by
 Jimmie Moglia
Your Daily Shakespeare

“ … Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the world o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.”

Hamlet act 1, sc. 2

American visitors to this site will probably know of the event, but here is a summary for our international guests. It is a case where the evidence is undisputable. And from the evidence we can, equally indisputably, reconstruct the workings of the political machinery, with conclusions that readers, perhaps, can draw by themselves, as the “consonancy in the sequel” (1) dramatically exposes.

On Oct 20, 2014, the Chicago police was called to investigate a disturbance caused by a 17-year old African-American youth called Laquan McDonald. Upon arrival on the scene of several police cars, L. McDonald is seen walking in the middle of the road, away from the police.

At that moment, policeman Jason VanDyke, shoots twice at McDonald who falls to the ground. Then the same policeman follows up with 14 more shots.

The one minute video (link at end of blog), shows McDonald falling on the ground, and while fallen, the bullets keep coming, leaving a trail of smoke as they hit the lifeless and crumpled body – as if the body were a grotesque kind of shooting target.

The scene exceeds the boundaries of hatred. For we find hatred everywhere in literature but, however cruel and irrational, it has a plausible reason.

For example, during the war of the Roses, Richard of Gloucester falls wounded to the ground in the battle of Sandal Castle. Queen Margaret has plausible reasons for hating Gloucester. He had succeeded in dethroning her husband, the lawful Lancastrian king Henry VI. Before dying, Gloucester says to Queen Margaret,

“She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France,
Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth!
How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex
To triumph, like an Amazonian trull,
Upon their woes whom fortune captivates!”

Queen Margaret cuts him short,

“Off with the crown, and with the crown his head;
And, whilst we breathe, take time to do him dead.” (2)

But here, Laquan McDonald was not a threat, an enemy or a rebel. He was one of the thousand disenfranchised youths, on the streets of disenfranchised sectors, where even hope has left indefinitely, leaving behind misery and abandonment.

Why then could a policeman, with no specific reason to hate, easily kill, in cold blood, a suspect who walks away without even running. And after killing him “take time to do him dead” with a volley of more bullets?

The question would seem rhetorical, were it not for the more than 1000 police killings to date, in 2015. Among the theories, as we will see, there is at least one connected with the events following this murder. Events that converted the tragedy into a masterpiece of iniquities.

Initially, the Chicago Police Department declared the killing a justifiable act of self-defense conducted by officer Van Dyke. Referring to a three-inch folding knife in the youth’s hand, the official report read: “He now has the knife fully in his hand going at one of the officers. At that point, the officer defends himself.”

The reader can judge by looking at the video the veracity of the police report. The following and obvious cover-up, involved the maximum authorities in the city, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel and maybe even higher authorities. It is plainly a case where,

“…corruption boils and bubbles
Till it o’er-run the stew; laws for all faults,
But faults so countenanced, that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber’s shop,
As much in mock as mark.” (3)

Indeed, the strong statutes would have been successfully mocked, and rated as serious as the price list (forfeits), posted in a barber shop, were it not for a sequence of events where chance and justice, for once, cooperated. It’s a case where,

“….chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors.” (4)

Otherwise it would have remained a case where,

“…Plate sin with gold
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.” (5)

where ‘gold’ here was the Mayor’s success in the imminent re-elections, with all the associated benefits of satisfied ambition, power politics and power. The same power that decreed the payment of 5 million $ to the victim’s family, in exchange for their silence.

There were actually two videos of the event. One captured from the surveillance camera of the nearby Burger King outlet, and one from the dash-cam of a police car. The police also obtained the footage of the Burger King camera and erased 86 minutes of it, comprising the entire shooting scene and its aftermath.

But the dash-cam video remained, allowing the conspiracy to be exposed. How and why that video was not erased remains a mystery.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel blocked the release of the video for 13 months. Later he said he never saw it, which equates to Clinton’s declaration of “never having had sex with that woman.“

Emanuel is not even a 100% American citizen. He holds dual nationality: Israeli/American (like many neocons, or “zionazis” polluting US foreign policy), and belongs to a prominent right-wing clan. The media of course rarely mention that inconvenient fact.

