collective, including such things as factories, soccer teams, armies (until we abolish them), and the arts.

A Few Members of the Berlin Philharmonic

One successful example of genuine democracy outside the political arena is the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s leading orchestras (see for instance, Thomas Grube’s documentary, Trip to Asia).

Let us look at what one commentator has to say about this “coolest band in the world:”

“When the Berlin Philharmonic was created in 1882, its fifty-two musicians decided to do business differently.  They wanted a democratic system that not only involved the musicians, but empowered them as well. . . .  It is the musicians who manage themselves, from scheduling concerts, to making tour arrangements, or handling delicate personnel matters. . . .  the audition process is totally inclusive. Every member of the orchestra takes part forming an audience for the auditioning candidates on the stage of the Philharmonie [the orchestra hall]. There are 128 votes and the Chief Conductor, like everyone else, has just one.  The audition tests stylistic understanding and qualities of sound and expression. Technique is a given but never used as the main criterion.  I was told by one player that he and his colleagues were looking ‘to have their souls touched by the music-making.’ . . .  Base salary is €90,000 gross for all rank and file players. Principals receive 15% extra. There is no individual negotiation of personal contracts as in the USA. Transparency and equity are seen as essential to solidarity. . . .  Besides playing in the Orchestra every musician is expected to be a soloist, perform chamber music, and contribute to the overall vision of the Orchestra. . . . The Berliners take a broad view of their responsibilities as musicians.  Besides the established concert series in the Philharmonie, the musicians are involved in community work that is remarkable for the depth of its engagement and interactivity. . . . The musicians’ work touches many, from kindergarteners to prisoners, from teachers to lifelong learners. There is no contractual obligation for the musicians to do this work.  They are paid no additional fees–just travel expenses. They do it because they understand the inherent transformative power of music and want to share that with audiences who have not previously experienced it.”

“The last time I saw the Berlin Phil I thought it was the greatest orchestra I had ever heard. I thought that the time before, too.  The performances have such energy, such commitment, such movement, indeed the musicians move physically with the music. Even their very presence on stage speaks of a different level of communication and engagement. I was very much taken by their tradition at the end of the concert of shaking hands and thanking their colleagues. . . . Their model is not the vision of any one leader.  It comes instead from a collective of musicians who are empowered to be creative with new ideas, new directions, and new challenges.”

A Philosophical Defense of Genuine Democracy

My focus in this article has been empirical.  That is, I believe that the historical record provides the best way of proving the superiority of real democracy over any other form of government.  But genuine democracy can also be defended on philosophical grounds.  Here for instance is John Stuart Mill, a 19th century scholar: [9]

“The ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community, every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government . . . Its superiority . . . rests upon two principles . . . The first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded when the person interested is himself able, and habitually disposed to stand up for them.   The second is that the general prosperity attains a great height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it.”

Also, real democracy, by its very nature, minimizes psychopathic interferences, anti-social behavior, and income inequalities.  It confirms its members’ views that they are masters of their own fate, and produces overall happier people than any other alternative.  Such a society is therefore more likely to enjoy greater cohesion and prosperity.

Finally, success depends on a system’s willingness to acknowledge, and learn from, its mistakes and to adopt policies that serve the public interest.  In totalitarian societies or oligarchies, policy makers can suppress evidence that they made a mistake or acted selfishly and shoot anyone who somehow finds out the truth and who proceeds to recommend the needed changes.  In republics like the USA or France, the same suppression is commonplace, albeit it is not as obvious to ordinary citizens.  In either case, unwise or selfish policies are likely to persist. In contrast, in real democracies, the truth comes out more readily and it is more likely to lead to criticism, debate, and a change of course.  Thus, real democracies enjoy a built-in corrective mechanism which assures communally-minded, wiser, more efficient, sustainable, and just policies. [10, 11]

Closing Remarks

It is no accident that, when given a choice, the Italian people rejected nuclear power, despite massive false advertising by the moneylenders.  It is no accident that, as of June 2015, the only country with any chance of escaping serfdom, Iceland, was able to do so through a referendum, despite massive false advertising by the moneylenders.  It is no accident that the Berlin Philharmonic is, perhaps, the world’s leading orchestra.  What worked so well for the Ancient Athenians, for the Iroquois Confederacy, and for most of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, is obviously working just as well for any country or organization choosing to give genuine democracy a chance.

The demonstrable superiority of real democracy to all other political systems tells us that, when given a chance, most of us are fundamentally decent and rational.  We ought to do everything we can to give ourselves that chance.

For revolutionary advocates of real democracy, the key question is:  How do we get there?  The answer is threefold.

First, our own organizations must follow a variation of the Iroquois or Athenian models of real democracy.

Second, when it comes to nations like Iceland or Switzerland (which enjoy a measure of independence from the Invisible Government’s interference in their internal affairs), the transition might be achieved peacefully.  Such a transition would involve internal educational and political campaigns, as well as tactical moves against subversion, economic blackmail, assassinations, media campaigns, and invasions.

Third, when it comes to oligarchies like Russia, China, or the USA and its many colonies (e.g., France, Japan, Saudi Arabia), where the oligarchs are too entrenched to be removed by peaceful revolution, the answer is the same as it was in the days of Thrasybulus: Violent revolution.  But, can an ordinary popular uprising succeed nowadays, given the extraordinary power of contemporary oligarchs and their expertise in co-opting, impoverishing, killing, or brainwashing the vast majority?  Tragically, the answer is: Almost certainly not.  For better or worse, eventually, a more effective way will be re-discovered.

Notes and References

1. The Orwellian term for real democracy is direct democracy.  This misleading term must be avoided because it implies that there are two legitimate variants of democracy: direct and indirect (representative).  To our ancestors, indirect democracy would be equivalent to soundless tam-tam or arrowless archery.

2. Democratic Athens practiced slavery and excluded women and Athenian-born residents of foreign extraction from the privileges of citizenship.  We can still derive many lessons from Ancient Athens, with the obvious proviso that any future real democracy will extend the full franchise of freedom and citizenship to all adult members.

