“The compulsive hatred of Putin by many who have almost zero idea about Putin or Russian history is disproportionate to any rational analysis, but not surprising. Trump and Putin are like weird doppelgangers in the liberal imagination.”
John Steppling, “Trump, Putin, and Nikolas Cruz Walk into a Bar”

The Trump and Netanyahu governments have a problem: How to start a greatly expanded Middle-Eastern war without having a justifiable reason for one.  No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem.  If they can’t find a “justification” (which they can’t), they will have to create one (which they will).  Or perhaps they will find what they have already created.  Whatever the solution, we should feel confident that they are not sitting on their hands. History teaches those who care to learn that when aggressors place a gun on the wall in the first act of their play, it must go off in the final act.

These sinister players have signaled us quite clearly what they have in store.  All signs point toward an upcoming large-scale Israeli/U.S. attack on Lebanon and Syria, and all the sycophantic mainstream media are in the kitchen prepping for the feast.  Russia and Iran are the main course, with Lebanon and Syria, who will be devoured first, as the hors d’oeuvres.  As always, the media play along as if they don’t yet know what’s coming.  Everyone in the know knows what is, just not exactly when.  And the media wait with baited breath as they count down to the dramatic moment when they can report the incident that will compel the “innocent” to attack the “guilty.”

Anyone with half a brain can see the greatly increased anti-Russian propaganda of the past few weeks.  This has happened as the Russia-gate claims have fallen to pieces, as former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, the late Robert Parry, Paul Craig Roberts, and others have documented so assiduously.  All across the media spectrum, from the big name corporate stenographers like The New York Times, CNN, National Public Radio, The Washington Post to The Atlantic and Nation magazines and other “leftist” publications such as Mother Jones and Who What Why, the Russia and Putin bashing has become hysterical in tone, joined as it is with an anti-Trump obsession, as if Trump were a dear friend of Putin and Russia and wasn’t closely allied with the Netanyahu government in its plans for the Middle-East.  As if Trump were in charge. “Russia Sees Midterm Elections as a Chance to Sow Fresh Discord (NY Times, 2/13), “Russia Strongman” (Putin) has “pulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history (The Atlantic, Jan. /Feb. 2018), “”Mueller’s Latest Indictment Shows Trump Has Helped Putin Cover Up a Crime” (Mother Jones, 2/16/18), “A Russian Sightseeing Tour For Realists” (whowhatwhy.com, 2/7/18), etc.   

I am reminded of the turn to the right that so many “muckrakers” made during and after WW I.  Afraid of a revolt from below, bewitched by their own vision to articulate the world’s future, heady over their own war propaganda, and wanting to be on the safe side of the government crackdown on dissent (The Espionage Act, the Palmer Raids, etc.), many progressives of the era embraced a jingoism similar to the anti-Russia mania of today.

War criminal Netanyahu "mugshot". He truly belongs in a dungeon as a threat to life and limb to anyone on this planet. The servile Western media of course will never touch him.

Only someone totally lacking a sense of humor and blind to propaganda would not laugh uproariously at today’s media nonsense about Russia, but such laughter would be infused with a foreboding awareness that as the Middle East explodes and U.S./NATO backed Kiev forces prepare to attack the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, the world is entering a very dangerous period.  And of course Trump has said, "The U.S. has great strength and patience but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea."  Totally destroy 26 million human beings.  While his bully buddy in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently said at the Munich Security Conference that Iran is “the greatest threat to the world,” compared it to Nazi Germany, and claimed it was developing ballistic missiles to strike deep into the United States.  “Iran seeks to dominate our region, the Middle East, and seeks to dominate the world through aggression and terror,” he said.  And he vowed to act against Iran and anyone who supported it – i.e. Lebanon and Syria (Russia). 

Putin also, like all the mythic bogeymen, is portrayed as the new Hitler intent on conquering the world.  If the American public wasn’t so “sophisticated” and adept at seeing through lies – pause and laugh – we could expect some World War I posters with Russian soldiers (like The Huns), sharp teeth glistening, gorilla strong and beastly, holding American women in preparation for the kill or rape.  Last year, when Oliver Stone did the world the great service of releasing his four-part interview with Putin, he was bashed, of course.  Just as he was with his film JFK, the only movie in history to be reviewed and panned one year before its release by a Washington Post reviewer who didn’t see the movie but had a purloined preliminary script as his source.  The Washington Post: the object of the latest film drivel, The Post, portraying it falsely as the savior of the nation through the publication of the Pentagon Papers (which is another story).  The Washington Post – the CIA’s dear friend.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his Putin interviews, Oliver Stone, a man of truth and honor, lets viewers catch a glimpse of the real Vladimir Putin.  Of course Putin is a politician and the leader of a great and powerful nation, and one should receive his words skeptically. But watching Stone interview Putin for four hours, one comes away – but I doubt few have watched the four hours – with a reasonably good sense of the man.  And putting aside one’s impressions of him, he makes factual points that should ring loud and clear to anyone conversant with facts.  One: that the U.S. needs an external enemy (“I know that, I feel that.”). Two: the U.S.A. engineered the coup d’état in the Ukraine on Russia’s border.  Three: the U.S. has surrounded Russia with US/NATO troops and bases armed with anti-ballistic missiles that can, as Putin rightly says to Stone, be converted in hours to regular offensive nuclear missiles aimed at Russia.  This is a factual and true statement that should make any fair-minded person stand up in horror.  If Russia had such missiles encircling the United States from Cuba, Mexico, and Canada, what American would find it tolerable?  What would CNN and The New York Times have to say?  Yet these same people readily find it impossible to see the legitimacy in Russia’s position, resorting to name calling and illogical rhetoric. Russia is surrounded with U.S/NATO troops and missiles and yet Russia is the aggressor.  So too Iran that is also surrounded.  These media are propagandists, that’s why.  They promote war, as they always have.  They are pushing for war with Russia via Syria/Lebanon/Iran and Ukraine, and they are nihilistically demonizing North Korea (as part of Obama’s pivot toward Asia and the encircling of China, as John Pilger has brilliantly documented in his film The Coming War on China) in what can only be called a conspiracy to commit genocide, as Dr. Graeme MacQueen and Christopher Black make clear in their Open Letter to the International Criminal Court: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-genocide-conspiracy-against-north-korea-an-open-letter-to-the-international-criminal-court/5627351