The official reason given for not releasing the video was that it would disrupt an ongoing internal investigation. In fact, the Chicago administration did not even identify the policeman who shot Laquan McDonald. While, the “civil rights” establishment of the city, including most of its African-American preachers, supported in unison the Emanuel reelection campaign. So much for civil rights. We can easily imagine what effect the video would have on the reelections.

The local corporate-controlled media, newspapers and television, showed little interest in the McDonald case, even after it became known – about 10 months later – that there was a video of the shooting. In fact it was the curiosity of a freelance journalist who led him to obtain a copy of the coroner’s report, describing the 16 bullet wounds.

Then a whistleblower of unknown identity alerted another freelance journalist of the existence of the video. In turn, the second journalist brought a Freedom-of-Information Act lawsuit, eventually resulting in a court order to release the video.

Even more interesting is what happened and what became known after the video became public. First, Mayor Emanuel, reversing his position, claimed to have supported the release of the video. As for the evident, undeniable and brutal violence, he adopted a Pilatesque view – according to which, police violence is a problem of bad perception of the police by the community, and of an equally bad perception of young men by the police. Which would explain, we must assume, the militarization of the police, the routine use of assault vehicles, the combat gear habitually worn by policemen in their operations, and the 1140 police killings  nationwide (to date).

With his declarations, Emanuel vies for the title of “…the lyingest knave in Christendom.” (6). For more than one year the apparatchik hid the video. Without it, officer Van Dyke would never have been charged, nor the victim’s family would have received the large payment of hush money.

Interestingly, until the forced release of the video, the incident was still being investigated. But, literally hours before the video became public, the attorney general for the county, Anita Alvarez, had Officer Van Dyke arrested and charged with first-degree murder, declaring implicitly the end of the investigation. Of course, the public is asked to believe that the end of the investigation was independent of the forced release of the video.

A few questions remain unanswered. What role did Emanuel play in concealing the video and arranging the $5 million hush-settlement with the family? At what point did the mayor learn that the official police story was a lie? Were there discussions with the Obama administration on how to proceed? What officers were involved in viewing and allegedly deleting the Burger King video, and under whose direction were they acting?

The next political bomb-shell was the firing of the Chicago police superintendent, Garry McCarthy. Who, as late as the night before, on television, strenuously defended the police department and promised unspecified but necessary reforms. Which sounds like a macabre joke – considering that at the time of McDonald killing’s, the Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Pat Camden said that McDonald was shot in the chest after he “lunged” at Van Dyke and his partner with a knife. This actions he represented “a very serious threat to the officers, which leaves them no choice at that point to defend themselves.” And McCarthy went along with the report.

Now the Mayor, having implicitly made McCarthy the official scapegoat, could freely shed tears about the McDonald killing, suddenly reversing his previous and repeated calls for strong police action in the “war on crime.”

Besides firing McCarthy, the Mayor created a five-member task force on police accountability, to report back in March 2016. Directing the task force is former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a leading African-American Democratic Party politician. This equates, in principle, to declaring Obama’s election to the presidency as the end of racism.

The creation of task-forces is a ritual to appease the so-called silent majority and the world at large, who was and is “still deceived with ornament.” (7). Most everyone sees the futility of these mean doublings, to escape the pursuit of blame, let alone responsibility. For power clouds discernment and deafens its holders or seekers to every call but the alluring voice of the sirens of conceit and prevarication. Thus corruption becomes the fountain of their principles.

Even the Chicago Tribune newspaper describes the Chicago Police as a “department long known for a culture of corruption, torture, wrongful convictions and lax discipline.” In fact, the city of Chicago has paid out more than $500 million in settlements for police abuse of citizens since 2004.

Regarding the released video, Obama declared to be “deeply disturbed by the footage” – a statement as full of meaning as the now forgotten but wildly promoted slogan at the time of his election, “Yes, we can.”

Mayor Emanuel embodies the symbiosis of finance capital and political power in the Democratic Party. He became a multimillionaire while working at one of the cesspools of fraud, a so-called investment banks, Wasserstein & Perella. From there he went on to become the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and Obama’s chief of staff, before resigning to run for mayor of Chicago in 2011.

Politicians and the mainstream media have reacted to the unfolding of events, explaining the killing of McDonald as the result of lingering racism, thus gaining some political points with the so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement.