3. One of the greatest tragedies of the human condition is our reluctance to let go of long-held convictions, even when presented with overwhelming evidence against them.  We know this from everyday observations of others, and also, if we are honest with ourselves, from introspection.  There is also some striking experimental evidence showing that this is so:

“Subjects were recruited to evaluate the efficacy of a self-contained instructional manual. Before they could provide the needed appraisal, they were told, they needed to acquire a first-hand experience of its content by studying it and following the instructions it provided for about four hours. At some point in the teaching process, the manual introduced a false volume formula for a sphere–a formula which led subjects to believe that spheres are 50% larger than they are. Subjects were then given an actual sphere and asked to determine its volume; first by using the formula, and then by filling the sphere with water, transferring the water to a box, and directly measuring the volume of the water in the box. The key question was: Would subjects believe the evidence of their senses and abandon their prior beliefs in the formula, the competence of the experimenter, and the legitimacy of the entire setup? Preliminary observations suggested that the task was far more difficult than expected: no subject decisively rejected the false formula or declined to use it in subsequent tasks. In later experiments various attempts were made to ease the conceptual transition called for by this experiment. In one variation all subjects held a Ph.D. degree in a natural science and were employed as research scientists and professors in two major research universities. A special section–involving measurements of a second ball–was introduced and constructed with the deliberate aim of helping these scientists break away from the false formula. In another variation, the discrepancy concerned the circumference of an ellipse, thereby ruling out the possibility that earlier results were ascribable to the difficulty of dealing with three dimensional concepts. But none of these variations substantially altered the initial results.”

We must recall this, before dismissing real democracy–or any other challenge to our conceptions.

4. After the fall of democratic Athens, the writings of the friends of democracy were deliberately destroyed—the oligarchs and Catholic Church understood well the subversive power of real democracy and the heroic appeal of men such as Thrasybulus.  The oligarchic campaign against real democracy is still very much alive, again “leading many writers to minimize the accomplishments of . . .  democracy’s strongest advocates.” (R. J. Buck, cited here).

5. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia, 1966.

6. Paul Hoefler, Africa Speaks, 1931, p. 351.

7. Steven Johnstone, Disputes and democracy, 1999.

8. At times, it must be admitted, ordinary people justify Plato’s scorn for democracy—or H. L. Mencken’s quip that “democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.“  In Athens too, the narrow-minded, self-destructive, bigotry of the people was at times appalling.  After the restoration of real democracy, Thrasybulus deservedly became the “hero of the people.”  And yet he failed to convince his comrades to extend citizenship to all the foreigners and Athenian-born descendants of foreigners who had fought alongside them against the bloodthirsty oligarchs.  So, real democracy is far from perfect—and yet incomparably better than anything else.

9. Mill, Consideration on Representative Government, 1861.  Mill goes on to say:  “But since all can not, in a community exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be representative.”  There are good reasons to believe that Mill, had he lived now, would revise his opinion on this point.  First, for Mill, the ideal form of government is real democracy, and representative democracy is only a second practical best.  Second, with modern technology, any country, regardless of its size, could have daily plebiscites, if it so wished.  In extremis, it could rely on polling techniques to ascertain the popular will. Third, given the utter subversion of representative governments by the money lenders, Mill would probably see that the only road to a genuine democracy is a variation of Athenian democracy.  Fourth, real democracy would involve, Mill would probably agree, massive decentralization: dividing any country into geographical units of 40,000 souls or less, and severely limiting the powers of the central government.

10. Walt Whitman might have had something like this in mind when he wrote about “the democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground for all” (see his poem, “The Commonplace”).

11. As far as I am aware, the first clear repudiation of the myth of authoritarian efficiency, and the most powerful theoretical explanation of real democracy’s greater observable efficiency, can be found in Karl R. Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies.  Like Mill, however, Popper failed to notice the sharp differences between real and representative democracies.

Moti Nissani

is an organic farmer (in Argentina), a former university professor (in the USA), a jack of many trades, and the compiler of  “ A Revolutionary’s Toolkit.”.

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Composition: AmericanDreaming

A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship. –Chalmers Johnson

In the ordinary course of going about my life—you know: tormenting conservatives, torturing faith healers, smashing the patriarchy, extracting $82 billion worth of amusement for readers out of the Religion-Industrial-Complex, sounding the alarm about the deadly squirrel menace, all the usual stuff—I have found myself repeatedly thinking a very specific sentiment: most US citizens have no idea what our government does or who it serves. And to be clear, by “most,” I mean the vast, overwhelming majority.

This is true for a number of reasons. It starts with our grade schools serving up steaming piles of shit: the noble escapades of Christopher Columbus, the warm and cooperative relationship between Native Americans and European colonialists we celebrate as a national holiday, a justice system that produces justice, our fearless and vaunted adversarial press, the great cause of democracy for which US citizens routinely sacrifice blood and treasure all over the world, the moral meritocracy of capitalism and The American Dream™, and on and on. Don’t even get me started on the myths we are fed about race. NEWSFLASH: there is no part of U.S. history or culture that is not inexorably linked to Africans dragged to this country in chains, and forced to work under the most brutal conditions imaginable, thereby amassing great wealth for America’s Owners. It continues to this day.

And then of course our rancid corporate media piles it on, 24/7/365, its sins of omission frequently far greater than its whitewashing of reality. We USians are surely among the most propagandized populations in the world, ever. The fog is so thick, we choke on it.

But this is what a ruling class does. This is what a ruling class has always done, and will always do. And so, quite understandably, most US citizens have no idea what our government does or who it serves.

Most US Citizens Have No Idea What Our Government Does Or Who It Serves.

MUSCHNIWOGDOWIS

#muschniwogdowis

♥♥♥!!!

OMG don’t you love it?! I LOVE IT. This ingenious new hashtag is guaranteed to be trending worldwide on Twitter. Any minute now.

Okay, maybe it’s a little clunky. Also: practically unpronounceable. But I am nevertheless finding it very, very useful.

Today’s demonstration of its utility comes courtesy of this headline in The Nation: The Obama Administration Has Brokered More Weapons Sales Than Any Other Administration Since World War II. You can read the whole thing for yourself for a nice overview of how it all works, though not for all the nasty little devils in the details. But the takeaway is this: the Executive Branch of the US government, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the Commander-in-Chief, is a dedicated worldwide sales force shilling for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrup Grumman.

Here is one example of how it works:

Take the administration’s proposed new 10-year aid deal with Israel. If enacted as currently planned, it would boost US military assistance to that country by up to 25 percent—to roughly $4 billion per year. At the same time, it would phase out a provision that had allowed Israel to spend one-quarter of Washington’s aid developing its own defense industry. In other words, all that money, the full $4 billion in taxpayer dollars, will now flow directly into the coffers of companies like Lockheed Martin, which is in the midst of completing a multi-billion-dollar deal to sell the Israelis F-35s.

What looks like a $40 billion US taxpayer gift to Israel is actually a $40 billion US taxpayer gift to Lockheed Martin. Israeli citizens, by the way, enjoy excellent universal health care, including mental health treatment and dental care for their kids. Unlike, say, the very same US citizens shelling out that $40 billion.