We are moving toward a global war that will become nuclear if an international anti-war movement doesn’t quickly arise to stop it.  Most people bemoan the thought of such a war to end all wars, but refuse to analyze the factors leading to it. It happens step-by-step, and many steps have already been taken with more coming soon.    It’s so obvious that most can’t see it, or don’t want to.  The corporate mainstream media are enemies of the truth; are clearly part of the continuation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, and those who still rely on them for the truth are beyond reach.  Douglas Valentine, in The CIA as Organized Crime, says the CIA has long aimed to use and co-opt the “Compatible Left, which in America translates into liberals and pseudo-intellectual status seekers who are easily influenced.”  And he adds that the propaganda is not just produced by the CIA but by the military, State Department, and red, white, and blue advertisements that are everywhere.  Nothing has changed since the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s.  Valentine adds:

All of that is ongoing, despite being exposed in the late 1960s.  Various technological advances,

including the internet, have spread the network around the world, and many people don’t even

realize they are part of it, that they’re promoting the CIA line.  “Assad’s a butcher,” they say, or

“Putin kills journalists,” or “China is repressive.  They have no idea what they’re talking about

but spout all this propaganda. 

William Blake said it truly:

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

How to break the chains – that is our task.

“Who would study and describe the living, starts /By driving the spirits out of the parts: /In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections, /Lacks nothing, except the spirit’s connections.”
—Mephistopheles warning to the student in Goethe’s Faust

“And how far would you like to go in?” he asked and the three kings all looked at each other. “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there.”
—Liner notes to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album

“The shadow is what I am but will not admit I am. For the shadow of the psyche involves me in a deepening self-recognition which is more humiliating and emptying than the normal limits of endurance. In the end, acknowledging the shadow means acknowledging a bottomless void within me. The initial question of truth-force is: How deeply will I acknowledge my own emptiness?”
—James W. Douglass, Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age

We are haunted by a specter. Strange as it may sound, I was reminded of this when I saw a photograph of the quarterback of the Super Bowl winning Philadelphia Eagles, Nick Foles, looking and pointing up to the heavens. Or to be more precise, the roof of the aptly named U.S. Bank Stadium, a fitting venue for a national celebration of violence and the warfare state. But if we can assume Foles’ gesture was meant to penetrate the roof and travel up to heaven, then you too may find it a bit odd, if touching. Most people, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz has said, are ashamed to ask themselves a question about the implication of such a gesture. “They have experienced the collapse of hierarchical space,” he writes, “and when they fold their hands and lift up their eyes, ‘up’ no longer exists. Let no one say that religion can manage without such primitive directions to orient people.”

...
Modern science has brought this about. And together with its models of reality, it has given us its technological child: nuclear weapons. So now we live haunted by the shadowy thought that human beings, having assumed God’s mantle, can bring this world to an end in a flash. As William Butler Yeats said in another context: “All changed; changed utterly.” But while we live in these end-times, in a new symbolic universe, our sense of spiritual power to stop the nuclear madness has been sapped by our refusal to venture deep into the interior of this enigma and change our minds and spirits enough to change the world. We seem stuck riding our bikes when we need to stop the world we think we know and experiment with truth at the deepest level. We need a revolutionary spiritual transformation to give us faith and courage to counter the nihilists who wage endless wars for the American empire and threaten nuclear destruction at every turn. Where can we find this inconceivable spiritual energy?
***
I was thinking of this not long ago when something very strange happened to me. Six days previously I had written an article subtitled, “In Light and Shadows.” On this particular morning I was sitting at the kitchen table contemplating that piece of writing and whether or not readers had grasped what I was trying to say by linking three very short stories that undulated like the flow of consciousness in waves of light and darkness. The phone rang, and as I answered I stood up and looked out the window at a flaming red bush, it being the height of fall’s display of colors. I heard my wife sobbing on the other end. “My mother’s dying,” she cried. “Oh no,” I replied, as I had an immediate flashback to my own mother dying five years earlier, and an inexplicably dark foreboding feeling gripped me. For some reason I looked at my watch; it was 10:58 on Thursday morning. In that instant, as I raised my eyes back to the blazing bush, I saw a sliver of a crescent dark shadow creep into the inner corner of my right eye as I listened to my wife tell me through her tears how her mother, who shared the name Rita with my mother, had turned a corner toward her death. When she was done, I told her something strange had happened to my eye.