The racist component is unquestionable, but a fact surprising to some, is that the police kills more white than black citizens. However, without exception, the victims belong to what was once called the working class – and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the working poor, the unemployed and the hopeless.

In this context, police violence against the working poor, particularly against the young, is a symptom of the extreme class tension and class struggle in reverse. Of which the over 300 mass shootings to date, can also be considered as another symptom.

The worsening economic inequality and the curtailing of public services and jobs are unwritten goals and unwritten policies of the so-called Democrats and so-called Republican parties. While an equally unwritten policy is the essentially unlimited expansion of the military.

The police cannot help being the interpreter of the deep contempt of the ruling cabal for the common citizens. That we are more aware of this deep-seated contempt, is simply due to the widespread use of smart-phones with cameras – currently the means to show graphically what many suspected and many more refused to believe.

There remains to be examined what is the role of the police as an interpreter of the prevailing ideology. The police is the intermediary between the authority and the general polity. While subordinate to the top, to those below him the policeman is the representative of the authority and enjoys a kind of privileged status. The arch personification of this type, in the psychology of the masses, is the army sergeant, who, as a classic figure, shows an example of the power of identification.

Those who watched the excellently produced “Downton Abbey”, may have noticed how butlers, valets and others adopt the attitudes, way of thinking and demeanor of the ruling class. They undergo a complete change of character, and, in an effort to minimize their lowly origin, often they appear as caricatures of the people they serve. In literature or on the stage it may be amusing. In life, this identification constitutes a psychic reality and is an excellent illustration of how an ideology becomes a material force.

Those who have worked in a large corporation know that a certain spirit develops among the employees, that transcends the power of critical thinking of the individual. As an example, we may recall the case of Enron, where even the lower in the ladder were convinced that they would become rich by simply believing that they would. Never mind that the profit was the reward of fraud, until the fraud was exposed and the house of cards collapsed.

Employees absorb the general spirit without being taught, just like children absorb ideas about sex independently and outside the compass of sex education.

What is the spirit absorbed by the police from their employer, the state? That the nation is exceptional. And if my employer is exceptional why should I not partake of the exceptionality? My employer, to show his exceptionalism, kills literally millions worldwide, which means that killing is good. Why should I not comply, considering that I hold a license to kill?

All of the above leads (or should lead) us to conclude that the wonder is not that there are so many police killings, but that there are so few.

The “disturbance” of the president at the McDonald’s killing, the recurring debates about racism, the noise about more police training needed, etc. are but empty words to assuage the thoughtless – according to the well tested principle that  “the empty vessel makes the greater sound.”(8) As well as to prevent or preempt the (pessimistically remote) chance that the “blunt monster with the uncounted heads” (9), may put two and two together. A quixotic hope or an actual impossibility, seeing that multitudes wander about they know not whither, in quest they know not of what.

Link to video -> https://youtu.be/k0h_bx7rXts

1. Twelfth Night

2. King Henry VI p.3

3. Measure for Measure

4. King Henry IV, p.2

5. King Lear

6. King Henry VI, p.2

7. Merchant of Venice

8. King Henry V

9. King Henry IV, p.2

In the Play (opening quote). Hamlet has a presentment after Horatio’s report about the appearance of the ghost.

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These demonstrators are never interviewed in depth, just passing, almost incomprehensible snippets.

It’s quite clear that the police in the US are out of control, and this is far from accidental. The problem is old and systemic. The police have become a de facto occupation force in many black and Latino neighborhoods throughout America.  Heavily documented (including thoroughly videotaped) cases of police abuse and disproportionate use of force—a symptom with many mothers—including numerous  wanton killings, have gone unpunished by prosecutors and Grand Juries, while trials also routinely end in acquittals or dismissals. A cop badge has become a license to kill—not only criminals and in self defense,  where some explanation or excuse might be found, but in many situations where the victims are unarmed and obviously harmless civilians. Caprice rules. Much too often, minor infractions can result in a one-way trip to the morgue. 

As usual, why is this so, and who really benefits? 