Hell, why not just hand it over directly to Lockheed, with the tiny little caveat that it reincorporate itself as a non-profit? (Hahaha. Oh man, sometimes I really crack myself up.)

__________

I remember reading something somewhere sometime about war profiteering once being considered an unconscionable crime, if you can believe it. Moneymaking from warmaking is evil, generating as it does massive profits for an elite few out of volatility and violence for the many. Now it is quite literally the American Way.

The ‘defense’ budget is three quarters of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year well over 25%. I guarantee you: when war becomes that profitable, we’re going to see more of it. –Chalmers Johnson

In closing, ask yourself this question: if America’s Owners (the permanent power factions in Washington DC, a.k.a. the deep state) are perfectly willing to bomb and invade sovereign countries at will, to destabilize and violently overthrow the democratically elected leftist governments of countries whose resources they feel entitled to exploit and install brutal tyrants to guarantee unimpeded access, to assassinate and neutralize labor activists, minority and indigenous organizers or indeed anyone who poses even a minor threat to the profit-making schemes from which they so richly benefit, do you believe for one second that they will ever allow leftists in the US to amass sufficient power to turn the ship of state 180 degrees and put it to work creating more just, peaceful, equitable and sustainable societies?

Aww fuck, I’m sorry. That was a loooong question. Makes my new acronym seem downright pithy by comparison, doesn’t it?

#muschniwogdowis.

Have a nice day

Original post at Perry Street Place.

This is box title

Iris Vander Pluym is a writer, artist and activist based in New York City. A self-described “unapologetic, godless, feminist lefty,” she blogs at Perry Street Palace, is a regular columnist at TPJ Magazine, a contributor at Secular Woman, Worldwide Hippies/Citizen Journalists Exchange and Pharyngula, and has written professionally for Keyboard and Electronic Musician magazines (print editions). Indoctrinated with the notion that Nice Girls™ never talk about politics, sex or religion, it turns out these are pretty much the only subjects she ever has any interest in discussing. Follow Iris not being nice on Twitter @irisvanderpluym

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Moti Nissani, PhD
No Planet – No People

Created by Garveate.

Part I of: Why does the Invisible Government Continue to Grow in Strength?

“[The Controllers of the Invisible Government] would continue to grow in strength, until they had the whole silly world, the whole credulous world, the whole ingenuous world, in their hands. Anyone who would challenge them, attempt to expose them, show them unconcealed and naked, would be murdered, laughed at, called mad, ignored, or denounced as a fantasy-weaver.”—Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings, 1972

Summary: Democracy, elections, presidents, governors, mayors, senators, representatives, judges, most mainstream journalists, book writers, and clergy, are nothing but a smokescreen.  America’s real rulers have access to immense fortunes, operate behind the scenes, and enjoy near-absolute power.

This article argues that the five major countries of the Anglosphere—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US—are governed behind the scenes by a coterie.  This coterie shapes historical events, accounts for the near-uniformity of these five countries’ political developments, and enjoys partial or full control of most nations of the world.  As far as we can guess, this coterie is comprised of a few banking families and their allies and subordinates in the information, corporate, military, intelligence, secret society, and “religious” worlds.

This coterie and its members go by such names as the deep state, One Bank, bankers, oligarchs, Directors, Men in the Shadows, or Princes of Power.  In this series, I shall refer to the entity itself as the Invisible Government and, following Aldous Huxley, to its head honchos as the Controllers.

What is it that the Controllers are after?  Why aren’t they content with what they already have?  The best guess is that they are just as sick as the fictional Eddorians:

While not essentially bloodthirsty—that is, not loving bloodshed for its own sweet sake—they were no more averse to blood-letting than they were in favor of it.  Any amount of killing which would or which might advance an Eddorian toward his goal was commendable; useless slaughter was frowned upon, not because it was slaughter, but because it was useless—and hence inefficient.  And, instead of the multiplicity of goals sought by the various entities of any race of Civilization, each and every Eddorian had only one.  The same one: power.  Power!  P-O-W-E-R!! (Doc Smith, Triplanetary, 1948)

Likewise, the head of the Invisible Government in This Perfect Day reveals his real motives:

“Chip, listen to me,” he said, leaning forward, “there’s joy in having it, in controlling, in being the only one.”

Juan O’Gorman’s “Enemies of the Mexican People”

Why Prove the Reality of the Invisible Government?

This posting introduces a series of articles that attempt to explain how and why the Controllers are steadily growing in strength.  Cleary, before talking about the growing power of the Controllers, we must be convinced that they exist.

As well, I’m not aware of any near-conclusive proof for the existence of the Invisible Government.  This article attempts to close that gap.

Finally, most people are not even dimly aware of the Invisible Government. And even the few who are awake can still be mesmerized by the charade of elections, still subscribe to the fiction that the president of the USA is elected by the people (in reality, he is selected and disposed of by the Controllers), still look upon said president as an independent actor, still talk about him as “the most powerful man in the world.”  They fail to see a simple truth: It doesn’t matter who the president of the USA is, who sits in Congress or on the Supreme Court, who performs for the mainstream media or organized religion.  It doesn’t matter who writes for the New York Times, who recites at National Public Radio, who avers whatever in any of the major think tanks.  All these people are jumping jacks.  Hopefully, proving the reality of the Invisible Government will help some people extricate themselves from the Controllers’ pervasive propaganda.

But, you may wonder: Is it conceivable that so many people mistake puppets for puppeteers?  Hollywood provides a trivial illustration.  Most movie watchers know the actors, but few know the controllers behind the camera: producers, scriptwriters, and directors.

I shall explore elsewhere the profound strategic implications of shifting our focus from the puppets to the puppeteers.  If mercenaries are invading your republic, your most logical target is their financial sponsor. Once you effectively shine the light on, impoverish, arrest, intimidate, or assassinate this sponsor, the looting of your country will cease.  Likewise, reformers and revolutionaries must shift their attention from the likes of Monsanto, British Petroleum, President of the United States, Senior Senator from Arizona, Governor of Wisconsin, or Chancellor of Germany, to the handful of their financial sponsors.

Who are the Controllers?

I want to know who the men in the shadows are.—Jackson Browne

Jeff Nielson offers the following brilliant deduction:

At first glance; the question appears elementary. The One Bank is a financial crime syndicate which controls 40% of the global economy – a global economy with annual GDP of roughly $70 trillion. Clearly the owners of the One Bank would have to be “the world’s richest people” (richest men?).