.
I had suffered a detached retina.

While I was fortunate to have excellent doctors for whom I’m very grateful, they were not very interested in my story of when the detachment occurred. Their job, as they rightly saw it, was to repair my eye and the rest was speculation since they operate within a materialistic paradigm. But as I recuperated, lying face down with my eyes closed for a few weeks, I had a lot of time to speculate (Latin, specere, to look at, view; pursuit of the truth by means of thinking).

.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s I lay there hour after hour, day after day, eyes closed, I found that what began as thinking turned into contemplation. I had come to a dark place. I had been stopped in my tracks. The world I took for granted, my routine, my habitual way of seeing, my known world was stopped, and while shocked, I realized that I was given the gift of a revelatory experience if only I would accept it. With my eyes down and closed, I had entered the temple of contemplation where images rose to my inner eye, and if I paid enough attention, they would lead me to a place of insight.
***
As a sociologist, I teach my students that sociology is the study of our social habits of thought, speech, and action. These habits or routines, which often become crystalized into myths and institutions, imprison us in ways we are loath to admit. Our collective mental habits are so powerful because they lie far deeper than mere thought can reach, and therefore to break them is as difficult as learning how not to ride a bicycle after years of knowing how. Where does one begin?
George Orwell once observed that “we have sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Today restating the obvious doesn’t seem to make much difference. At the level of the habits of group think and political and cultural propaganda, many of us have been trying to do that to little avail as the lies and deceptions of the U.S. power elites seem to win the day, day after day. It is blatantly obvious that these people lie endlessly in their pursuit of an empire built of sand saturated with the blood of innocent victims at home and abroad. Yet despite the obvious, and despite it being pointed out again and again, vast numbers of otherwise intelligent people continue to imbibe the myth that the “other side” (now the Democrats) will change the nihilistic trajectory of an evil capitalistic system leading to nuclear annihilation. The naiveté is frightening as these people calmly ride their bicycles down the primrose path of death denial.
***
As I lay contemplating the images that crossed my inner eye, I saw that we wear our social mental habits like shrouds that conceal the waking dead those habits have rendered us, sleepwalking prisoners marching toward oblivion. But why? Sure, the political propagandists are skilled at their work, having learned from and greatly superseded their mentor, Edward Bernays, in the tricks of the trade. And the technology has made their job much easier, and the CIA and other intelligence services have their people throughout the mass media. Yet something was missing in this explanation, a deeper explanation. It was then I again realized that there are different paradigms or experiences of reality operating in the world. The prevailing one today sees only a world of things, a material world that includes people and animals, a billiard ball world where surfaces without centers careen around in physical cause-and-effect determined movements. In this world the story of how my retina became detached is perhaps somewhat weirdly interesting but “just coincidental.” I suspected that my good doctors, if we met for a drink, would still hold firm to their habitual paradigms of physical cause and effect. They would have a very difficult time trying not to ride their bikes.
***
Another way of seeing is provided by Owen Barfield, English philosopher and poet, one of the most neglected and original thinkers of the twentieth century, who countered the superficiality of our materialistic collective thinking with these words:
The real world, the whole world, does not consist only of the things of which we are conscious; it consists also of the consciousness and subconsciousness that are correlative to them. They are the immaterial component of the world. But today the only immaterial element our mental habit acknowledges is our own little spark of self-consciousness. That is why we feel detached, isolated, cut off not only from the world as it really is, but also from those other little sparks of detached self-consciousness we acknowledge in our fellow human beings.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]mprisoned in our isolated minds and failing to grasp the interpenetration of mind and matter, thought and feeling, a sequence of forms and patterns changing into other forms, Barfield argues that we end up treating not only other people and ourselves as things, but all of nature, including animals, as inanimate objects to be used. The world becomes a place for necrophiliacs, not the home of living interconnected spirits. In such a world schizoid experience becomes commonplace. In such a crazy world, “what the self of each of us feels isolated from, cut off from, by its encapsulation in the naked physical reality presented to it by contemporary culture, is precisely its own existential source.” Such a physically encapsulated self is a false self without reality. It is no wonder that the use of drugs of every kind has risen exponentially, the earth despoiled, wars waged constantly, and nuclear weapons prepared to blow the planet to smithereens.
***
I had been thrown off my bicycle and then my doctors got me up again. Of course I was so thankful for their medical expertise, but I needed to try to not ride the same old bike. How could I break the habit, and of what did the habit consist. I didn’t want to say that I had gone not too far in but just far enough to say I’d been there. In where? During the days when I strictly, almost obsessively, followed my doctor’s advice and, despite the great discomfort, lay immobile, face down, eyes closed, I found myself deep in a prison that seemed to open out into a place of fear and freedom simultaneously. Although I wasn’t looking around and needed help with simple things, which my wife so kindly provided me, I experienced a weird sense of concentrated power from within the terrible vulnerability I felt. I am trying not to exaggerate, but this sense of power in vulnerability was very real. I had no interest in listening to the two books on tape I had; Tolstoy and James Baldwin seemed like intruders. They would distort the vision of what I was sensing. I think at its heart was a core of emptiness and powerlessness, which in the oddest of ways made me feel very powerful, as though all my teaching and writing and efforts to help others and make the world a better place and give advice and try to change people were useless and arrogant, but that their uselessness was their usefulness, and in accepting that I was embracing an essential truth.