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=By= Matt Agorist

John Daniel Ehrlichman

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ohn Daniel Ehrlichman was counsel and domestic policy chief to President Richard Nixon. He was a key figure in events leading to the Watergate first break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and served a year and a half in prison.

Aside from the conspiracy of Watergate, which when compared to today’s politicians seems like schoolyard pranks, Ehrlichman, while serving under Nixon, was part of a much larger, and far more detrimental conspiracy that is still playing out today — the war on drugs.

In a new report, in Harper’s Magazine, written by Dan Baum, Ehrlichman comes clean on the real reason behind the war on drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.

According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman bluntly asked Baum of the war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

According to Baum, that was the end of the conversation, “he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door,” recalls Baum.

What has ruined millions of lives and ended countless others, has been nothing more than a political play to remove the party’s opposition.

We’ve seen police departments turn from Andy Griffith to storm troopers armed with MRAPs tearing down entire houses, throwing grenades into the cribs of babies, and stripping the rights away from hundreds of millions of people — for what?

Epileptic children across the country continue to suffer and die because cops will lock their parents a cage for attempting to treat them with cannabis and they do so only because they believe in some fraud idea concocted decades ago by corrupt fat cats in D.C. looking to silence their opposition.

Thanks to the black market trade of drugs, pushed into dark alleys, by a system of oppression and prohibition, drug peddling violent gangs now plague places like Chicago, New York, and Detroit.

Democrats blame guns for the violence while Republicans blame gun control. Meanwhile, both sides are missing the giant pink elephant in the living room.

At the center of this tragic violence plaguing American streets is a giant Leviathan which lays waste to all lives it comes across, it’s called the American Drug War.

America has the largest prison population in the world. It is estimated that victimless crime constitutes 86% of the federal prison population. That means the only reason that these individuals are incarcerated is because the state deemed their non-violent personal choices, “illegal.” The majority of that 86% is for illegal drugs only.

Most of the people who are thrown in prison are non-violent. However, when they are locked in cages with society’s worst and treated like cattle in a factory farm, they come out forever changed. America is breeding a torturous and violent environment, and they have the audacity to call this the “justice system.”

As former Congressman Ron Paul pointed out prior to the revelation admitted by Ehrlichman;

[Black people] are tried and imprisoned disproportionately. They suffer the consequence of the death penalty disproportionately. Rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often. And most of these are victimless crimes. Sometimes people can use drugs and get arrested three times and never committed a violent act and they can go to prison for life. I think there’s discrimination in the system, but you have to address the drug war. I would say the judicial system is probably one of the worst places where prejudice and discrimination still exists in this country.

The war on drugs has done more to destroy black communities than any amount of bigotry and racism ever could. And, on the other side, the antiwar, consciousness-expanding hippies were marginalized, ended their experimentation with psychedelics, and got in line with the status quo. Instead of turning on, “tuning in and dropping out,” the hippy movement enrolled, voted, and became the politically correct class.

A potentially paradigm-shifting movement of love and peace was effectively neutered by the political and warmongering aspirations of a few corrupt politicians.

Thanks to the unquestioning order followers, carrying out the immoral orders of their oligarchs on high, generations of lies have been perpetuated and millions throughout the world have suffered.

The War on Drugs takes good people and turns them into criminals every single minute of every single day. The system is setup in such a way that it fans the flames of violent crime by essentially building a factory that turns out violent criminals.

The system knows this too!

When drugs are legalized, gang violence drops — drastically. Not only does it have a huge effect on the localized gangs in America, but the legalization of drugs is crippling to the violent foreign drug cartels too. 

Until Americans educate themselves on the cause of this violence, uninformed and corrupt lawmakers will continue to focus on controlling the symptoms. 

We will see more senseless killings and more innocent lives stripped of opportunity by getting entangled in the system.

The solution is staring us in the face. End the war on drugs.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and opened up clean injection facilities for addicts to utilize. These facilities offer clean needles, which has stopped the spread of disease. Users are also monitored by medical staff, which has stopped drug overdoses. Portugal has cut their country’s needle drug use in half since they changed their drug policies. They went from having the worst heroin problem in Europe, to having one of the lowest.

No one is claiming that it will be easy, but the science is there to support this move. Now all we need is for the masses to understand that prohibition is immoral and causes far more problems than it ostensibly prevents. Please share this article with your friends and family so that they may know the history of this unethical and vile — war on people.