Here the Corporate media is only too happy to be of service to us. Once a year; we are presented with a “world’s richest list”, which is then parroted by all of the other outlets of the Big Media oligopoly, ad nauseam. Thus, we simply peruse this list for the names at the top, and we have our “owners” of the One Bank. Et voila!

More than 90% of the actual wealth in the world today (real and paper) is hidden from us

Instead, the only rational answer is that there is another, entire tier of the “world’s richest”, an echelon above all the B-List Billionaires on the official lists. The real “world’s richest” are, in fact, not billionaires at all, but rather trillionaires: the Oligarch Trillionaires who own (among other things) the One Bank.

How wealthy are these Oligarchs? Not only are these Oligarchs wealthy enough to be able to hide their names (and fortunes) from all public scrutiny, these trillionaires wield enough power to even prevent the word “trillionaire” from being recognized as an official word in our dictionaries.

Nielson then identifies the Controllers’ with the Rothschild clan.

For my part, I have been trying to fathom the Controllers’ identities for a long time.  I’ve read many competing speculations but never encountered a definitive answer.  So I have some vague notions about their identity and suspect that somehow the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers (Rs&Rs) are involved.

Apart from that, I can only offer a few queries.

To avoid assassination, the Controllers typically rely on proxies, shadows, and surveillance mirrors.  As we shall soon see, besides the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers sit atop an immense web of regimentation.  So, are the Rs&Rs collaborating as equals?  Are they competitors?  Or are the Rockefellers merely the American agents of the Rothschilds? (not farfetched—the “mighty” J.P. Morgan was a Rothschild agent).

Above the ordinary billionaires, way up in the stratosphere, Nielson says, are the trillionaires.  That could be another way of identifying the men in the shadows:  Do the Rothschild and Rockefeller clans control trillions?  Does the Catholic Church?  Do British or Dutch royalties?  Do some secret societies?

The intelligence agencies, the police, the armed forces of the USA, UK, Israel, and allied countries, have a license to kill, and they could perhaps do away with the bankers and become the top dogs.  Why don’t they?  How do the Controllers keep these Praetorian Guards in line?

It’s important to note, however, that our limited information about the Controllers’ identity in no way invalidates our forthcoming conclusion that the Controllers, conniving in the background, are the real power brokers.  Humans have always known that water exists, even though they were often ignorant of its constituent parts.  The same goes for the Invisible Government:  Truth-seekers have excellent reasons to believe it exists, although information about its internal structure and the identity of its members remains as elusive as they are.

Evidence Supporting the Existence of the Invisible Government

Insider Quotes: Many insiders tried to alert us.

Views of Other Knowledgeable Observers

The first quote is from an outraged journalist (in those bygone days when some mainstream journalists defended truth and people).  The next two are from high-level captive intellectuals.

Invisibility Slips

An article in one of the Invisible Government’s chief propaganda organs clearly underscores who is really in charge of the UK:

Governed either by or on behalf of the people who fleece us, we cannot be surprised to discover that all public services are being re-engineered for the benefit of private capital. . . . The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London [London’s financial district] is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. In fact, the relationship seems to work the other way. Behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons sits the Remembrancer, whose job is to ensure that the interests of the City of London are recognised by the elected members.

In the U.S., the Rockefellers played a key role for some 140 years.  David Rockefeller in particular, in rare exhibitionist moments, likes to brag:

We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The super-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.

David Rockefeller

So, we have it straight from the Psychopath’s mouth:  It’s Rockefeller and his lackeys—and not the nominal governments—who are conspiratorially developing their “plan for the world” and who possess enough power to do so.  If they get their way, we shall become the slaves to conscience-less bankers like David Rockefeller and to such “intellectual” flunkeys of theirs as Kissinger, Brezhinski, Friedman, Greenspan, and Sachs.

In another overweening moment, David Rockefeller allowed these lines to be inserted into his own encyclopedia:

Rockefeller has met with and advised every American President since Eisenhower… President Jimmy Carter offered him the positions of United States Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman but he declined both instead preferring a private role… Rockefeller has been able to act as bridge to various interests around the world, including Saddam Hussein and Communist leaders such as Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, and Mikhail Gorbachev… Rockefeller also reportedly has connections to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). David was extensively briefed on covert intelligence… Additionally, he serves as the only member of the Advisory Board for the Bilderberg Group… In 1992, he was selected as a leading member of the Russian-American Bankers Forum, an advisory group set up by the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to advise Russia on the modernization of its banking system, with the full endorsement of President Boris Yeltsin… Rockefeller began a lifelong association with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) when he joined as a director in 1949, the youngest member appointed to that position yet. He would later become head of the nominating committee for future membership and after that the chairman of this foreign policy think-tank. In 1965, Rockefeller and other businessmen formed the Council of the Americas to stimulate and support economic integration in the Americas. In 1992, at a Council sponsored forum, Rockefeller proposed a “Western Hemisphere free trade area”, which subsequently became the Free Trade Area of the Americas in a Miami summit in 1994… Rockefeller helped found the Trilateral Commission in July 1973.

Given this web of subjection, given the Rockefellers’ 140-year-long dominance of American politics, it seems reasonable to suppose that the Rockefeller clans belongs to the exclusive club of world puppeteers.

Uniformity

Near-identical policies suggest that the same entity(s) is pulling strings everywhere.

At times, the Controllers are careless, treating us to such bizarre spectacle as the “heads” of Canada and Australia reciting the same speech.  Is it conspiratorial to suppose that they were reading a speech handed to them by someone possessing more power than they could ever dream of having?

Here is another trivial, and yet suggestive, example of convergence:

What do New York City and London have in common?  Both are eliminating their public libraries against the will of the public and replacing them with luxury housing, using secretive, deceptive tactics. . . .  It is almost as if the authors of the London and NYC articles copied each other and substituted different libraries, one from London, the other from NYC.

That grotesque uniformity applies to all key policies of the Anglosphere and its colonies.  They all fight “terror” and are subjected to “terror,” they all deliberately and needlessly impoverish and poison their people, they all pay lip service to environmental stewardship—while steadily undermining the physical and biological foundations of life itself.

Or take the curious case of Crimea.  Any decent person who knows what really happened in the Ukraine since the 2014 CIA regime-change operation would agree that the people of Crimea—mostly anti-fascist Russians—had a right to secede from Ukraine and join their historical Russian home.  Instead, the official policies of all Western countries is that this act of Russian “aggression” calls for nuclear brinkmanship that could cost—deliberately or accidentally—the lives of billions.  Only a central authority controlling all these countries could bring about such suicidal compliance.

