WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Paul:

Yes, the nuclear card is being played, including fusion, and yes, at a billion a pop or so, it will work under the capitalist framework just fine. But none of my fellow travelers conceded the field to those games. I put the Rockefellers at about the fourth level of the global food chain. When David Rockefeller called Dennis at home, that announced that he was not Mr. Big. Kissinger, American presidents, etc., are further down, especially after they took out JFK.

Alternative physics models are legion, going back at least to Tesla, and all I’ll say is that what my pal had demonstrated defied the current “laws of physics” and then some. My sense is that the people who kidnapped him hailed from the disenchanted arm of the GCs, and they are shooting for something other than, “Free energy, brought to you by Lockheed and Wall Street.”

The stuff that I am aware of could be cheaply mass-produced (no moving parts, would last almost indefinitely, the size of a book, how much power do you want?), and for the GCs, that would be a Game Over situation, and they know it. It is a very real threat to their hegemony, which is why free energy has been suppressed like it has. The GCs are not as in charge as they think, and there is dissention in the ranks. If any of it gets out, all of it will eventually come out. I doubt that the “dribble it out” plan will be very successful in the long run, which is why they have kept the lid tight on that Pandora’s box.

We’ll see how it plays out. Interesting times.

Best,

Wade

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
I doubt that the “dribble it out” plan will be very successful in the long run

May the force be with us

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Yesterday, I worked on Ed’s quote page and added some to Noam’s. As my Ed bio project continues, his quote page will grow. No hacks have arrived yet. We’ll see how that goes. Next up is updating this chapter of my Ed bio for my recent studies (and some other bio changes), then writing the article on those books, then I will be taking on Ed’s horrific Wikipedia bio and tweaking some other Ed-related articles. Then the hacks will likely arrive. This process could take all summer, but I hope not.

Then I will begin plunking along on my long overdue update of my big essay. I expect that process to take a year or so, of my “spare” time. It will be a significant update. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will only take a few months. We’ll see. Then I am going to engage in some more visibility work, do some interviews, etc.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

My post this summer will include drafts of my writings on Ed and Noam. I am far from finished, but this is a draft of my revision of The Washington Connection, which I worked on this morning:

The Political Economy of Human Rights

Herman and Chomsky’s first uncensored collaboration was “Saigon’s Corruption Crisis: The Search for an Honest Quisling”, published in 1974. The article discussed the American government’s intractable problem in Vietnam: finding a puppet who was not corrupt, in order to change the image of the regimes in Vietnam and renew generous funding from Congress.

In 1977, previews of Chomsky and Herman’s next collaboration appeared in various publications. One was a preview of the first two chapters of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. Herman’s writings were published in Monthly Review over several decades. Another was on the American media’s treatment of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, when little confirmable information on Cambodia’s situation was available to the West.

In 1979, Chomsky and Herman published the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights; The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism was the first volume, and After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology was the second. The combined works greatly expanded on CRV. The preface of The Washington Connection established the theme of those two works, which contrasted the facts of the United States’s international behavior with the popularly held beliefs about them in the United States.

The Washington Connection

The facts asserted by the authors were that the United States had “organized under its sponsorship and protection a neocolonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite.”

The beliefs asserted by the authors, which they called an “ideological pretense,” were that the “United States is committed to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, although it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective.”

The authors noted that between 1960 and the publication of their work in 1979, more than 18 Latin American governments had been subjected to military takeovers, and the United States was essential to the overthrow process in all of those nations. The authors wrote that torture had been no more than a historical curiosity in recent centuries, but suddenly flourished in the “free world” while it had simultaneously declined in the Soviet domain after Stalin’s death.

The inner cover of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism presented a diagram of nations that routinely tortured their citizenry during the 1970s. That diagram listed the 35 nations that practiced torture on an administrative basis, and 26 (74%) of them were client states of the United States. The diagram also presented the amount of military aid provided by the United States to those torturer regimes from 1946 to 1975, which amounted to many billions of dollars, as well as how many of those nations’ military and police personnel were trained by the United States from 1950 to 1975, a count which exceeded 200,000 people. The authors noted that 35,000 Latin American officers had been trained at the School of the Americas, which was known as the “school of coups.” The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, became infamous for running a torture school, and long after The Washington Connection was published, the Pentagon declassified some of their training manuals, which advocated torture and described torture techniques.

In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman argued that the term “terror,” as used by the American media, was a political construct applied only to violence committed by marginal groups, even American students who protested the Vietnam War, while state terror, which was immensely more destructive, was defined away as not being terror at all, but was described by euphemisms such as “police action,” “protective action,” and similar terms, even while the Cuban and Cambodian governments’ violence was deemed “terroristic.”

Chomsky and Herman surveyed the CIA’s methods of subversion, including:

• Assassinating foreign heads of state;
• “Direct conspiracies with terrorists, mercenaries or (usually) military factions within a country to disrupt or overthrow a government in disfavor”;
• “Political bribery and funding foreign politicians”;
• Propaganda, in a “wide variety of forms”;
• Organizing and funding demonstrations;
• Actual information collection, which was its primary official function in its charter, but it routinely provided that information to those torturer regimes and the CIA’s proxies for harrying and overthrowing governments.

A theme throughout The Washington Connection was that those activities had the singular purpose of providing a favorable investment climate for American interests, primarily transnational corporations. Torture, slaughter, even genocide, and terror was performed with the objective of cowing a populace into apathy and submission so that foreign interests could plunder the labor and natural resources of those subject nations.

A generation later, John Perkins described those activities from the inside, as a member of a “middle management” that described themselves as “economic hit men,” who openly acknowledged among themselves that their purpose was to plunder the labor and resources of subject nations. When people such as Perkins failed to get foreign leaders to sell out their nations to transnational corporations, then the “jackals” (covert operatives, usually CIA contract agents) were sent in, often to assassinate foreign heads of state. Perkins had clients that were populist leaders of Panama and Ecuador, Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldós, and after the economic hit men unsuccessfully tried to get them to sell out their nations to the “corporatocracy,” both men soon died in aircraft “accidents” that Perkins strongly believed were “jackal” operations.

Chomsky and Herman wrote that the CIA-enabled Latin American dictatorships had similarities to Nazi Germany, not the least of which was the CIA’s use of Nazis, particularly those who fled to Latin America after World War II, often with American assistance and protection, but with some important exceptions. Anti-Semitism was rarely evident in the ideology of those Latin American dictatorships, although Argentina was an exception, with its long history of anti-Semitism. More importantly, unlike European fascism, the Latin American variant had no popular support. The regimes were “denationalized” and had no allegiance to their nations’ masses, but instead were beholden to their foreign sponsors, so they treated their domestic populations as their enemies. Accordingly, the authors termed those regimes “subfascist.” The authors noted that the phenomenon of American-supported subfascist regimes was far from confined to Latin America, but was the typical situation in American client states globally.