Source: The Free Thought Project.

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Past in Present Tense with Murray Polner

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]oes anyone remember James Kutcher, a victim of one of our Red Scares?

He was a badly disabled WWII veteran who belonged to the Socialist Workers Party, a miniscule and powerless Trotskyist group the  U.S. government claimed was trying to overthrow it violently. As a result, he was fired in 1948 from his job as a Veterans Administration filing clerk.

Robert Justin Goldstein’s  convincing, disturbing, and impressive new book, “Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, The Legless Veteran” (Kansas) reminds us that Kutcher fiercely resisted the government, and finally won his battle. But for Goldstein, professor emeritus at 0akland University, the persecution  and ultimate redemption of James Kutcher would be forgotten.

But first, a few personal memories of that very dark era. My friend Lenny and I once watched two brave souls set up a stand on my neighborhood’s major shopping avenue and asked passers-by to sign their petition  calling for support for the Bill of Rights. I have no idea whether they were serious or not, but very few, other than the two of us, signed, so pervasive was the fear. My sister’s high school steno-typist teacher, whose Marine son was killed in the Pacific, was accused of communist leanings and lost his job,  a not unknown crime committed in our name in many of the nation’s public schools and universities. Another of our teachers, the humorist Sam Levinson (he taught Spanish and named his son Conrad after my sister’s fired teacher’s late Marine son), was threatened by the McCarran Senate subcommittee on Internal Security because of alleged  Red connections and was rescued only after  Dr. Abraham Lefkowitz, our school principal and well-known anti -communist in the city’s teacher wars, personally vouched for him. My gifted high school social studies teacher was fired by a frightened and spineless Board of Education. I was later told (though could never verify) that he went to work delivering milk.  While I was a grad student at Columbia’s Russian Institute some of my classmates fantasized that FBI informers had been planted among us.

Nationally, it was a time of  unforgiving and paranoid Torquemadas, loyalty boards, the Attorney General’s list of “subversive” organizations (the subject of Goldstein’s earlier book “American Blacklist”), the A and H-Bombs, Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, Hoover, the Korean War, McCarthy, Red Channels, HUAC, the 1949 Peekskill riot, more blacklists and book banning, an ugly period when everyone affected was  seriously wounded. Years later, Michael Ybarra wisely pointed out in “Washington Gone Mad” that, while there were certainly communists in Washington, “it was the hunt for them that did the real damage.”

James Kutcher was drafted in 1940 in our first peacetime draft at  age of 29. Assigned to the Infantry, he fought  in North Africa, Sicily, and  the Battle of San Pietro in Italy where a mortar shell cost him his legs. Hospitalized and then discharged after fitted for prosthetics, he was hired as a VA clerk but then dismissed because of his membership in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, whose leaders had been found guilty in 1943 for plotting “to use force to overthrow the government” — an absurd accusation.

(More about the tiny and toothless SWP may be found in my HNN reviews of  Donna T. Haverty- Stacke’s “Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since The Age of FDR” and Said Sayrafiezadeh’s “When Skateboards Will Be Free: Memoirs of a Political Childhood”)

Relying in part on declassified FBI documents and the correspondence of contemporary lawyers, Goldstein reveals how the VA and Justice Department hounded and persecuted Kutcher and his parents who were also threatened with ejection from their Newark public housing apartment. The vindictiveness didn’t stop there when the government tried to deny him his disability pension.  Even the “notoriously conservative American Legion” took exception to the firing, calling it an “almost perfect example of bureaucratic bungling,” notes Goldstein. Kutcher, they charged, was fired from a “little $40.00 a week clerical job” solely for “cheerfully” admitting his ties with an “insignificant sect.” Not everyone agreed with the AL, especially those on the Right.

The Communist Party also frowned on Kutcher’s fight. A west coast party paper, the Daily People’s World, rejected Kutcher’s claim. “What is being touted as the ‘case of the legless vet,’ they argued, and a case for civil liberties, hasn’t the remotest connection with the defense of civil rights.” In their twisted logic, the Communists insisted that while the government’s prosecution of their Stalinist party leaders violated their legal rights in no way did it do the same to Kutcher, a Trotskyist.