How far would the Controllers go to achieve their stated goal of “full spectrum dominance,” using the USA as their primary tool? 1. Neither the USA nor any of its allies is under the remotest threat of being invaded or encroached on by anyone. 2. The Controllers plan to enrich and empower themselves by investing $10,000 dollars of each American’s household money on weapons of mass destruction (like the one shown nearby). Couldn’t the average American put that money to better use elsewhere? 3. The Controllers probably have underground cities to wait out the aftermath of multiple explosions. Do you have a similar hiding place? 4. Does their striving for power justify the killing of billions and the possible extinction—accidental or deliberate—of humanity? 5. Why, in heaven’s name, do ordinary people take such irresponsible brinkmanship lying down?

Aaron Russo’s Testimony

Shortly before dying of cancer, renowned filmmaker Aaron Russo said:

So I had a friend, Nick Rockefeller, who was one of the Rockefeller family. . . . And one of the things that we used to talk about . . . the goals of the banking industry — not just the Federal Reserve System but the private banks in Germany, and England, all over Italy, all over the world — they all work together, they’re all central banks. . . . And so, the ultimate goal that these people have in mind is the goal to create a one-world government, run by the banking industry. . . there’ll be no more cash. . . . And I used to say to him that I never really did that because that wasn’t where I was coming from. As much as I like you, Nick, your way isn’t my way, we’re on the opposite side of the fence. I don’t believe in enslaving people.

[Rockefeller said something like]:

“What do you care about them? What do you care about those people? What difference does it make to you?  Take care of your own life. Do the best you can for you and your family. What do the rest of the people mean to you? They don’t mean anything to you. They’re just serfs, they’re just people.”

It was just a lack of caring. And that’s just not who I was. It was just sort of cold.

Incredible Concentration of Wealth

“You’re looking at the most expensive Congress money can buy.”—Bill Moyers, 2013

Jeff Nielson reminds us:

Roughly 2½ years ago; readers were introduced to a paradigm of crime, corruption, and control which they now know as “the One Bank.”  First they were presented with a definition and description of this crime syndicate.

That definition came via a massive computer model constructed by a trio of Swiss academics, and cited with favor by Forbes magazine.  The computer model was based upon data involving more than 10 million “economic actors,” both individuals and corporations, and the conclusions which that model produced were nothing less than shocking.

The One Bank is “a super-entity” comprised of 144 corporate fronts, with approximately ¾ of these corporate fronts being financial intermediaries (i.e. “banks”). According to the Swiss computer model; via these 144 corporate tentacles, the One Bank controls approximately 40% of the global economy. The only thing more appalling than the massive size of this crime syndicate is its massive illegality.

Attentive readers will notice that there is nothing new under the sun:  This computer model echoes what Huey Long said 84 years ago.

The golden rule of politics states: He who has the gold, rules.  Wouldn’t the owners of ill-gotten almost everything use their wealth to rule the world?

The Controllers are above the Law

Here is Jeff Nielson again:

On a near weekly basis; the Big Banks of the West are caught-and-convicted (but never punished), perpetrating criminal conspiracies literally thousands of times larger than any other financial crimes in human history. The U.S. government has now publicly proclaimed that its Big Banks have a license to steal.

Another example is provided by a U.S. Congressional report, entitled “Too Big to Jail: Inside the Obama Justice Department’s Decision Not to Hold Wall Street Accountable.”  This report proved that—“despite criminal wrongdoing as insidious as supporting major drug cartels and catering to states considered enemies of the United States”—certain Big Banks are above the law.

That is precisely what you would expect from a Department of Justice that is ruled by the very individuals it is obligated to put behind bars.

Challenging the Controllers is a Life- or Career-Threatening Business

If the Invisible Government exists, then its control of government and information sources confers upon it a license to sideline, smear, incarcerate, or kill, its influential challengers.

This subject will be taken up in greater detail later; for the moment we only need to mention that 4 of the 12 people cited in this posting for hostile criticisms of the Invisible Government were probably assassinated:  Presidential candidate Huey Long, muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips, Congressman Louis McFadden (“heart attack,” having survived two earlier assassination attempts), and Congressman Larry McDonald (airplane “accident”).

Four others in this list died or were incapacitated comparatively young:  Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt died at age 60, President Wilson was incapacitated in office, age 62, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office (years after surviving a coup attempt), age 63, and Aaron Russo died of cancer, age 64.

On the other hand, activist Upton Sinclair died at age 90.  Henry A. Wallace died at 77, Oscar Callaway at 74, and NYC ex-mayor John Hylan died at 67.  All four were viciously smeared by the Rockefeller media.  Thanks to those media and the Controllers’ power, the last three were unceremoniously evicted from the political world.

These data are certainly more consistent with the existence of an all-powerful Invisible Government than with its absence.

The Acknowledged Power of Billionaires

The Rockefellers and Rothschilds (Rs&Rs) hand-pick a few shrewd yet acquiescent individuals to positions of political power (e.g., Rockefeller stooges Kissinger or Brzezinski) or, in all likelihood, help some people become billionaires (e.g., Bill Gates, Mikhail Khodorkovsky).  In return, the politicians promise obedience and the billionaires undertake to toe the line and never, ever, share their excessive wealth with the people.  Some of these handpicked billionaires—unlike their cautious masters—are kept in the limelight while promoting their masters’ agenda (so that, if push comes to shove, they, and not their benefactors, will be pitchforked).

Here are a few examples.

Russia’s Criminal Oligarchs

In Russia, the Rs&Rs created, out of thin air, a few plundering oligarchs.  One, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was powerful enough at one point to challenge a popular, democratically-elected, government.

According to Andrei Raevsky, a titanic struggle is being waged between Russian patriots and the Controllers’ oligarchs who are still running Russian finance and banking, key economic ministries, and the Central Bank.  These oligarchs “are, by far, the single biggest threat . . . to the Russian people as a whole.”

George Soros

David Galland and Stephen McBride write:

During the 1980s and 1990s, Soros used his extraordinary wealth to bankroll and fund revolutions in dozens of European nations, including Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. He achieved this by funneling money to political opposition parties, publishing houses, and independent media in these nations.

There’s no doubt about Soros’s great influence on US foreign policy. In an October 1995 PBS interview with Charlie Rose, he said, “I do now have access [to US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott]. There is no question. We actually work together [on Eastern European policy].

If you wonder why Soros meddled in these nations’ affairs, part of the answer may lie in the fact that during and after the chaos, he invested heavily in assets in each of the respective countries.

He then used Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs to advise the fledgling governments to privatize all public assets immediately, thus allowing Soros to sell the assets he had acquired during the turmoil into newly formed open markets.

Having succeeded in advancing his agenda in Europe through regime change—and profiting in the process—he soon turned his attention to the big stage, the United States.”