In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman described how the American mass media operated, and included a brief discussion of the features of what became their Propaganda Model, which was further developed in their Manufacturing Consent. In an early example of the media’s double standards that became a regular feature of Chomsky and Herman’s media analytics was a section of The Washington Connection titled, “Cambodia: Why the Media Find It More Newsworthy Than Indonesia and East Timor.” Chomsky and Herman explicitly made their arguments about the Cambodian slaughter in the 1970s; they were framed in the American media’s treatment of it, as they stated:


“Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our readers. It is a ‘benign bloodbath’ in our terminology.”

In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman provided more examples of their framework of constructive, benign, nefarious, and mythical terror and bloodbaths, several of which were not in CRV, and they considerably expanded on their discussions in CRV. The terror and bloodbaths discussed in The Washington Connection included:

• Benign and Constructive: American client regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia;
• Benign: East Pakistan, early 1970s; Burundi, 1972; Indians of Latin America, particularly the genocide of the Aché of Paraguay, where the effort was led by American missionaries, enabled by the State Department and other American government agencies; and a lengthy discussion of the Indonesian invasion and aftermath in East Timor, which was the greatest proportional genocide of an ethic group since World War II;
• Constructive: Indonesia, 1965-1969; Thailand and the Philippines, post-World War II to the 1970s; Dominican Republic, from the 1965 American invasion to the 1970s, Latin America in general, from the American overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, to the mid-to-late 1960s epidemic of overthrown governments, to the subfascist terror regimes in the 1970s;
• Nefarious and Mythical: Vietnamese land reform in the 1950s and the Huế “massacre” in 1968.

Chomsky and Herman provided voluminous details, context, and dry humor regarding those events. For instance, in the early days of Marcos’s subfascist terror regime in the Philippines, they routinely tortured dissidents, such as Trinidad Herrera, who organized protests in a squatter community near Manila, but was released after a tremendous international outcry that finally spurred the State Department to intervene to obtain her release. The testimonies of Marcos’s torture victims became a public relations problem, so the Marcos regime graduated to a “more advanced subfascist process” in which dissidents then began simply disappearing, never living to describe their treatment. The authors described a similar process in Thailand, in which “disappeared” dissidents (such as protesting students) were disposed of by incineration, even while the victims were still alive. Chomsky and Herman repeatedly noted that after successful constructive terror, American investment would pour into subject nations, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, as those nations became investors’ paradises.

Chomsky and Herman, in a preview of Manufacturing Consent, described the American media’s enabling performance of those activities, such as the New York Times’s performance regarding the East Timorese genocide, particularly that of its Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, Henry Kamm, who uncritically promoted the Indonesian government’s propaganda as it slaughtered the East Timorese in its unprovoked invasion. As the genocide in East Timor reached its peak, the American media went completely silent, which Chomsky later said reached the level of actual complicity in genocide.

In an early example of the pairing analysis of the media that Herman and Chomsky made famous in Manufacturing Consent, they noted that the trial of Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky received more American media coverage in 1978 than the collective coverage of several thousand murders inflicted by Latin American client regimes in the same year.

Chomsky and Herman regularly noted the media’s irrationality in its reporting, such as the logical fallacy known as false alternatives, in which people who opposed the American invasion of Vietnam on principle were called “supporters of Hanoi.” The authors described at length American president Jimmy Carter’s hypocrisy as a “human rights” advocate when it came to how American client regimes treated their domestic populations, such as in American-supported dictatorships in Nicaragua and Iran, as well as Carter’s presiding over the greatest proportional genocide since World War II, as his administration renewed weapons sales to Indonesia when it began running out of bullets. The authors wrote that the United States was far from alone in supporting the Indonesian genocide in East Timor, as several Western nations provided various forms of assistance, including France and notably the United Kingdom; British Aerospace sold $25 million of counterinsurgency attack aircraft to Indonesia in 1978, which would have only been used on East Timor at that time. Western oil companies lined up in the wake of the invasion to negotiate oil exploration rights in Timor Gap.

Chomsky and Herman wrote at length about the USA’s operations in Vietnam, including mass murder programs such as Operation Speedy Express and the Phoenix Program. Details of the American operations were provided by examples such as the Congressional testimony of K. Barton Osborn, who:


“served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of forms of torture used by U.S. and Saigon personnel, but also made the startling claim that ‘I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC [NLF] suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.’”


Vietnamese land reform in the 1950s was a dismantling of an economic order that exploited peasants, as had been happening throughout the Third World since World War II, but it was also an endemic issue in agrarian societies, going back to the first civilizations. The most credible estimates were that the communist leadership in North Vietnam executed as many as two thousand people during its land reform activities. However, in late 1969, Nixon announced that 50,000 people had been executed by North Vietnam’s communist leadership. Several months later, Nixon said that the number was “hundreds of thousands,” and a month later, when huge protests were held across the USA in response to Nixon’s announcement that the USA was bombing Cambodia, Nixon announced that “a half a million, by conservative estimates…were murdered or otherwise exterminated by the North Vietnamese.” Nixon’s lies were made to bolster his claims that the North Vietnamese would massacre millions of South Vietnamese if they ever ruled over South Vietnam, and preventing a communist bloodbath became his rallying cry. Vietnamese land reform became one of Chomsky and Herman’s mythical bloodbaths.

Nixon’s lies about Vietnamese land reform and warnings against communist bloodbaths were part of a longstanding ideological construct that the USA was preventing or containing communist “aggression.” In that framework, the USA was never the aggressor, but was responding to or preventing communist aggression. That stance became known as “containment,” and was the USA’s official rationale for the Cold War. Herman and Chomsky spent a good deal of their political writings demonstrating that the “containment” policy was pure propaganda. The USA never felt threatened by communist expansion from the Soviet Union or China. Peasant nations freeing themselves from centuries of European colonial domination would no longer be subjected to capitalist-imperialist exploitation, and that was the real threat that the USA addressed with its foreign policy.

In his Beyond Hypocrisy, Herman wrote about the fictions that the containment policy was founded on, and he analyzed National Security Council Report 68 (“NSC-68”), prepared just before the Korean War in 1950. NSC-68 was a planning document for American leadership, and its author, Paul Nitze, advised the Reagan administration more than 30 years later. NSC-68 frankly recognized Soviet weakness, as it recovered from tens of millions of deaths in World War II. NSC-68 made explicit plans to subtly attack the Soviet Union, first by stripping away its satellites, and then to subvert the Soviet Union itself. NSC-68, like the Reagan administration’s “Defense Guidance, 1984-1988” report, authored by the Pentagon, openly acknowledged Soviet weakness and how to aggressively exploit it.

NSC-68, declassified in 1975 by Henry Kissinger, acknowledged that in order to subvert the Soviet Union, the USA needed a large military and mobilized public. Herman wrote:


“Doublespeak embedded in a convenient matrix of anticommunist ideology was essential, as the U.S. establishment was obliged to pretend (or internalize the belief) that the huge global expansion of the U.S. political economy on which they had embarked was ‘defensive’ and responsive to some external threat; that we were ‘containing’ somebody else who was committing ‘aggression’ and threatening our ‘national security.’