Even so, Kutcher had plenty of left and liberal supporters such as his invaluable pro bono lawyer, Joseph Rauh, writer Murray Kempton, civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, philosopher  John Dewey, architectural and urban critic Lewis Mumford, Norman Mailer, the CIO, Washington Post and especially Harold Russell, who lost his arms in  the war and received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1946 film “The Best Years of Our Lives.” He and Kutcher had been roommates in Walter Reed Hospital, and  Kutcher later told Russell that without the government granting him a fair trial “things will get as bad here as in Russia.”

Kutcher was relentless in his defense, traveling the country, one trip lasting nine months. He pleaded his case to Truman and Eisenhower, neither of whom answered.  In his own book, “The Case of the Legless Veteran,” — which could not find an American book publisher other than SWP’s Monad/Pathfinder Press  and later a documentary film was produced by someone else– Kutcher was elated, writing “that each administrative defeat, stripping away illusions about the intentions of the witch hunters, seemed to create new areas of interest and to open new avenues of support for us.”

Finally, after eight long years, several court rulings saw to it that his job and pension were restored and he and his family could remain in their apartment. But irony of ironies, the SWP expelled Kutcher and several hundred other members which, Goldstein tell us, was  “following a change in leadership and policy in which Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution” was  discarded. The turn deeply upset Kutcher, who never abandoned his belief in socialism.

Still, the FBI would not let go. Goldstein discloses that after he was back at his VA job “the FBI continued to subject him to relentless surveillance.” In September 1956, the FBI put him on its Security Index, which Goldstein explains was “a listing of individuals who would  be rounded up and detained without trial in the case of a national security emergency.” And in 1966, the FBI notified the Secret Service that Kutcher, still minus his legs,  was “potentially dangerous.” The next year Goldstein discovered that Kutcher was included on the FBI’s “detcom” or “detention of Communists” list.

In the ensuing years, the SWP sued the FBI and won its fourteen-year case against the FBI and some intelligence agencies and were awarded $246,000. Federal Judge Thomas Griesa  ruled that Hoover’s FBI –surprise!– had carried out investigations against “entirely lawful and peaceful political activities,” much as they had done in their Cointelpro program.

James Kutcher died in a VA hospital in Brooklyn in 1989 barely noticed in a country whose fundamental rights he had fought to preserve on the battlefield and then against his own countrymen and government.  Goldstein laments: “In a final irony, Kutcher, who in life furnished the country with so many (often front-page) stories, was ignored in death. Not a single major paper mentioned his death or provided an obituary, with the exception of a tiny paid listing in the New York Times and a small obituary in New York’s Newsday.” Even so, I think Goldstein would surely agree, as I do, that the country owes much to James Kutcher for his courage in battling for freedom abroad and at home as well. I also wonder if Kutcher’s experience is also a cautionary tale of what could lie ahead in our never-ending War on Terror.

Of related interest is this documentary: The Case of the Legless Veteran: James Kutcher (Directed and produced by Howard Petrick)

Contributing Editor, Murray Polner wrote “No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran“; “When Can I Come Home,” about draft evaders during the Vietnam era; co-authored with Jim O’Grady, “Disarmed and Dangerous,” a dual biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan; and most recently, with Thomas Woods,Jr., ” We Who Dared to Say No to War.” He is the senior book review editor for the History News Network.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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Picture from the video El Salvador War Documentaries

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hirty years since the release of director Oliver Stone’s film Salvador, the tragic events depicted onscreen have largely been forgotten. Collaborating with rogue journalist Richard Boyle, Stone attempts to treat America’s deadly case of historical amnesia by telling the shameful history of the United States government supporting the fascist death squads against the people of El Salvador in the 1980s.

Poster for the film “Salvador”

During the Cold War, the US supported right wing terrorists in Latin America to make the world safe for capitalism. Salvador is based on the experiences of journalist Richard Boyle in El Salvador in 1980-82. By the late 70s, he had left journalism to take up various lines of work. He returned to the profession in 1979 to cover the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua for NBC radio and CNN, as well as producing a documentary called Below the Volcano.