Earlier in my life I had numerous very profound experiences with synchronicity that had convinced me that our consensual reality conceals a level of truth rarely felt because of the power of habit. But these experiences had been all positive and had left me feeling amazed but powerful. One even involved the power of a look I gave another. The power of my eyes. This latest one was different since it frightened me and made me vulnerable. Telling you all this makes me feel doubly vulnerable, but now I don’t care. I now know why I have long wanted to make a word my own but never could. The word is insouciant. Somehow it has become me more since this latest experience.
***
We are ruled by people who think they have everything under their control, including the nuclear weapons that are the ultimate expression of the hubris emanating from Einstein’s equation of E = mc2, the unimaginable amount of energy contained in a particle of matter. Those who brandish nuclear weapons operate within a consensual reality that is a form of madness, and these madmen will incinerate us all unless they are opposed by a force equal to that they brandish. How can we stop them?

In his extraordinary book, Lightning East to West, Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age, James. W. Douglass, suggests that there is such a force and a way to stop this holocaust. It lies within you and me. He says:
Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the
physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein
discovered a law of physical change : the way to convert a single particle of matter into
enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible
and undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of
persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society
and a world? I believe that there is , that there must be, a spiritual reality corresponding to E =
mc2 because, from the standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete without it,
and because, from the standpoint of moral freedom, humankind is sentenced to extinction
without it.
***
I believe it too. It arises in the hearts and minds of those totally committed to the truth no matter where it leads, and the passion to suffer it, even when it makes them look foolish. “A man needs a little madness, or else….he never dares cut the rope and be free,” Zorba tells the boss in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek.

So let’s try learning not to ride our bicycles so we can save ourselves and the world.

By Joanne Laurier, WSWS.ORG
26 January 2018

John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was recently screened at movie theaters in the US to mark 70 years since the film’s release in early January 1948. The showings were sponsored by Turner Classic Movies, Fathom Events and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

The classic film, based on the 1927 novel by German author B. Traven (published in English in 1935 to considerable success), is the tale of two down-and-out Americans in Mexico who join with an older prospector to dig for gold.

Tim Holt, Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

It is a drama about the transformation and degeneration of human beings as they become possessors, or believe they have become possessors, of considerable wealth. The movie comes out of Hollywood’s most radical and realistic period, between the end of World War II and the full onset of the “Red Scare.” Indeed, by the time of the release of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the liberal opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the anticommunist blacklist, led by Huston, Humphrey Bogart and others, had already collapsed in large measure.

From the film’s first images, Huston is attentive to the acute social and economic realities that are also today’s dominant facts of life. In 1925, Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart), destitute in hot, dusty Tampico, Mexico on the Gulf of Mexico, has been reduced to bumming change from strangers, especially fellow Americans. In fact, Dobbs is so focused on the hands that either fumble for coins—or don’t—that he doesn’t notice he’s solicited cash three times from the same man (played by director Huston). Dobbs subsequently hooks up with another vagabond expatriate Bob Curtin (Tim Holt).

Dobbs and Curtin are recruited by a big-talking contractor, Pat McCormick (Barton MacLane), to work on setting up an oil rig for the princely sum of eight dollars a day. Under the blazing sun, they slave away for McCormick, only to be cheated out of their wages. Drinking in a cantina, the duo are informed about the contractor, who regularly fleeces “foreigners and half-baked Americans.” After a no-holds-barred confrontation with McCormick, they claim their hard-earned pay.

Soon afterward, the pair encounter an experienced, but penniless and more or less toothless, grizzled old gold prospector, Howard (Walter Huston, the director’s father). In their wretched flophouse, the subject of gold comes up. In a remarkable speech, brilliantly delivered in rapid-fire fashion, Howard gives them the lowdown, loosely basing himself on Marx’s theory of value: “A thousand men, say, go searchin’ for gold. After six months, one of ’em’s lucky—one out of the thousand. His find represents not only his own labor but that of 999 others to boot. That’s uh, 6,000 months, uh, 500 years scrambling over mountains, goin’ hungry and thirsty. An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin’ and the gettin’ of it.”