“The words and phrases ‘defense,’ ‘containment,’ ‘aggression,’ and ‘national security’ are core items of the doublespeak lexicon, essential ingredients of the ink squirted out by imperial cuttlefish.”


Nitze was a leading foreign policy hawk, and the leading dove of the early postwar years, George Kennan, authored Policy Planning Study 23 (“PPS-23”) for the U.S. State Department in 1948, the year after the USA renamed its War Department to the Defense Department. PPS-23 was declassified in 1974. Kennan made infamous observations in PPS-23, including:


“Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

“…We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and - for the Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”


Kennan was the author of the USA’s “containment policy,” but Kennan wrote in 1985:


“In no way did the Soviet Union appear, at that moment, as a military threat to this country. The Soviet Union was utterly exhausted by the exertions and sacrifices of the recent war.”


In the 1960s, Kennan lectured on the idea that when the USA created NATO:


“they had drawn a line arbitrarily across Europe against an attack no one was planning,” and Kennan admitted that there was really “nothing to contain.”


Herman and Chomsky regularly wrote about American policymakers in the early postwar years and what the real game was, which they openly admitted in their top-secret planning documents.


Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Here is an early draft of my rewrite of my summary of Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm. It will receive plenty more work before I get it into the shape I want, but here is a peek.

After the Cataclysm

In Chomsky and Herman’s After the Cataclysm, their emphasis was on how the American media system focused on events in Indochina after the American withdrawal, and how it helped reconstruct the USA’s imperial ideology. The bludgeoning of Southeast Asia, which caused several million deaths, had to be framed as a noble cause gone awry, instead of an imperial undertaking. In that regard, the USA’s media engaged in the task of transforming the USA from perpetrator to a concerned observer with clean hands that could righteously moralize about the failings of its victims, as it falsely portrayed them as the victims of others, as if the USA had no responsibility for how events unfolded in postwar Indochina, even as it actively prevented aid from reaching its victims.

In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman made their stance explicit, writing in the book’s first paragraph:


“We will consider the facts about postwar Indochina insofar as they can be ascertained, but a major emphasis will be on the ways in which these facts have been interpreted, filtered, distorted or modified by the ideological institutions in the West.”


Chomsky and Herman wrote about how American pundits immediately began framing the American invasion of Indochina as a mistake, not a crime, and how the media endlessly repeated the myth that the USA’s intention was to protect the freedom of South Vietnam’s peasants. Chomsky and Herman quoted the New York Times’s leading “dovish” pundit on the Vietnam War, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Anthony Lewis, who wrote:


“The early American decisions on Indochina can be regarded as blundering efforts to do good. But by 1969 it was clear to most of the world – and most Americans – that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake.”


That became the standard theme of American apologists. The USA was not attacking Vietnam, but defending it, in its “blundering efforts to do good.” Chomsky and Herman wrote that reframing crimes as “mistakes” and “errors” had rich precedence; they quoted Klaus Barbie, also known as the Butcher of Lyon, during his comfortable retirement in Bolivia, after rendering his services to the Third Reich:


“the mass killings of Jews constituted a grave error. Many of the SS officers believed that the Jews could have been put to better use building roads to facilitate the advance of our troops.”


Chomsky and Herman wrote that as Herman Goering was being interrogated at Nuremberg after the Nazis were defeated, he said that genocide of the Jews was not a crime, but a:


“vast political blunder; many would have made good nationalists and joined in the Liquidation of the communists. If only Hitler had not confused the issues….”


Chomsky and Herman surveyed the USA after its Revolutionary War, and France after World War II. In postwar France, around 30,000 to 50,000 French citizens were summarily executed, often by mobs, generally for the alleged crime of Nazi collaboration, and such murders happened while France was under the authority of Dwight Eisenhower, with Winston Churchill’s approval, as Eisenhower implemented Franklin Roosevelt’s directive. In the American Revolutionary War, the relative affluence of Americans muted the barbarities that typically plague postwar situations, but Chomsky and Herman noted that about 100,000 loyal British subjects were driven from the colonies by the revolutionaries, and that massacres were common between loyalists and rebels. About 20% of the colonial population, about a half million in all, were loyalists to the British crown. Chomsky and Herman used those postwar examples, both of which had minimal suffering compared to what the Vietnamese people endured, in order to calibrate what the postwar experience in Vietnam could have been like.

Contrary to Nixon’s warnings of a communist bloodbath in postwar Vietnam, one did not happen. In their chapter on postwar Vietnam, Chomsky and Herman wrote about how the American media portrayed the events in Vietnam in the harshest possible light. The testimonies of many credible Western witnesses, who noted many positive developments in Vietnam’s recovery from the American invasion, were disregarded in favor of the testimony of a French priest, André Gelinas, who served in Vietnam and made extremely fanciful and lurid claims, such as that the Vietnamese people wished that the USA would drop atomic weapons on them, to end the scourge of communism once and for all. Virtually none of Gelinas’s claims could be independently verified, and when they could be subjected to verification, the findings demonstrated that Gelinas was far from a credible witness. A great deal of credible Western testimony, such as from Quakers, Mennonites, relief workers, and UN officials, was entirely disregarded by the American media in favor of Gelinas’s fabrications, which were prominently published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other media venues.

Chomsky and Herman made it clear that few nations on Earth really helped much with reconstructing Indochina after it was destroyed by the USA. When help was given, it was invariably done over the objections of the USA, as it tried to prevent Indochina from receiving any assistance as it recovered, in a historic example of vindictiveness. Most of Indochina’s draft animals were killed in the wars, farmers were pulling plows in the aftermath of the American invasion, and when India sent 100 water buffaloes to Vietnam to help replenish its decimated herds, India had to route its donation through the Indian Red Cross, to avoid American retribution, as the USA outlawed any nation’s aid from going to communist-ruled Vietnam or Cuba.

Chomsky and Herman summarized how the American ideological system operates, which became a prominent theme in their work:


“The beauty of the democratic system of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis – aided by the forces of nationalism and media control by substantial interests – presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon. Then let the debate rage; the more lively and vigorous it is, the better the propaganda system is served, since the presuppositions (U.S. benevolence, lack of rational imperial goals, defensive posture, etc.) are more firmly established. Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate (or if noticed, dismissed as ‘emotional,’ ‘irresponsible,’ etc.).”


Thousands of Indochinese farmers and others were killed by exploding ordnance that did not initially explode when the USA dropped it on Indochina, as well as leftover American mines. Laotian Vice-Foreign Minister Khamphay Boupha met with the American official in charge of postwar Indochinese relations, Frederick Brown, and Khamphay concluded his summation of the meeting with:


“The US has dropped 3 million tons of bombs – one ton per head – forced 700,000 people to abandon their fields; thousands of people were killed and maimed, and the unexploded ordnance continues to take its toll. Surely the US does not show humanitarian concern by refusing to heal the wounds of war.”


Khamphay noted that Brown not only dismissed the idea of any forthcoming aid, but that the USA “forced Thailand to close the border.”