Why is Soros spending a fortune establishing a variety of organizations, mimicking his “successes” in Europe? For one simple reason: to buy political power.

More recently, Soros has given more than $33 million to the Black Lives Matter group, which has been involved in outbreaks of social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015. Both of these incidents contributed to a worsening of race relations across America.

He is intent on destroying national borders and creating a global governance structure with unlimited powers. From his comments directed toward Viktor Orbán, we can see he clearly views national leaders as his juniors, expecting them to become puppets that sell his narrative to the ignorant masses.  . . .

By all appearances, Soros is conspiring against humanity and is hell-bent on the destruction of Western democracies.

Soros alone, it would appear, wields more power than America’s Congress, President, and Supreme Court.  Moreover, is it just a coincidence that Soros carries out David Rockefeller’s stated agenda?

Sheldon Adelson

Eric Margolis writes about Netanyahoo:

[In 2015] came the triumphant visit to Congress by Israel’s rightwing prime minister . . .  Congress put on a truly revolting display of sycophancy, servility and brownnosing . . .  that included 23 rapturous standing ovations.

If you have an exceptionally strong stomach, you might want to watch this video:

This is neither the first time, nor the worst: In 2011, in a disgraceful, shocking, display of subservience, the thoroughly corrupt Netanyahoo received 29 standing ovations.

Gambling godfather Sheldon Adelson invested $92 million in the 2012 presidential election cycle.

Why are these politicians openly betraying humanity and the American people?  The intrigues of one minor billionaire, working probably with the explicit or tacit consent of the Invisible Government, provide a partial answer.

[Sheldon Adelson] has already threatened to invest unlimited sums of money to prevent the reelection of any Senator or Representative who is absent from Netanyahoo’s speech.

Historical Episodes Illustrating the Invisible Government’s Enormous Power

American “Medicine:” Follow the Rockefellers

No other peaceful population, probably since the 1839 Opium Wars, has been so devastated by a drug epidemic encouraged by a government.—James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya (Genocide by Prescription)

Cutthroat oilmen, moneychangers, and despoilers of everything: John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Jr

Isn’t it curious that the life expectancy at birth of people born in Spain or Switzerland is 83 years, while in the USA it is 79 (38th place in the world)—even though per capita spending on health in the USA is roughly 3.5 times greater than in Spain (in 2013, $9,146 vs. $2581)?  Have you ever asked yourself why a Cuban born today is likely to live as long as her American counterpart, even though the per capita spending on health in the USA is 15 times larger than in Cuba?

James Corbett:

As Americans . . . wonder how the country became enslaved to the highest healthcare costs in the world, we turn back the pages to look at how the modern medical paradigm came together in the early 20th century, courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation and their cronies.

[The healthcare industry came into being] “as a result of a concerted and carefully plotted plan that was laid out generations ago by people with malice of forethought. . . . By taking over the medical industry in 1910 through studies which he made through the Carnegie foundation, John D. Rockefeller emerged as the kingpin of the medical monopoly in the United States. And he now presided over an allopathic system of medicine, controlled through every legislature by accreditation of hospitals, control of physicians, control of medications and which is essentially what we have today. . . . Interestingly enough, the Rockefellers control every major drug company in the world, and when I say control, I mean directly. . . . I think we understand that profit isn’t in and of itself a motivating driving factor for the David Rockefellers and others of the world. . . . America became the most expensive healthcare system in the world . . . through methodical planning over the course of generations by people with almost unthinkable amounts of wealth.

You might want to click on the nearby link, before your next chemotherapy session, bi-annual dental X-rays, or visit to a conventional physician, dentist, or pharmacist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6J_7PvWoMw

Prohibition:  Follow the Rockefellers:

Using alcohol as an alternative to oil would actually drive down food prices, help enrich the soil, and have a lot of other benefits. . . .  So if alcohol can provide a cheaper and better fuel than gasoline, why doesn’t anyone talk about it today?

Well, John D. Rockefeller, under the ruse of Christian temperance, gave 4 million dollars to a group of old ladies and told them to fight for Prohibition (they successfully used the money to buy off Congress). Why? Rockefeller owned Standard Oil, the main company pushing gas as an alternative fuel to alcohol. By getting Congress to pass Prohibition laws, Rockefeller eliminated his competition.

Global Brainwashing Operations:  Follow the Rockefellers

William Hearst remarked: “The newspapers control the nation.”  The Controllers understood that, and wisely decided to subvert most information sources.  After all, why should criminals who can print as much money as they wish, steal national gold hordes, manipulate governments, and possess a license to sideline, steal, defame, and kill, have to put up with inconvenient truths?  Why should they have to tolerate the likes of David Graham Phillips writing in a main circulation magazine about their crime syndicate?

The wily Rockefellers rose to the occasion, with the sad result that most people—intellectuals included—remain clueless because they read newspapers, listen to radio, watch television, go to school, and study “history” books.

We may note in passing that only one in a thousand sees the obvious:  As in the case of cyanide poisoning, the only way to prevent brain poisoning is to avoid exposure.

In 1917, Congressman Oscar Callaway explained how the Controllers colonized our minds:

In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control, generally, the policy of the daily press. . . .   They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.  An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.

To be sure, truth served money and power long before 1915.  Thomas Jefferson famously said in 1807:

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.

The 1915 and subsequent campaigns merely refined the conversion of mainstream journalists into presstitutes.  Here, for instance, is Upton Sinclair, writing in 1919:

I was determined to get something done about the atrocious conditions under which men, women and children were working the Chicago stockyards.  In my efforts to get something done, I was like an animal in a cage. The bars of this cage were newspapers, which stood between me and the public; and inside the cage I roamed up and down, testing one bar after another, and finding them impossible to break.

Every seeker of compassion and rationality since then would recognize Sinclair’s cage as her own.

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 Joaquin Flores, Special Associate Editor; Belgrade Correspondent, is a Mexican-American expat based in Belgrade. He is a full-time analyst and director at the Center for Syncretic Studies, a public geostrategic think-tank and consultancy firm, as well as the co-editor of Fort Russ news service. His expertise encompasses Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and he has a strong proficiency in Middle East affairs. Flores is particularly adept at analyzing ideology and the role of mass psychology, as well as the methods of the information war in the context of 4GW and New Media. He is a political scientist educated at California State University. In the US, he worked for a number of years as a labor union organizer, chief negotiator, and strategist for a major trade union federation. His work at TGP can be found here. 

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=By= Jimmie Moglia

Cartoon by Vinenzo Apicella

hing, hang, hog…
Hang hog is Latin for bacon, I warrant you.