Director John Huston in his cameo role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Later, Howard adds prophetically: “Aw, gold’s a devilish sort of a thing anyway. You start out to tell yourself you’ll be satisfied with 25,000 handsome smackers worth of it, so help me Lord and cross my heart. Fine resolution. After months of sweatin’ yourself dizzy and growin’ short on provisions and findin’ nothin’, you finally come down to 15,000 and then 10. Finally you say, ‘Lord, let me just find 5,000 dollars worth and I’ll never ask for anything more the rest of my life’ ... Yeah, here in this joint, it seems like a lot. But I tell you, if you was to make a real strike, you couldn’t be dragged away. Not even the threat of miserable death wouldn’t keep you from tryin’ to add $10,000 more. $10,000, you’d want to get 25. $25,000, you’d want to get 50. $50,000, a 100. Like roulette. One more turn, you know, always one more.”

But soon, Howard, Dobbs and Curtin are pooling their resources, beginning a perilous journey in search of the elusive shiny metal that is eternally cursed because it “changes the soul of man in a second.” A four-day trip takes them to the Sierra Madre, north of Durango.

As they climb the mountainside, clearing the thick brush along the way, Howard—more energetic and agile than either of the younger men—shows his expertise at distinguishing genuine from fool’s gold. Having come upon the real thing, Huston does a memorable, devilish jig to mark the spot. The trio set up a mining encampment and begin the arduous and grueling labor that will take them months.

Traven writes in his novel: “Sand and dirt, dirt and sand, coupled with inhumane privations; crushing rocks from the bitter cold morning hours, through the broiling of midday, and far into the darkness of night made them feel worse than convicts. When it turned out that a huge heap of crushed rocks held, as frequently happened, hardly the day’s pay of a union bricklayer in Chicago, the disappointment of the gang became so great that they could have killed each other just for the pleasure of doing something different from the daily routine.”

The gold dust eventually piles up, but so does their fear and distrust of one another. Dobbs is the worst, showing signs of genuine paranoia and even madness.

When a stranger, Cody (Bruce Bennett), also in search of treasure, encroaches on their unregistered claim, the three “vote” to kill him, an act that is only interrupted by an attack of bandits—not looking for gold but ammunition.

Cody, originally from Texas, dies in the exchange of gunfire. His wallet contains a poignant letter from his wife, who reminds him that his family is “life’s real treasure,” and that she “never thought any material treasure, no matter how great, is worth the pain of these long separations.”

But the lure of riches is irresistible, regardless of the consequences.

In the novel, during an argument with Dobbs, who has denounced him for his “Bolshevik ideas” delivered from “a soap-box,” Curtin responds that perhaps it was the Bolsheviks’ aim “to see that a worker gets the full value of what he produces, and that no one tries to cheat a worker out of what is honestly coming to him.” Curtin is no saint, Traven makes clear in the novel, his morals are those of a society in which “the big oil-magnates, the big financiers, the presidents of great corporations, and in particular the politicians, stole and robbed wherever there was an opportunity. Why should he, the little feller, the ordinary citizen, be honest if the big ones knew no scruples and no honesty, either in their business or in the affairs of the nation.”

In one of the book’s most important passages, whose spirit is largely captured in Huston’s movie, Traven writes: “With every ounce more of gold possessed by them they left the proletarian class and neared that of the property-holders, the well-to-do middle class. So far they had never had anything of value to protect against thieves. Since they now owned certain riches, their worries about how to protect them had started. The world no longer looked to them as it had a few weeks ago. They had become members of the minority of mankind.

“Those who up to this time had been considered by them as their proletarian brethren were now enemies against whom they had to protect themselves. As long as they had owned nothing of value, they had been slaves of their hungry bellies, slaves to those who had the means to fill their bellies. All this was changed now.

“They had reached the first step by which man becomes the slave of his property.”

Walter Huston

And for Dobbs in particular, being a slave to his gold adds to the insanity produced by the sacrifices he made for it. The expedition to the mountains, as it must, ends in tragedy and failure.

Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, conscientious and artistically crafted, is a condemnation of capitalism: gold assumes enormously appealing and powerful qualities, while human beings turn to dirt—literally. In the movie, the three leads are reduced to a heap of sandy filth. Both Huston and Traven echo Shakespeare, who has his Timon declaim “Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? ... Thus much of this [gold] will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.”

Author and filmmaker are influenced by socialist notions about the enslavement of people to money and gold, infecting, corrupting and destroying relationships. The acrimony and murderous altercations among the principals, who were all poor, diverts them from looking to the roots of the general misery affecting poor Americans, Indians and Mexicans alike.

Walter Huston gives an extraordinary performance in particular. His characterization speaks to a period when artists still paid attention to the working class and plebeian elements in society. The earthy, slang-filled speech in Huston’s movie has not become dated, unlike the words of characters in many naturalistic novels of the time, because universal truths about class society and humanity find expression through its particularity.

The Hustons (John and Walter) received the film’s three Academy Awards, out of four nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Walter Huston), Best Director and Best Screenplay (John Huston).

The context in which this generally left-wing film was shot and released is significant and has tragic overtones. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was filmed from March to July 1947. As we have previously noted, the “political situation in the US … transformed itself within a matter of months in 1947-48. … The American political and media establishment’s anticommunist campaign had shifted into full gear.