Chomsky and Herman wrote at length on the failings of Christian Science Monitor, as it parroted the propaganda about postwar Indochina as uncritically as the rest of the media, while it portrayed itself as a publication of high-minded thought on foreign affairs.

The largest chapter in After the Cataclysm was on postwar Cambodia. That chapter became the basis for a major international campaign to falsely portray Chomsky, and to a lesser extent, Herman, as apologists for the Khmer Rouge and defenders or deniers of the resultant genocide in Cambodia.

Chomsky and Herman repeated throughout After the Cataclysm that their concern was the media’s treatment of postwar Cambodia, for example:


“As in the other cases discussed, our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task.”


Chomsky and Herman wrote that Time magazine, in preparation for an article on Cambodia (“Cambodia: An Experiment in Genocide”, July 31, 1978) had approached Chomsky to elicit his support for the Khmer Rouge regime. Chomsky replied to Time with a partial list of fabrications about the Cambodian situation that Time and other American publications were responsible for. Time’s article did not name any “political theorists” who defended “the Cambodian tragedy” and Khmer Rouge atrocities because, as Chomsky and Herman noted, Time could not find any.

Chomsky and Herman wrote about Cambodia:


“It is a common error, as we have pointed out several times, to interpret opposition to U.S. intervention and aggression as support for the programs of its victims, a useful device for state propagandists but one that often has no basis in fact.”


Chomsky and Herman wrote:


“Another common device is to thunder that the doves ‘had better explain’ why there has been a bloodbath, or ‘concede’ that their ‘support for the Communists’ – the standard term for opposition to U.S. subversion and aggression – was wrong; it is the critics who must, it is claimed, shoulder the responsibility for the consequences of U.S. intervention, not those who organized and supported it or concealed the facts concerning it for many years, and still do.

“It is, surely, not in doubt that it was U.S. intervention that inflamed a simmering civil struggle and brought the horrors of modern warfare to relatively peaceful Cambodia, at the same time arousing violent hatreds and a thirst for revenge in the demolished villages where the Khmer Rouge were recruited by the bombardment of the U.S. and its local clients. Matters have reached such a point that a social democratic journal can organize a symposium on the quite astounding question of whether opposition to the U.S. war on Indochina should be reassessed, given the consequences in Cambodia.”


Chomsky and Herman replied to that logic with:

“Evidently, the question can be raised only if one accepts two assumptions:

1. the U.S. intervention in Indochina would have prevented a Cambodian bloodbath or was designed for this purpose;
2. the United States has the right to use force and violence to prevent potential crimes – and thus, a fortiori, to resort to force to prevent actual crimes by invading Indonesia, much of Latin America, etc.

It is difficult to decide which of the two assumptions that are jointly required for the question even to be raised is the more absurd.”


In their chapter on postwar Cambodia, Herman and Chomsky repeated their theme from The Washington Connection, on the discrepancy regarding the media’s treatment of Cambodia and East Timor, such as:


“A few months after Khieu Samphan’s now famous ‘admission’ that his regime was responsible for the deaths of about one-sixth of the population of Cambodia, Indonesian Prime Minister Adam Malik admitted that 50-80,000 people, close to the same percentage of the population, had been killed in East Timor in the course of what the Indonesia propaganda ministry and the New York Times called the ‘civil war’ – that is, the U.S. backed Indonesian invasion and massacre – though one would not have discovered that fact from the U.S. media. While Khieu Samphan’s ‘admission’ was concocted by the media and scholarship on the basis of remarks that quite possibly were never made, Malik’s admission, by contrast, was clear and explicit. A comparison of media reaction to the actual admission by Malik and the concocted ‘admission’ by Samphan gives some insight into what lies behind the machinations of the Free Press.”


Chomsky and Herman wrote at length about the tragedy of Cambodia and what caused it. Contrary to the “gentle land” description of pre-war Cambodia found in the media, Cambodia had long been torn by strife, particularly by France’s brutal imperial reign.

Chomsky and Herman wrote on subjects completely neglected by the American media regarding Cambodia, such as the idea that Nixon and Kissinger’s escalation of bombing in 1973 not only created the conditions that brought the Khmer Rouge to power, but it was an intentional outcome; the authors considered Michael Vickery’s explanation to be persuasive:


“Vickery points out that the Kissinger-Nixon policy during the last two years of the war was a ‘major mystery,’ for which he suggests an explanation that appears to us quite plausible. Referring to the ‘Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,’ which holds that ‘pluralistic and libertarian Communist regimes will breed leftist ferment in the West,’ he suggests that ‘when it became clear [to U.S. leaders] that they could not win in Cambodia, they preferred to do everything possible to ensure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.’ In short, though it was understood that the United States had lost the war in Cambodia (even though it was, quite clearly, still trying to win it in Vietnam), the destruction of rural Cambodia, by imposing the harshest possible conditions on the eventual victors, would serve two classic ends: retarding social and economic progress, and maximizing the brutality of the eventual victors. Then the aggressors would at least be able to reap a propaganda victory from the misery they had sown.”


Chomsky and Herman wrote that before the 1973 bombing (the same year that Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize), the Khmer Rouge were far more moderate in their ideology. The authors quoted leading Cambodian scholar David Chandler, an American, who wrote:


“What drove Cambodians to kill? Paying off old scores or imaginary ones played a part, but to a large extent, I think, American actions are to blame. From 1969 to 1973, after all, we dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs on the Cambodian countryside. Nearly half of this tonnage fell in 1973…In those few months, we may have driven thousands of people out of their minds. We certainly accelerated the course of the revolution. According to several accounts, the leadership hardened its ideology and got rid of wavering factions during 1973 and 1974.”


Another neglected idea in the American media about Cambodia also applied to Vietnam, in that Indochina was comprised of peasant societies that had societal dynamics markedly different from industrial ones. Agrarian civilizations produced limited agricultural surpluses that could only support a small non-food-producing population, generally comprised of urban professionals and the elite, who coercively taxed the agrarian hinterlands to support the cities. Cambodia’s and Vietnam’s cities had long been the headquarters for France’s colonial undertaking, and the USA’s epic bombing of Indochina was partly inflicted to drive the peasantry off of their lands and into cities and “strategic hamlets,” to destroy the popular base of support for communism. Without the huge influx of food to the cities of those war-torn nations, delivered by the USA, the artificial economies of Saigon and Phnom Penh would not have survived, and the urban dwellers would have soon starved to death. The evacuations of Saigon and Phnom Pen to the countryside were largely a return of rural peasants who had been forced into the cities, in order to stave off starvation, especially when the USA avidly prevented any foreign aid from reaching those nations.

In addition, the longstanding conflict between rural and urban society in Indochina was greatly intensified by the American invasion, and Chomsky and Herman wrote that the brutal aftermath in Cambodia seemed to be largely due to peasant vengeance on urban dwellers that comprised the colonial elite under French and American rule. The authors wrote that those historical dynamics contributed to the atrocities and brutal rule of the peasant-based Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Herman also noted that the early reports of atrocities in postwar Cambodia came from parts of the nation where the Khmer Rouge’s influence was relative muted, as the traumatized peasants engaged in prodigious score-settling, particularly against the wealthy and city-dwellers.