For over a century, an oligarchy of wealthy landowners ruled over the poverty-stricken masses of El Salvador using intimidation and violence. Rumblings of revolt against the landowners had been reverberating throughout the country, leading to the outbreak of a civil war that lasted 12 years. The US government sided with the landowners and by the mid-1980s El Salvador became the largest recipient of US military aid.

In the original theatrical production notes, actor James Woods, who portrayed Boyle in the film, said, “[Boyle] goes back to El Salvador just to make some money. But then he gets swept up on a personal level and becomes truly interested in finding the truth.”

This was not the first time the intrepid reporter was exposed to the disastrous folly of American foreign policy. During his career Boyle has reported on Cambodia, Laos, Israel and Vietnam, where he obtained firsthand accounts of the horror as it unfolded. He wrote the explosive underground exposé The Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, published in 1972 by Ramparts Press, based on these experiences.

Boyle found a kindred spirit with fellow veteran Oliver Stone, who served in the US Army from September 1967 to November 1968 in the 25^th Infantry Division and the 1^st Air Calvary in Vietnam. Returning with a Bronze Star for Valor and a Purple Heart, Stone studied film at New York University. He graduated in 1971 and went on to pen the screenplays for Brian De Palma’s Scarface and Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, for which he was honored with an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

In December 1984, Boyle handed Stone an unpublished manuscript about his experiences as a reporter in El Salvador. Upon reading it, Stone said it was a “good story” and was determined to adapt it for the big screen. He initially wanted to focus on Boyle rather than the political side of what Boyle was covering. But when Stone visited El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica in January 1985, he was struck by an eerie sense of déjà vu. Recalling his experiences in Central America, Stone had a kind of “flashback on the order of a Back to the Future Spielberg movie.”

“I thought I had returned to Vietnam, 1965, Saigon. It was hot, wet, and the American kids were 19 again in green uniforms…We were ‘saving’ Honduras. Some of these people were women now, and I suddenly felt like a forgotten older man who was wandering around wondering how this could happen again so quickly in my lifetime.”

Jim Belushi played Boyle’s friend Dr. Rock, a radio disc jockey in San Francisco. Belushi said his character represents a kind of vessel for the audience to discover the heart of darkness: “My character is ignorant of Central American issues, [as is] most of the American general public. So I feel I’m a touchstone for the audience at the beginning of the movie. My character discovers El Salvador as the audience does.”

Media critic Carl Jensen (and the non-profit group Project Censored) writes:

“The U.S. media coverage of the outbreak of civil war in El Salvador was dangerously misleading. Either through willful misinformation or ignorance, the major media supported a misguided U.S. foreign policy that threatened to embroil Americans in another Vietnam War.”

Hollywood, serving as an extension of the US media, helped perpetuate the myths fashioned by The Pentagon. This was, after all, the Top Gun generation. Ronald Reagan was president and the Soviet Union was “the Evil Empire.” Pro-war propaganda disguised as entertainment proved irresistible to studio executives, resulting in a slew of highly profitable films best described as “patriot porn.”

Needless to say that a film depicting the bleak truth about the arrogance of American Empire and the carnage left in its wake caused many people to even look away from the movie poster of Salvador when arriving at the theater. As a result, the film was met with a disappointing turnout at the box office.

The defeat in Vietnam and the carnage that resulted was a blow to the morale of American Imperialism. Along with the mental illness that compels leaders to declare war, the American people were said to be suffering from “Vietnam War Syndrome” as a result. This sociological vulnerability was exploited by reactionary elements in the US who were not satisfied with the administration of President James “Jimmy” Carter when it came to foreign policy in regions such as Central America, particularly in nations like El Salvador.

Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on April 7, 1987, Oliver Stone said the nightmare in El Salvador climaxed with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan:

“An archbishop, 18 other priests, and 4 nuns were murdered by death squads—founded, as I pointed out in my movie Salvador, by people like José Medrano and René Chacon, who studied with our Green Berets in Vietnam and the International Police Academy in Washington and at the Jungle School in Panama. But this was the time of the Jeane Kirkpatrick school of thought that manages to distinguish authoritarian and totalitarian government, and in the crusading name of anti-communism, from 1980 to 1985, we poured 1.7 billion dollars’ worth of military and economic aid into a military mafia that was, in fact, a death squad responsible for some 30 to 50 thousand civilian deaths.”

In 1980 alone, the US supplied over $5.7 million in military aid to El Salvador to support “moderate opposition” to “leftwing terrorism.” The recipients of this funding (“the moderate opposition”) were fascist goons serving the nation’s plutocrats. The so-called “leftwing terrorists” being opposed were unarmed peasants, workers, students, teachers, small business owners and others who criticized the government.

That year, there were over 10,000 political assassinations across the country. Records from the Legal Aid Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador reported that 80 percent of these were committed by the death squads— not by “leftwing terrorists” or “Marxist guerillas” as originally claimed by the Reaganites.

One such Reaganite was Cold Warrior Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as US Ambassador to the United Nations from 1981-1985. Kirkpatrick justified these actions by saying, “Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.” This is consistent with the widely accepted American credo where “the ends justify the means” when trying to stop the “godless Communists.”

Stone has continued to study the crimes of the American Empire and co-authored The Untold History of the United States with history professor Peter Kuznick, Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. In a chapter titled “The Reagan Years: Death Squads for Democracy,” the authors describe the massacre of civilians in the village of El Mozote by the death squads.

According to Stone and Kuznick:

“The U.S.-trained and armed Salvadoran troops slaughtered the 767 inhabitants of the village of El Mozote in late 1981. The victims, including 358 children under age thirteen, were stabbed, decapitated, and machine-gunned. Girls and women were raped.”

The Reagan administration ignored such reports by deeming them “not credible.” In 1992, the year the civil war in El Salvador came to an end, forensic experts discovered the skeletal remains of children, including babies, in El Mozote.

“The United States government simply lied about it,” US Ambassador to El Salvador Robert E. White (1979-1981) stated bluntly in an interview about the film.

The tragedy of El Mozote has echoes of the My Lai Massacre in the Quang Ngai province in Vietnam, where between several hundred unarmed civilians were murdered in a “Search and Destroy” mission conducted by the Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, American Division in March 1968.

Boyle writes in The Flower of the Dragon, “My Lai was not the act of one man. It was not the act of one platoon, or one company. It was the result of an ordered, planned and well-conducted campaign conceived at high command levels to teach a lesson to the villagers of Quang Ngai province.”

Boyle recognized the pattern. The pattern was not new in El Salvador, nor was it new in Vietnam:

“When I was about eight I used to ask my father what he’d been doing when Hitler rose to power, and he would reply that he’d been too busy trying to earn a living to pay attention. My mother would add that people didn’t know what was going on in Germany.

Now my father’s generation shakes its head in dismay and wonders out loud how my generation could turn away from those values which ‘made America great.’ But they never told us that genocide was an old American habit, that U.S. soldiers scalped hundreds of Indian women and children at Sand Creek and held up their scalps at the Salt Lake City opera house; that hundreds more defenseless Indians were gunned down at Wounded Knee, that General Jake Smith ordered the massacre of 8,294 children, 2,714 women and 420 men on the island of Samar during the American occupation of the Philippines in 1901.

For me and for millions of my generation My Lai came as the final punch in the mouth, the end of our illusions. We could no longer say we didn’t know. The day we learned of My Lai changed our lives.”

The civil war in El Salvador ended in 1992. The United Nations sponsored a peace accords and the rebels formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). More than $6 billion in economic and military aid was given to El Salvador by the US, at least $1 billion of it was channeled through covert funding. This effort cost the lives of over 75,000 Salvadorans, courtesy of the Reagan and Bush gangs. And yet, there are still people who say “we didn’t know,” even as Salvadoran blood dried on their hands.

Salvador was released in February 1986 to critical acclaim and award nominations. As noted by Newsweek critic Jack Kroll, “Central America has become a kind of hell on earth and Salvador scorches us with this infernal truth.” Even if Salvador was then ignored by movie-goers, Stone and Boyle still managed to stun film goers with images of brutality caused by US policies that paved the way for the hell on earth forged by imperialism.

A billboard serving as a reminder of one of many massacres that occurred during the Civil War in El Salvador. The Castilian inscription to the left reads in English: “They tore out the flower, but the roots are returning among us.” (Dave Watson)

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