“The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings into ‘Communist influence’ in Hollywood grabbed headlines day after day in the autumn of 1947; ultimately, the ‘Hollywood Ten’ were convicted and sentenced in April 1948; throughout that year the Communist Party leadership in New York City faced prosecution under the Smith Act, which outlawed conspiring to advocate forcible overthrow of the government; in August 1948 congressional hearings (presided over by Richard Nixon) began into accusations that former State Department official Alger Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union.”

In response to the film industry’s blacklist attempts, Hollywood liberals and radicals like Huston, Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Gene Kelly and numerous others established the Committee for the First Amendment in September 1947. However, the group’s visit to Washington in October 1947 was pilloried by the media as a “Communist front” operation and its members soon caved in to the pressure.

In March 1948, only 12 months after filming on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre began, an article appeared in Photoplay magazine under Bogart’s byline. “I’m No Communist.” The disgraceful piece claimed that the actor and other members of the Committee for the First Amendment had been duped by Communist Party members and supporters.

At the time of filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston had a number of important credits as a screenwriter (above all, High Sierra, 1941, directed by Raoul Walsh) and director (The Maltese Falcon, 1941) under his belt. He had wanted to film Traven’s novel next, but World War II intervened. He took up the project again in 1946 once he had returned from active duty in the war.

The McCarthyite purges resulted in the complete exclusion of some, but it also knocked the stuffing out of others. Huston directed two more significant works in Hollywood, Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), but the demoralizing, “scoundrel time” atmosphere had a seriously damaging effect on his artistic life. There are interesting and even insightful works to come, but nothing close to the intensity and social boldness of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Asphalt Jungle.

Like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, Huston was essentially driven out of the country. Increasingly disgusted by the political situation in the US, he took up residence in Ireland in 1952 and took out Irish citizenship a dozen years later.

“I left the country,” he explained decades later, “because I could not abide with what McCarthy was doing to America ... [and] I did not want to come back into an atmosphere that was permeated with the stench of that dreadful man. In some ways, I trace the Nixon years with its disgrace to the McCarthy period.”

Like many disillusioned liberals and radicals, he drew fairly despairing conclusions. “The idea of America, the America of our founding fathers, was lost,” he later recalled. “It stopped being that America and became something else. And then one wondered whether it ever had been America except for the founding fathers and a few rare souls. Was it all an illusion?”

Huston’s contributions to American filmmaking remain with us.  

The ubiquitous praise for MLK drowns out the most important fact: who killed him?

“And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.”
             — Graeme MacQueen,  Beyond Their Wildest Dreams: September 11, 2001 and the American Left

It is well known that effective propaganda works through slow, imperceptible repetition. “The slow building up of reflexes and myths” is the way Jacques Ellul put it in his classic, Propaganda.  This works through commission and omission.

I was reminded of this recently after I published a newspaper editorial on Martin Luther King Day stating the fact that the United States’ government assassinated Dr. King.  To the best of my knowledge, this was the only newspaper op-ed to say that.  I discovered that many newspapers and other publications (with very rare exceptions), despite a plethora of articles and editorials praising King, ignored this “little” fact as if it were inconsequential.  No doubt they wish it were, or that it were not true, just as many hoped that repeating the bromide that James Earl Ray killed Dr. King would reinforce the myth they’ve been selling for fifty years, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that is available to anyone wishing to investigate the truth.

BELOW: DEMOCRACY NOW! with Amy Goodman, a prime exponent of lying by omission.

The general attitude seemed to be: Let’s just appreciate MLK on his birthday and get on with it.  Don’t be a spoil-sport.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hat this is the approach of the mainstream corporate media (MSM) should not be surprising, for they are mouthpieces for official government lies.  But when the same position is taken by so many liberal and progressive intellectuals and publications who are otherwise severely critical of the MSM for their propaganda in the service of empire, it gives pause.  Like their counterparts in the MSM, these liberals shower King with praise, even adding that he was more than a civil rights leader, that he opposed war and economic exploitation as well, but as to who killed him, and why, and why it matters today, that is elided.  Amy Goodman at Democracy Now in a recent piece about an upcoming documentary about King is a case in point.  Not once in this long conversation about a film about the last few years of King’s life and his commitment to oppose the Vietnam War and launch the Poor People’s Campaign is the subject of who killed him and why broached.  It is a perfect example of the denial of the truth through omission.

Propaganda, of course comes in many forms: big lies and small; half-truths, whispers, and rumors; slow-drip and headlong; misinformation and disinformation; through commission and omission; intentional and unintentional; cultural and political, etc.  Although it is omnipresent today – 24/7 surround sound – when it comes from the mouths of government spokespeople or corporate media the average person, grown somewhat suspicious of official lies, has a slight chance of detecting it.  This is far more difficult, however, when it takes the form of a left-wing critique of U.S. government policies that subtly supports official explanations through sly innuendos and references, or through omission.  Reading an encomium to Dr. King that attacks government positions on race, war, and economics from the left will often get people nodding their heads in agreement while they fail to notice a fatal flaw at the heart of the critique.  The Democracy Now piece is a perfect example of this legerdemain.