Chomsky and Herman wrote that the primary account that Americans were familiar with regarding Phnom Penh’s evacuation was an article by John Barron and Anthony Paul in Reader’s Digest, which depicted horrific suffering inflicted on the evacuated city dwellers by the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Herman performed a detailed analysis of the Barron-Paul account of postwar Cambodia and concluded that it fell far short of a work of scholarly integrity.

Shane Tarr, a New Zealander journalist, and his Cambodian wife participated in Phnom Penh’s evacuation, and their account bore little resemblance to the Barron-Paul account, particularly regarding atrocities, which they never witnessed. Their account was never given any Western media treatment, other than being sarcastically dismissed, and their account was far from alone in being ignored by the Western media, as it did not conform to the media’s preferred version.

Near the end of After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman wrote:


“When the facts are in, it may well turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct. But even if that turns out to be the case, it will in no way alter the conclusions we have reached on the central question addressed here: how the available facts were selected, modified, or sometimes invented to create a certain image offered to the general population. The answer to this question seems clear, and it is unaffected by whatever may be discovered about Cambodia in the future.”


Chomsky and Herman could not have been clearer that their task was to focus on how the American media handled events such as the slaughters in Indonesia, East Timor, and Cambodia, not to support the regimes that might have slaughtered fewer people than their neighbors did, as if the lesser of two evils was somehow good.

In their final comments in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman wrote:


“Our primary concern has been U.S. global policy and propaganda, and the filtering and distorting effect of Western ideology, not the problems of reconstruction and modernization in societies that have been victimized by Western imperialism. Correspondingly, we have not developed or expressed our views here on the nature of the Indochinese regimes. To assess the contemporary situation in Indochina and the programs of the current ruling groups is a worthwhile endeavor, but it has not been our current objective. […] The success of the Free Press in reconstructing imperial ideology since the U.S. withdrawal has been spectacular. The shift of the United States from causal agent to bystander – and even to leader of the struggle for human rights – in the face of its empire of client fascism and long, vicious assault on the peasant societies of Indochina, is a remarkable achievement. The system of brainwashing under freedom, with mass media voluntary self-censorship in accord with the larger interests of the state, has worked brilliantly.”


In their subsequent Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky summarized the decade of the Cambodian catastrophe and the American media’s treatment of it:


“Phase I: From 1969 through 1975, U.S. bombing at a historically unprecedented level and a civil war sustained by the United States left the country in utter ruins. Though Congress legislated an end to the bombing in August 1973, U.S. participation in the ongoing slaughter continued until the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975 […] The vast numbers of Cambodians killed, injured, and traumatized in that period were, in our conception […] ‘unworthy victims.’”

“Phase II: From April 1975 through 1978 Cambodia was subjected to the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge, overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 […] the Pol Pot era is the ‘holocaust’ that was widely compared to the worst atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, virtually from the outset, with massive publicity and outrage at the suffering of these ‘worthy’ victims.”

“Phase III: Vietnam installed the Heng Samrin regime in power in Cambodia, but the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) coalition, based primarily on the Khmer Rouge, maintained international recognition apart from the Soviet Bloc. Reconstructed with the aid of China and the United States on the Thai-Cambodia border and in Thai bases, the Khmer Rouge guerillas, the only effective DK military force, continued to carry out activities in Cambodia of a sort called ‘terrorist’ when a friendly government is the target […] Phase III renewed the status of the people of Cambodia as worthy victims, suffering under Vietnamese rule.”


Best,

Wade

[onawah]

Wade, what do you think about this: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1229101 ?? Thanks.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Onawah:

I don’t pay much attention to that stuff, and it is not too important in the scheme of things, IMO.

Best,

Wade

[onawah]

I think it would be important if what is claimed is true, that all US patents are owned by an insider group that is beholden to the royals of England.
Since you are Avalon's expert on patents, I thought you would be able to say if the claim is true or not.
Thanks for your attention.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Onawah:

I don’t care about patents. They are meaningless for the important issues, and only serve to support delusions about capitalism.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have been busy lately working on Ed’s bio for my site. I’ll publish the revised bio about the same time that I publish my Wikipedia article on The Political Economy of Human Rights and my rewrite of Ed’s abysmal Wikipedia bio, which is what Ed asked me to work on, which began this entire project. The imperial hacks will be up in arms with my Ed bio, and we will see how those battles go. But even though they might do their best to erase my work, which is not new to me at Wikipedia, they are going to have a very hard time erasing the Wikiquote page that I put up for Ed. I have been beefing it up in recent days, and am probably about done for now. I can see that page growing over time. I expect that this phase of my Ed bio project will last well into the summer, and then it will be off to my long overdue big essay update.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have been devoting my writing time to my Ed bio project. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel for this phase, finishing it in the next week or two, and then I plan to take the summer off from heavy lifting. I need a break from the last two relentless years. Come autumn, I plan to then get on with my big essay update, which will likely take a year or so of my “spare” time, and then onto more visibility activities relating to my work.

What a heavy lift the Ed project has been, but it has been a labor of love and an honor. Just this weekend, I decided to beef up Ed’s latest on demonstration elections, and his contrast between the treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009. In a preview of what I may face at Wikipedia, the Iranian protestor who was shot has a big Wikipedia article on her, and Oxford has a scholarship in her name, while the Honduran protestor who was shot two weeks later not only has no article on him, but the account of his death at Wikipedia looks a bit like disinformation, such as an unfounded allegation that the protestors, not the military, shot him, and that the soldiers were somehow justified if they shot him, anyway. It is Ed and Noam’s Propaganda Model in action once again. Here is somebody who learned Ed’s lessons.

I found another tribute from one of his co-authors, and we’ll see if I can work it in. Those who knew Ed all felt blessed, even those whom he chastised, as they felt that he helped them make their work better.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

A few odds and ends as I work hard on Ed’s bio project. The booklet that saved my father’s life was banned in the USA, and a generation later, that book’s banned advice is now the mainstream advice. Of course, that disgraced pioneer will not receive any mainstream recognition.

A generation ago, a close friend asked me about a wintertime raw patch of skin on her arm, I said it was nothing, but she went to a dermatologist anyway, was diagnosed with melanoma, and had surgery to remove it, with a big scar on her arm to this day.

I have written on my site for a generation that mammograms may cause more cancer than they detect, that there may be a condition that mainstream medicine calls malignant that is really benign, that the “winning the war on cancer” idea is largely a fraud, and that diagnosing benign conditions as malignant is one of the many sleights of hand that provide those winnings statistics.

Well, surprise of surprises, that friend just had her annual cancer checkup, which she has had every year for more than 20 years, since her “melanoma” was removed, and her mainstream dermatologist, who is a prominent member of the medical community, told her during her medical examination that she likely did not have melanoma a generation ago, that “new” findings show that many benign conditions have been misdiagnosed as melanoma and breast cancer in the past, and that mammograms may cause more cancer than they detect. Imagine that!