(Merry Wives of Windsor, act 4, sc.1)

To the articulate speculations of many analysts on the failed coup in Turkey I will not add the vanity of my conjectures – for, clearly, everything and its opposite seem equally possible. I cannot guess the past, nor sound the bottom of the aftertimes (1) – hence just a few serendipitous observations.

Literarily speaking, and considering his massacres, Erdogan could be compared to Macbeth. However, Erdogan lacks Macbeth’s tragic persona, blinded and thrust forward by destiny and ambition – after having completely misunderstood the witches’ predictions.

Furthermore, there is something noble in Macbeth – and in moments of lucidity he even feels the pangs of conscience.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
… or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” (2)

Even without allowing for the influence of Lady Macbeth, ambitious schemer from behind the curtains, who suggests,

“…look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t.” (3)

With Erdogan we know nothing of the influence of his wife (or wives?). And while endeavoring to add new strands to the fabric of his ambition, Erdogan remains a kind of Falstaff, somewhat thinner, but deprived of any ability to laugh at himself, at least at times.

“I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass” (4)

Erdogan looks like an ornery corner-store owner, angry because there isn’t enough ice in the refrigerator.

As an aside, that ‘g’ in Erdogan is neither a vowel nor a consonant; it’s a conso-vowel – a true piece of Levantine lexicography. Those in the know have mastered the correct pronunciation, but I side with the German songwriter, who ended up in court for his sacrilegious lyrics. Where the refrain in his sinful song ends with “Erdoui, Erdouo, Erdouan.” Here is the original https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6e-X0PEeMneLR7xWaQ5PNOSzfUsBd9NZ

To return to the coup, out of these global sagas with multiple threads, often spring out characters, previously unknown to the world at large. In the instance, the “fetid mullah with the goulash,” which is my mnemonic trick to remember the very Turkish name of Fehtullah Gulen, with the umlaut on the ‘u’ of Gulen – the Turkish, not the more familiar German umlaut.
But how could anyone follow the million strands that pop in and out from the wool-ball-like-world of global politics? Beyond a certain limit we can’t and, even if we could, “memory, the warder of the brain, shall be a fume.” (5)

In the instance, Fehtullah, by just looking at him, is the embodiment of the quintessential godfather who makes you offers that you cannot refuse. In real life, he is a proven metaphorical milker of US cows – characters often found in the great morass of wild privatizations, undertaken in the exceptional nation. Here the udders are the ‘charter schools’, a proven venue to suck taxes from the taxpayers, in the name of (never proven and actually disproven) efficiency in pedagogy. The millionaires who caught the gale of fortune, thanks to the charter-school racket, make a pretty hefty number.

Apparently, Fehtullah has imported scores of Turkish instructors to teach English to Americans in his charter schools, thanks to the farcical H1B visa scheme (foreigners can be imported when no Americans can be found, able to do the same job).

But all makes sense, when considering the strong ties between the fetid mullah and the Clinton Foundation. Which, as demonstrated in the blog “The Clintons’ War on Women” should be more accurately renamed “The Oral and Anal Sex Foundation.” http://wp.me/p2e0kb-1Xk

Analysts agree that the fetid mullah is a CIA ‘asset’ – an interesting euphemism, suggesting a menacing innocence under a veneer of verbal neutrality. What kind of asset? an informer, schemer, killer, plotter, non-expendable terrorist or expendable patsy?

But the impressions of some find their opposites in others, who see in Fehtullah a harmless old man descended into the vale of years. (6)

Just a little research, however, yields a different picture. Apparently, Fehtullah is a galvanizing figure in the world of Turkish expatriates. Furthermore, maybe like Erdogan, Fehtullah dreams (or plans) a new Ottoman Empire carved out from the lands of neighboring nations and stretching from Instanbul to the remote Turkish province of Uyghur in Northwest China.

Fehtullah’s plan to gain power in Turkey, reads like a chapter extracted from the Pentagon’s manual on Fourth Generation Warfare. Here is an extract from a speech broadcast on Turkish television before Fehtullah fled to the US as a refugee.

You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here. – Fethullah Gülen Sermon broadcast on Turkish television

Back to the coup. The lightning-speed purge of thousands in Turkey, begun even before the last soldier was captured, suggests that the proscription list had been ready for a while, waiting for implementation. Leading to the concurrent nazification of the Turkish people, inflamed by religious fanaticism, helpless victim of carnage, or witness of carnage inflicted on neighbors.

Meanwhile the EU chancelleries bleat recommendations of caution and moderation, as the Turkish Falstaff giggles and (possibly) asks, “How about two or three more millions of undocumented migrants?” “Should I close your bases and become a Russian ally?” “Do you want me to stop from plotting to have Assad assassinated like Gheddafi or Saddam?” “And I warn you CIA & Associates. If you come after me I have hard evidence of so many skeletons in your cupboard, that if you move a finger against me I will tell the whole world.”

Still, these considerations do not answer the question as to which theory, about the sequence of recent horrible events, is correct. A massacre in Nice, a coup d’etat in Turkey with hundreds of victims, hundreds of civilian victims in Aleppo, thanks to bombing conducted by the US and France. The very France, victim in the same week of an attack, which, whether genuine or otherwise, traces its origins to France’s military aggression in North Africa and the Middle East.

In the circumstances, while seeking for truth, or at least plausibility, I adhere to two principles,

1) It comes directly from Oscar Wilde, “Believe anything, provided it is quite incredible”
2) It applies to America and its colonies, “Do not believe anything until it’s denied.”

Let’s apply a quick test.
Erdogan accuses the US of knowing about the coup, staged by the fetid mullah. The US denies it. (see principle 2).
A proscription list containing over 6000+ names of Turkish teachers, academics, judges, journalists, generals, colonels and others is ready within literally hours after the completion of the unsuccessful coup. That is incredible (see principle 1).
The US deny having any hand in the Turkish coup. (principle 2)

As for the massacre in Nice. Here is a drunkard, erotomaniac, bisexual, with a police record of violence, a thief who did not observed the Ramadan, ignored the Koran, did not attend mosques and ate pork. A perfect picture of the mentally unstable, manipulable, easily prey to illusions. And yet, as Italian journalist Fulvio Grimaldi points out, he is “radicalized” in the short space from one night to the next morning, before the rooster crows three times. Also, he did not shave for a week, prior to the massacre – no doubt, a flawless characterization of a polished and sophisticated planner of massacres. Who says so? French Security.
Applicable principles? Both one and two.

Talking of terrorism, it has evolved. I refer to a theme by the same Italian journalist. In his analysis, the classification begins with the terroristus rooseveltianus, driven to terrorism by provocation, believing to react to an imminent attack, as the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Next is the virtual terroristus johnsonianus, existing only in the Pentagon’s report about heavily armed North Vietnamese fishing boats attacking the US Navy in the golf of Tonkin.

I added the terroristus esperimentalis, embodied by Harvey Oswald, used as a test case to measure the acceptance at large of the fictional story (that he was the isolated killer of President Kennedy).

We then have the terroristus bushensis, disguised as a Saudi plane hijacker, a subway bomber, or a marathon watcher. Whose cover, however, is paper thin, and liable to be unmasked with consequences that would be catastrophic, without the iron-clad protection by the doctors of the image and by the industry of deceit, embodied in the domestic mainstream media.

Talking of which, given the noise raised by Turkish coups and French massacres, the corporate media did an excellent job of downplaying the latest revelations about the (until now officially secret) missing pages of the 9/11 official report. Whose conclusions, however, are that the Saudis did it. (apply principle #1).

Who writes here knows Saudi Arabia in person. Clearly, brilliance and intelligence can be found everywhere, but in Saudi Arabia even toothbrushes and toothpaste come from abroad. Assuming the Saudis capable of organizing 9/11 equates to having the King of Saudi Arabia discover the principles and the mathematics of quantum physics.

Even so, the matter did not go down well with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Newspaper Al Hayat, reputed to reflect the views of the Saudi Monarchy, recently published an article from which I extract the following,

“September 11 is one of winning cards in the American archives, because all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos [of 9/11] agree unanimously that what happened in the [Twin] Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S. Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings… Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing [into them] only gave the green light for the detonation – they were not the reason for the collapse. But the U.S. still spreads blame in all directions. [This policy] can be dubbed ‘victory by means of archives.’

On September 11, the U.S. attained several victories at the same time, that [even] the hawks [who were at that time] in the White House could not have imagined. Some of them can be enumerated as follows:

1.   The U.S. created, in public opinion, an obscure enemy – terrorism – which became what American presidents blamed for all their mistakes, and also became the sole motivation for any dirty operation that American politicians and military figures desire to carry out in any country. [The] terrorism [label] was applied to Muslims, and specifically to Saudi Arabia.
2.   Utilizing this incident [9/11], the U.S. launched a new age of global armament. Everyone wanted to acquire all kinds of weapons to defend themselves and at the same time battle the obscure enemy, terrorism – [even though] up to this very moment we do not know the essence of this terrorism of which the U.S. speaks, except [to say that] that it is Islamic…
3.   The U.S. made the American people choose from two bad options: either live peacefully [but] remain exposed to the danger of death [by terrorism] at any moment, or starve in safety, because [the country’s budget will be spent on sending] the Marines even as far as Mars to defend you.
Lo and behold, today, we see these archives revealed before us….we see a bill in Congress accusing Saudi Arabia of being behind it [sic]. This is after the previous Iraqi regime was accused of being behind it. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were also blamed for it, and we do not know who [will be blamed] tomorrow! But [whoever it is], we will not be surprised at all, since this is the essence of how the Americans, that are civilized and respect freedoms and democracy, operate.

The nature of the U.S. is that it cannot exist without an enemy… [For example,] after a period during which it did not fight anyone [i.e. following World War II], the U.S. created a new kind of war – the Cold War… Then, when the Soviet era ended, after we Muslims helped the religions and fought Communism on their [the Americans’] behalf, they began to see Muslims as their new enemy! The U.S. saw a need for creating a new enemy – and planned, organized, and carried this out [i.e. blamed Muslims for terrorism]. This will never end until it [the U.S.] accomplishes the goals it has set for itself.”

Interestingly, the article prefers to point the finger at the USA, rather than Israel, acknowledged by many as the mastermind and producer of the event. Which is possibly a sign of the equivalence in thought and action between the Saudi elite and Israel – or that the Saudis are more afraid of Israel than of the US – a credible hypothesis, pregnant with meaning.

In this context, and apart from the puzzling Turkish coup, Erdogan reconciles with Israel, which, however, was already a practical ally in the effective protection of ISIS. ISIS being the ideal Orwellian friend-enemy of the US of A, target and source of enormous profits for the military-industrial-lobbying cabal – its members sunk into the bottomless gulf of insatiability.

The last specimen in the Darwinian evolution of terrorists is the terroristus Hollandiensis, the sacrificial calf, recruited among the disenfranchised, rejected, unstable and manipulable, living in the urban social underground and sent on stage to enact a play directed from behind the scenes. He may live next door and causes his neighbors to be distilled almost to jelly into the act of fear (7) – thus justifying all the chains wrapped around them to ensure their security.

In the US, the NSA (National Security Administration), considering the billions invested, has proven a disappointment, not to say a failure. But that is easily remedied through lexical tactics practiced in the comments by operators of the engines of propaganda – simply using the term “mass murder” rather than “terror”. Forgetting that terror, by any other name, remains diabolical and makes a mockery of the reasons for which the well-protected coprocracy (***) ensnares the ever more helpless and irrelevant citizens, for the latter’s own protection.

Through all this there is a kind of autism in the opinion of the people in the West, which prevents them from understanding what really moves beyond appearances, and therefore from controlling what their own coprocracy is plotting behind their back. Consequently they cannot discern whether the interests brought forth by the rulers are those the citizen takes for granted, or if citizens are considered but intimidatable and expendable pawns, a’ la 9/11.

In the end it is this kind of attitude that feeds a state of fear and impending doom – thus furthering the myth of a war of civilizations. With which Western leaders deprive their own citizens of the civilization that they conquered.

*** For a reading on ‘coprocracy’ refer to the blog, “Spectacle, Ornaments and Marionettes” http://wp.me/p2e0kb-1VA

** 1. King Henry IV, part 2
** 2.3.5. Macbeth
** 4. Merry Wives of Windsor
** 6. Othello
** 7. Hamlet
In the play (starting quote). The Welsh Master Evans (whose accent is reproduced by the misspellings) teaches Latin to William Page, son of Mr. and Mrs. Page. But the Welsh pronunciation prompts Mistress Quickly to deliver a sarcastic remark and to give her own interpretation to Evan’s Latin lesson.

Initial Image. Cartoon by Vinenzo Apicella

Would you like to own a dictionary that gives you a listing of all possible Shakespearean quotes, suggestions on how to use them and a description of the context in which they appear in the original – just like this one? Get the book “Your Daily Shakespeare” or the Kindle Version at $5.99 – go to http://yourdailyshakespeare.com/book-store to see a short animation and/or to purchase.

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