I do not know the motivations or intentions of many prominent leftist intellectuals and publications, but I do know that many choose to avoid placing certain key historical events at the center of their analyses.  In fact, they either avoid them like the plague, dismiss them as inconsequential, or use the CIA’s term of choice and call them “conspiracy theories” and their proponents “conspiracy nuts.”  The result is a powerful propaganda victory for the power elites they say they oppose.

Orwell called it “Crimestop: [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.  It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.  Crimestop, in short means protective stupidity.”

There are many fine writers and activists who are very frustrated by their inability, despite a vast and continuous outpouring of excellent critiques of the machinations of the oligarchical rulers of the U.S., to convince people of the ways they have been brainwashed by government/media propaganda.  Most of their anger is directed toward the most obvious sources of this intricate psychological warfare directed at the American people.  They often fail to realize, however – or fail to say – that there are leftists in their ranks who, whether intentionally or not, are far more effective than the recognized enemies in government intelligence agencies and their corporate accomplices in the media in convincing people that the system works and that it is not run by killers who will go to any lengths to achieve their goals.  These leftist critics, while often right on specific issues that one can agree with, couch their critiques within a framework that omits or disparages certain truths without which nothing makes sense.  By truths I do not mean debatable matters, but key historical events that have been studied and researched extensively by reputable scholars and have been shown to be factual, except to those who fail to fairly do their homework, purposely or through laziness. 

There is no way to understand today’s world without confronting four key historical events out of which spring today’s conditions of oligarchic rule, constant war, and the growth of an intelligence apparatus that makes Orwell’s 1984 look so anachronistic.

They are: the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK by elements within the U.S. intelligence services, and the insider attacks of September 11, 2011.   These are anathema to a group of very prominent left-wing intellectuals and liberal publications.  It is okay for them to attack Bush, Obama, Clinton, Trump, the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, liberals in general, creeping fascism, capitalism, the growth of the intelligence state, etc.; but to accept, or even to explore fairly in writing, what I assert as factual above, is verboten.  Why?

When President Kennedy was murdered by the CIA, the United States suffered a coup d’état that resulted in years of savage war waged against Vietnam, resulting in millions of Vietnamese deaths and tens of thousands of American soldiers.  The murder of JFK in plain sight sent a message in clear and unambiguous terms to every President that followed that you toe the line or else.  They have toed the line.  The message from the coup planners and executioners was clear: we run the show.  They have been running it ever since.

When Martin Luther King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War and joined it to his espousal of a civil rights and an anti-capitalist program, he had to go.  So they killed him.

Then, when the last man standing who had a chance to change the direction of the coup – Robert Kennedy – seemed destined to win the presidency, he had to go.  So they killed him.

To ignore these foundational state crimes for which the evidence is so overwhelming and their consequences over the decades so obvious – well, what explanation can leftist critics offer for doing so?

And then there are the attacks of September 11, 2001, the fourth foundational event that has brought us to our present abominable condition.  One has to be very ignorant to not see that the official explanation is a fiction conjured up to justify an endless “war on terror” planned as perhaps the prelude to the use of nuclear weapons, those weapons that JFK in the last year of his life worked so hard to eliminate after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. 

In refusing to connect the dots from November 22, 1963 through April 4 and June 5 1968 and September 11, 2001 until today, prominent leftists continue to do the work of Crimestop.  I will leave it to readers to identify who they are, and the numerous leftist publications that support their positions.  There are two famous left-wing American intellectuals, one dead and one living, who are often intoned to support this work of propaganda by omission:  Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, both of whom dismissed the killing of JFK and the attacks of September 11 as inconsequential and not worthy of their attention. They have quite a few protégés whose work you probably read and agree with, despite the void at the heart of their critiques.  Why they avoid accepting the truth and significance of the four events I have mentioned, only they can say.  That they do is easy to show, as are the dire consequences for a united front against the deep-state forces intent on reducing this society and the world to rubble because of their refusal to confront the systemic evil that they render unspeakable by their acquiescence to government propaganda.

In  his groundbreaking book on the assassination of John Kennedy, JFK And The Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters, James Douglass quotes his guide into the dark underworld of radical evil and our tendency to turn away from its awful truths, the Trappist Monk Thomas Merton, who said of the Unspeakable:  “It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”

Can you hear it on your left?

“There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.”
– Friedrick Nietzche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Any artist [person] who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist [person] in him.”
– Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously”

“It ain’t me you’re lookin for, babe.”
– Bob Dylan, It Ain’t Me, Babe

Enter

The set was real but illusionary: A legendary old New England hotel dressed festively for Christmas and the holiday season.  Norman Rockwell’s magical realism.  The lobby full with merriment, the cozy fire dancing to the sweet sound of violin and piano Christmas music mixed with a subtle alcoholic fragrance.  Main Street U.S.A.  Snow on the street and the classic strains of “White Christmas” in the inner air.  A mythic setting for meeting a legendary actor.