I wonder if I will live to see the entire cancer treatment paradigm of attacking the tumor finally called insane by mainstream medicine and abandoned. It is a huge racket, so we will see. Will I live to see fluoride’s use as a dental “preventive” finally admitted to be a huge and deadly fraud? I have not had to update my medical racket or fluoride essays in the generation since I wrote them, as far as the thrust of those essays goes, but I add material when mainstream medicine finally admits what the disgraced pioneers had long stated, as billions of people have been victimized by the state of affairs in medicine.

There is a method to the madness of my site, and that is to help people think comprehensively, whether it is the media’s lies that Ed and friends expose, writing on the medical racket, the Permian Extinction, or today’s arrested state of the free energy field. Once people can begin thinking comprehensively and sharpen their tools of discernment, they can become useful for my little project. Otherwise, they get trapped by their delusions and tunnel vision, and hack at branches if they hack at all. It takes a lot of hard work to develop the needed awareness, even for those few with the right stuff. I can’t tell you how many people approach me, dragging along their baggage of delusions, with their “bright ideas” that are completely useless for what I am doing, and it does not matter how much I have tried to dissuade them, they just had to go out and try it. I often get to hear later what a disaster it was, and I really don’t want to hear it. I have been regularly approached by academics over the years, and even the most worldly of them are usually quite naïve. Some are hip, but they are vanishingly few.

One issue that I have often written about is the “laws of physics” and free energy. Brian was fond of saying that there are no “laws of physics,” but just theories. When scientists invoke the “laws of physics” to dismiss free energy’s possibility, they are playing priests, not scientists. Thinking like a true scientist is good work and necessary for what I am doing, but it is not the only way to think. The greatest scientists had a mystical bent, and for good reason. Once somebody becomes scientifically literate, theories are just seen as theories, ready to die at the hands of the next fact. Some theories are stronger than others, but even Einstein expected his theories to one day die at the hands of new facts, but that the best parts of his theories would live on in the new theories.

I was reading in the latest Scientific American how scientists are embroiled in the issue of the connection between the quantum and classical views of physics, and there are several competing hypotheses, which is normal science at work. If and when the technologies that my friend was shown finally come into the open, today’s physics texts, as well as the entire paradigm that today’s science operates under, will be scrapped. Science and technology in the Fifth Epoch won’t resemble today’s much, but almost none of today’s world will survive into the Fifth Epoch. That is what Epochal change means.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

I just started reading Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

This is mostly a rehash of all the talks that Hans Rosling gave over the years. He gives a little too much importance to money (and indirectly exchange games), as opposed to Education and ultimately Energy. Other than that a reasonable read for most people.


I can't read Ed Herman or Noam Chomsky anymore, reading Wade's big essay is enough.

Robert Saplosky has interesting lectures on Human Behavioral Biology And have his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Penguin Press, May 2017) on my reading list.

As far as GC's releasing FE for homes. I am waiting for it, my door is open. Not holding my breath though.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Krishna:

I’ll say this about Sapolsky: he has one hell of a beard!

Yes, the Exchange Game is easy, seductive, and worthless for really solving our problems. The Exchange Game is always about the advocate getting more goodies out of the game. A very egocentric approach…

I am attaching a picture of my desk, while I am on the home stretch of this phase of my Uncle Ed project. After this stretch, which should be finished in a couple of weeks, the heavy lifting will be finished. On my desk is one big pile of genocide that our propaganda systems portray as heroic deeds. I understand about going through your Noam and Ed phase. Somebody has to do it, and nobody did it better, but yes, that stuff takes its toll, and eventually you learn enough to use your own tools of discrimination. Once you are awake, then there is no need to do that anymore. I have written repeatedly that studying the darkness is not fun or what my work is about, but more about how the system and masses call the darkness the light. That is the mind-boggling part. We are giving Hitler a run for his money, and even outdo him at times, but we are the force of light, by golly.

My big essay is about something very different from what Noam and Ed taught, and I think that if Uncle Bucky was alive today, he would be doing something like what I am.

I have been sketching out what my next few years of Wade’s World activity might look like, and it is possible that I will make a book out of my big essay, a highly abridged version so the tree killers will have something to hold. I have been badgered for 20 years to write a book, and maybe I will, but I have not seriously thought about it since 2001. We’ll see how it goes. I won’t spend too much effort on it.

On the GCs allowing some kind of FE to come out, yes, I won’t hold my breath, either, but I am not about to wait for somebody to do it for me. There is work to do!

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Been reading
The Global Context of the Civil Rights Movement
The American Influence on Nazi Race Law
The Life of Anne Braden, Part One: Finding Her Way to the Movement
The Life of Anne Braden, Part Two: a Life in the Movement
Gandhi’s Connections with Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey
all Written by Lynn Burnett

It is fantastic reading.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Krishna, AKA Mr. Voracious Reader:

Yes indeed, the USA was Hitler’s inspiration in a number of ways. And it was no surprise to find that the Nazi race laws (and Europe’s) were influenced by the American version. It was new to me to hear that the Nazis sometimes called Jews “Indians,” as they slaughtered them.

Yes, the fight against the Nazis did cause American introspection, and influenced the Civil Rights Movement. In a way, Hitler did us a favor, holding up a mirror to us.

The USA is history’s most racist nation. I was raised in a racist household, and heard the word “nigger” and other racial epithets daily. It took my leaving home to understand what kind of environment I had been raised in, and I then put that racist upbringing behind me. I would go a year without hearing the word “nigger,” until ten minutes after I arrived at my childhood home for a visit.

JFK was the first postwar president who did not call blacks “niggers,” and his “progressive” views helped lead to his murder.

In the Fifth Epoch, not only will racism race end, but race will, too, along with nations, cities as we know them, and other primitive constructs born of scarcity.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Hi Krishna, AKA Mr. Voracious Reader:

Thanks Wade. Trying to catch up with your reading. I don't remember as well though, I just learn general outlines.

Two interesting papers behind paywall, my summary is that we should push out the "firsts" back in time for pretty much everything. In this case there were really old (2 millions years ago) hominin in China. Giant dinosaurs existed 30 Million Years before they were suspected to get that size.

Hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 million years ago by Zhaoyu Zhu, Robin Dennell, Weiwen Huang, Yi Wu, Shifan Qiu, Shixia Yang, Zhiguo Rao, Yamei Hou, Jiubing Xie, Jiangwei Han & Tingping Ouyang

An early trend towards gigantism in Triassic sauropodomorph dinosaurs by Cecilia Apaldetti, Ricardo N. Martínez, Ignacio A. Cerda, Diego Pol & Oscar Alcober


===========Added Later========

The Global Context of the Civil Rights Movement mentioned above is very interesting. Decolonization desegregated public establishments in Washington "Eisenhower believed in white superiority, and supported segregation. But he also knew that a segregated capital humiliated foreign dignitaries and pushed potential allies towards the Soviet Union… and that was unacceptable. The desegregation of the nation’s capital began in 1953, and was complete by 1955"
It also had a role to play in Brown vs Board decision which I now understand to be a political decision.

Decolonization changed the politics of civil rights in USA, which lead to changes in Immigration Law, which paved a path for me into the USA. We should not miss the influences that come from a global level on all of us.

[Krishna]

Another interesting paper
Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter?

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

My biography project for Uncle Ed just reached a milestone with my publication of:

• My revised biography on Ed on my site. I considerably beefed it up from last year’s version, particularly my chapter on Noam and Ed’s The Political Economy of Human Rights. I have also hosted documents on my site which Wikipedia would likely erase the links to, such as Michael Hourigan’s affidavit about how his investigation into the assassination of Rwanda’s president was killed, and the text of Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm.
• A Wikiquote page for Ed’s writings, which is sure to grow.
• Ed’s biography at Wikipedia, and related articles:
• Manufacturing Consent;
• The propaganda model;
• The Political Economy of Human Rights, which was only a stub before I changed it.
• The article on their first work together, which was censored. I fixed that some months ago. It has kind of been censored twice, with Philip Cross, mentioned below, misrepresenting what happened.

Ed originally asked me to rework his execrable Wikipedia bio, and that is where most of my Wikipedia effort went, but the other articles needed work, too. The infamous anti-historian Philip Cross (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) has been the most prolific “editor” of Ed’s bio so far, and I am trying to get Cross banned from editing Ed’s articles.

How the disinformation effort has been working against Ed and Noam is that what they actually wrote has been excluded from Wikipedia so far, such as the concept that they used from the very beginning of their collaborations, of benign, constructive, nefarious, and mythical bloodbaths and how the media treats them. That was quite an achievement, to completely exclude that major theme from Wikipedia (I added it last year). Then, with their actual writings suppressed, the attacks on their work commenced. That is the “straw man” logical fallacy at best, and libelous at worse.

I have had plenty of experience with the racist, imperial “editors” at Wikipedia before, but I can easily live with Brian O’s Wikipedia bio as it exists today. I wrote an initial entry on Ed’s talk page, announcing my intentions.

We will see how it goes.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, that did not last long. I’ll write an essay on it one day, titled something like “My Adventures at Wikipedia, The Sequel.” More than ten years ago, a friend and I made additions to a wildly biased list at Wikipedia, to only see them all get deleted within a few days, mostly by the “editors,” but the worst offenders might have been the admins. There was literally nothing to rationally dispute about our additions. They were simply numbers of natives slaughtered, where, when, and the scholarly source of the numbers. It was unassailable, especially when our effort was the first to introduce scholarly sources to the list. Then we just stood back and watched what happened. In the end, the logic at Wikipedia was that two white invaders being murdered by some angry Indians was a “massacre,” but slaughtering 40,000 (my number, but I have seen higher numbers estimated) residents of Tenochtitlan after the Cortes-led siege ended was somehow not a massacre. If it was 100,000, which it may have been, would it have been a massacre? The bias was blatantly racist. When reporting on Ed and David Peterson’s genocide reporting ratio, in which a death in a “nefarious bloodbath” was more than 25,000 times as likely to be reported as a “genocide” in the media as a death in a “benign bloodbath,” I wrote that it might be the greatest statistical disparity to be found in the social sciences, but Wikipedia’s reporting may be more extreme.

Yesterday, I made my additions to those articles that I linked to, and then stepped back to watch what happened. Predictably, one of Ed’s libelers called my additions “hagiography,” but according to the only honorable and reasonable person that I saw write yesterday, my version is the closest thing to a normal Wikipedia article that has yet been written about Ed. I was expecting that the editors would start at it, and that reasonable editor immediately did. That is how it is supposed to work at Wikipedia. I was expecting edits, but that the framework would at least survive, because what was on Ed’s bio was basically a bunch of attacks on his exposures of the media’s treatment of “nefarious bloodbaths,” and more often than not, the critics cited in Ed’s Wikipedia bio libeled him. I never saw even one of those critics cited on Ed’s bio make even one valid criticism. It was all lies, misrepresentations, errors in logic, and the like. It was just more evidence of what Noam wrote about, that Western intellectuals are so indoctrinated that they are incapable of understanding “trivial realities” when they aren’t being patently dishonest. Noam once said that he did not mind scholarly disagreement, but that he did mind all of the lying.

So, the reception to my edits was disparagement but also serious editing. I would have taken that any day, but also I wondered when an editor would argue that all of my edits should be deleted. It turned out that nobody needed to, because an admin did it for them, and quite rudely. He made multiple threats about banning me from Wikipedia, and when he finished his diatribes, I was apparently guilty of three editorial crimes:

• I was a fan of Ed’s who had communicated with him. We traded somewhere around a hundred emails over about 20 years. Apparently, that gave me a conflict of interest, making me disqualified to edit any article related to Ed.
• I had made quotations in my edits, from other copyrighted material, which was a copyright violation.
• I was guilty of plagiarism.

Those were my crimes, and all of my edits were unceremoniously deleted from Wikipedia. Not a simple reversion, mind you, but a KGB-like erasure of what I wrote, so that the public will never see it, at least on Wikipedia. I’ll deal with my “crimes” one at a time.

On being Ed’s fan, I am guilty as charged. So, communicating with an author disqualifies anybody at Wikipedia from making edits about said author. I am guessing, but that crime may have been committed at Wikipedia a million times by now, so I am in good company. But, since 99.9% of the editors at Wikipedia are anonymous cowards, there is no way to tell what their conflicts of interest might be. Such conflicts will only be identified for people who use their real identities, and I made it easy on everybody by announcing my “conflict” as I came in the door.

On the Heinz Haber article, his son sat on that article like a hawk, erasing anything that suggested that his father was involved in medical experiments in World War II. Haber may not have been involved with medical experiments, but his greatest claims to fame were: as the protégé of a German doctor, Hubertus Strughold, who definitely was involved in human experiments; the Disney sidekick of Wernher von Braun, the most famous of the NASA Nazis, whose V-2 rockets cost the lives of at least 20,000 concentration camp inmates; and Haber made a children’s movie for Disney and wrote a children’s book that extolled the virtues of nuclear energy. However, Haber came over via Operation Paperclip, which was legendary for whitewashing the criminal backgrounds of the German scientists that it brought over. Haber’s mentor, Hubertus Strughold, destroyed all of his files that would have documented his participation in human experiments, but one slipped through the cracks and was discovered in 2004.

Haber co-authored a paper titled, “Man Under Gravity-Free Conditions” in the now-legendary German Aviation Medicine, World War II, which was published by the Air Force, after it was sanitized by Strughold (working at the same facility that Haber did), who deleted passages in the work that suggested that experimental results derived from human subjects, experiments conducted by his colleagues such as Strughold’s good friend Siegfried Ruff (who gets softball treatment at Wikipedia) and Hermann Becker Freyseng, who worked for Strughold.

Now, there is a conflict of interest, and the Haber article to this day is outright hagiography. You can see yesterday’s rude admin taking me to task over my contributions to the Haber talk page, while Haber’s son gets to edit the page about his father like a hawk. This is the “evenhandedness” of Wikipedia in action. Take that in for a moment.

Until yesterday, I had no idea that that “relationship” with Ed gave me an insoluble conflict of interest, which was apparently the primary reason for erasing all of my work. I’ll guarantee you that my so-called conflict of interest is nowhere near as great as “Philip Cross’s”, who is very likely not a person, but a pseudonym for a group of individuals, and it would not surprise me to discover that they work for MI6 or the CIA in some capacity, and George Galloway, one of Cross’s favorite editorial targets, is readying a lawsuit that will presumably expose Cross’s identity. So, my admitted “conflict of interest” disqualifies me, but Cross’s hiding behind a pseudonym, as “he” purveys disinformation, is just fine. I went into great detail on one of “his” disinformation additions to Ed’s bio. Every time that somebody removed it, it was restored by other editors. So, this is far from a negligent oversight, but those editors are very actively misrepresenting Ed’s work. The bizarre part is that the passage that keeps getting added twists one of the greatest acts of censorship in the late 20th century into seeming to be a responsible and righteous act. Calling the treatment on Ed’s bio “Orwellian” is an understatement. Those kinds of misrepresentations and outright libel dominate Ed’s bio today, and that reasonable editor has proposed, after my erasure, to make Ed’s bio more like a normal Wikipedia article, but he is already being shot down. I was going to refer to my last post at Wikipedia, but that was hidden from casual readers, and I reproduce it here.

My second editorial crime was reproducing copyrighted material when I quoted somebody. Look through any Wikipedia article, and particularly any biographical one, and you will see plenty of quoting, and Wikipedia has a “blockquote” feature just for lengthy quotations. When I began to ready Ed’s bio for Wikipedia, I realized that there were far more quotations to make, to give Ed’s work justice, than I could put in the Wikipedia bio, and I suspected that what happened yesterday was well within the realm of possibility, so I built a bunch of quotes at Wikiquote, so that Ed’s voice would be heard at least once in the Wiki-universe, amongst all the libel against him.

So, the logic seems to be that putting quotes at Wikiquote is fine, but putting them in a Wikipedia article is a copyright violation. I am no attorney, and I can’t make any sense out of that logic. I expected that some of my quotes in the Ed articles would be erased and turned into paraphrases, and I planned to add the erased quotes to Wikiquote, if they were not already there. I do plan to add quotes to Ed’s Wikiquote page, from yesterday’s erased effort, but not immediately. I already have added a pretty big slug of quotes (that page is all my work so far) that fills in the blanks on Ed’s writings, to show how off-base his assailants are, and that is enough for now. I was already planning to take an Ed break, after it consumed most of my “spare” time over the past year, and especially after yesterday’s adventure in censorship.

The last “crime” that I was accused of was plagiarism. Whom did I plagiarize? Myself! It seems that if I put anything on Wikipedia that was already on my site, that is plagiarism. Krishna informed me that it was not plagiarism, which I already knew. I have been writing long enough to know what plagiarism means. It is stealing somebody else’s work and presenting it as one’s own. I have been plagiarized and impersonated on the Internet, and the crazy part about being plagiarized is that you can be accused of the plagiarism. I don’t keep track of how often I have been plagiarized, but one event happened in 2001, when a professional Hollywood writer plagiarized my writings about Mickey Cohen, and I was the person accused of plagiarism (you can see that event at the Above Top Secret forum, before they banned me – yes, I am used to this kind of treatment, where the trolls get free play while assailing me, and I get banned). The good news is that it was easy to prove when I published my work, and the plagiarist published his work a few months after mine. But it is kind of surreal to be plagiarized, to then be accused of being the plagiarist.

So, real plagiarism, where I copied somebody else’s work and called it mine, is actually nowhere in evidence in any of my work or what I posted at Wikipedia (you can see what I do when copyrighted material is added to my site, outside of the stray Fair Use quote, and that was quite an experience), but the person that I plagiarized was myself, of all people. Should I be angry at being ripped-off that way? Krishna began reading my work around 2001-2002, and after years of Krishna’s working on me, I finally contacted Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement and the spiritual grandfather of Wikipedia. Krishna’s idea, and I thought that it made sense, was that Free Software and Free Energy activists would be natural allies, and I wrote an open letter to that effect, around the time that I contacted Stallman in 2006. Alas, after a frustrating month of trading email with Stallman (Does that disqualify me from ever editing his Wikipedia article? It would seem so.), I gave up. He is a classic Level 3, where so many of the “smart” end up. That is no crime, but Stallman is not going to be any help.

I can’t remember exactly when I did it, but Krishna kept working on me, and I put my copyright release on my home page at least several years ago, meaning that anybody can use it in any way they wish, including me ( ), without fear of any copyright infringement. Basically, I am a “public-domain” writer, although I ask people to at least cite me, if they use my work. But I doubt that I would ever sue anybody who didn’t.

So, the “plagiarism” that I stand accused of is plagiarizing myself! Because I used words from my own writings (including Brian’s NASA bio, which I wrote), and even though my writings on my site are all public domain, I was guilty of plagiarizing myself, and all of the examples that the censorious admin presented were “plagiarisms” of my public-domain self. The admin informed me that any well-educated middle-schooler knew that, which was one of quite a few insults and threats. I guess that I am just not smart enough to understand or was trained badly, but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea that if I use my own public-domain writings at Wikipedia, that I am guilty of plagiarism. Maybe a lawyer can explain it to me one day, but since I will never contribute to Wikipedia again, I don’t think it matters, and I will file yesterday’s series of events into my Twilight Zone file. It was a truly bizarre day. To add icing to the cake, that censorious editor also wiped out most of my work on Brian O’s bio (my crimes were knowing Brian and using my own writings), and now it is just a stub, with nary a mention of free energy. What a travesty.

I have been on the receiving end of “selective enforcement” activities that make what happened yesterday pale into insignificance, and I’ll get over it soon. I’ll one day publish the code that I wrote to put it into Wikipedia (probably 100 hours or so of effort), and anybody can use it however they wish. My best version of Ed’s bio sits on my site today, and shows up as the third result on Bing and the second result at Google, if somebody enters “Edward S. Herman biography”, so my work is not completely banished to Siberia, but it is really a shame that Ed’s Wikipedia bio is an exercise in disinformation, but such is today’s world, and it is only more confirmation of Ed and Noam’s propaganda model. While it would have been nice to get through Wikipedia’s censorious gauntlet, it was not to be, and I am finished with trying, although I am being encouraged to keep fighting at Wikipedia. But it is a rigged game, in my opinion, and in the opinion of others who would know. While Uncle Ed is near the head of my pantheon, I have bigger fish to fry these days. What an honor to have done this work, but it has set back my big essay update by more than a year, as well as other “visibility” work relating to my effort. It is time to move on. Maybe somebody will make a dent in rectifying Ed’s Wikipedia bio one day, which today stands as an exercise in disinformation, but it won’t be me.

Best,

Wade