But as I entered the dimly lit set, the legend was nowhere to be seen.  I approached the spot where the musicians were playing and didn’t see him in the room opposite.  Then, as I was greeting two actors with bit parts that I knew (unconscious actors, I should add), out of the shadows came a laughing Russian spy obviously dressed as a Russian spy, one red star on his hat, walking stick in hand.  He and I were there to have a drink and enjoy the music that would allow us to talk privately without being overheard.  A few hours earlier he had sent me a strange message from Epicurus:  “It is impossible to lead a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly (‘justly’ meaning to prevent a person from harming or being harmed by another).”

What did this cryptic message mean?   The day before I had met a leading expert on the CIA on the same set and we had discussed the criminal activities of the Agency, how they dissembled and lied in their self-declared mission to defeat communism everywhere, even where it didn’t exist.  Those people were great at creating false myths, counter-myths, and Hollywood/media narratives to discombobulate a public already lost in an entertainment culture.  Now I was meeting this crazy Russian whom I heard say to some passing actors that he was a communist, and then he said something in Latin that totally perplexed them, which made him laugh.  A woman approached him and said she liked his hat.  Again he replied in Latin with a Russian accent and her face dropped.  Then we all laughed. She blushed, the scent of flirtation in the badinage. Was this guy serious or a comic having fun? 

Off to the bar he and I went for some vino, wisecracks spewing from the mad Russian’s mouth. Heads turned to watch our passage, for even on this movie set, his costume stood out.

The True Man

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s we settled in a corner with our drinks, a joyous warmth enveloped us.  Play-acting was fun.  Francesco was good at it.  Here in the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, no one took him for the legendary New York City Detective, Frank Serpico, shot in the face for being  a whistleblower before the word became commonplace, and made mythic through the 1973 movie, Serpico.  To the people surrounding us, he was just an amusing guy in an interesting hat, a man having fun with a buddy.

At a round table in front of the chairs we were sitting in, a group of six middle-aged adults sat playing cards. They were not conversing. Frank mentioned that they reminded him of those pictures of dogs playing cards.  He got up and asked them if they were playing for high stakes.  They laughingly said no, just for amusement.  And what game were they playing? I asked.  A children’s game, the woman said. It was a perfect scene from a spoof, and Frank whispered to me, “The masses are deluded with TV, Hollywood, and children’s games.  Let’s bark.”

“Become who you are,” advised Nietzsche.  Frank had done that; had always done it, despite decades of having to escape the mythic masked man Hollywood had made of him when Al Pacino played him in 1973, creating the legendary persona behind which the real person is expected to disappear, held hostage by the mask.   While all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask, there are those who are nothing but masks – hollow inside.  Empty.  No one home.  Unconscious and involuntary actors living out a script written by someone else.  Not Frank Serpico. He has consistently been an unmasker, a truth-teller exposing the fraud that is so endemic in this society of illusions and delusions where lying is the norm.

The Lone Ranger

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]rank has always understood masks. When he was an undercover cop, he used his play acting skills to save his life.  In the recent documentary film, “Frank Serpico,” directed by Antonino D’Ambrosio, he says he told himself: “You’re going on the stage tonight.  The audience is out there.  I told myself I was an actor and I had to sell my role.  I got my training in the streets of New York where I played many roles from a doctor to a derelict and how well I played those roles my life depended on it.” His acting skills were his protection, but these acts were performed in the service of protecting the citizens he had vowed to protect.  Genuine acts.

Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree with the bard that we are “merely” players.  It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.  But who are we behind the masks?  Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona, Latin, to sound through).  In Frank’s case, the real man is not hard to find.  Never was. From a young age he was incorruptible.  When he became a cop and took his oath, he was the same honest guy, though not fully aware of the dishonesty that pervades society at all levels.

When this honest cop was lying in a pool of his own blood on the night of February 3, 1971, having been shot in the face in a set-up carried out by fellow cops, Frank Serpico heard a voice that said, “It’s all a lie.”  In that moment as he fought for his life, he realized a truth he had previously sensed but never fully grasped in its awful reality.  His honesty, his refusal to be a corrupt cop like so many others, his allegiance to the sacred oath he took when he became a police officer, was returned with a violent snarl by the liars he walked among.  And in that moment he was determined to live and return their lies with more truth, which he did in his subsequent eloquent testimony to the Knapp Commission that was investigating police corruption in the New York Police Department because of him.

The After Life

Pacino as Serpico: the image everyone associates with the real person, a bravura impersonation.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut then came the rest of his life, not a small thing.  Lionized and damned as a “rat” by many cops, recreated through the superb actor’s mask of Al Pacino in the film Serpico, his legend was created by the celebrity machine.  His truth was turned into a Hollywood myth; a true American hero became a cool movie star.  But unlike a movie actor or entertainer, he was still Frankie the honest boy who became an honest cop, and he wanted to become who he was, not an actor playing someone else.

Police work was his “calling,” he told me.  It is a word with deep religious roots.  A vocation (Latin, vocare, to call).  The mythographer Joseph Campbell has written eloquently of “the call” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  When one is called by this mysterious voice that many call God, this call to adventure and authenticity – the hero’s way, he terms it – one is faced with a choice whether to accept or refuse.  Campbell writes:

[It] signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual

center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.  This fate-

ful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant

land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a

of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman