Proof that Krugman and Mankiw are Full of Hot Air...

From economicpolicyjournal THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2010:


...or at least they think they know what causes hot air.

Despite the fact that best-selling economics text books fail to get across, so that it sticks, that price controls cause shortages. Despite the fact that all best-selling economic text books fail to discuss the structural distortions Fed money printing causes, even when there is no price inflation. Econ textbook writers seem to be as fearless as they are clueless, and it appears that they now all pontificate on global warming.

Most are discussing global warming theory, as though it is near fact. How do I know this? 

Yoram Bauman has given Mankiw and Krugman's econ textbooks "A" grades for their coverage of "Climate Change", and presumably becasue  they both call for, you guessed, higher taxes to fight climate chnage.

Mankiw wants the federal tax on gasoline to go up from its current level of 40 cents to $2.10. Krugman appears to favor carbon taxes, but does not follow Mankiw in naming a specific rate.

The only textbook to receive an "F" was Economics: Private and Public Choice by Gwartney, Stroup, Sobel and Macpherson, which suggests the "Climate Change" discussion in the book is at least half way decent. And, indeed, Bauman has this quote from their text:

The billions of dollars going into global warming research give scientists an incentive to maintain climate change as a public issue. "As [MIT climatologist Richard] Lindzen puts it. "Alarm is felt to be essential to the maintenance of funding..."

The Real Story Behind The Five Trillion Dollar Cold War Hoax Backed By Washington's Treasonous Reprobates

From 911 The Mother Of All Black Operations :


Editor's Note: The following essay by author Eustace Mullins describes the real events surrounding the post World War II Cold War, concocted by none other than Winston Churchill himself, in which to pit the United States against Russia, in order to give the House of Rothschild the time needed to regain its control over Europe.

Mullins also describes how our elected representatives were quick to adapt to this covert act of treason. One which would take the United States from a policy of isolationism to one of imperialism, in which we would finance the creation of the horrific United Nations (the international hub through which the House of Rothschild is implementing its global Zionist dictatorship), while establishing costly and unnecessary U.S. bases around the world.

This was accomplished at the expense of the American people, who since 1945, have been placed into trillions of dollars worth of *debt which they will never be able to repay; all at the direction of the House of Rothschild and its global counterfeiting-money laundering operations.

*This debt does not include the debt incurred as the result of the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade. See the facts behind the Bush 43 Administration's fraudulent war on terror here.

As for those who doubt the Rothschilds' role in the destruction of the United States, remember the following 1862 Times Of London quote regarding the Rothschilds' hatred for the American people and their intent to destroy us.



The Rothschilds Declare War On The United States
"That same year (1862) The Times of London publishes a story containing the following statement, 'If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without a debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. THAT GOVERNMENT MUST BE DESTROYED OR IT WILL DESTROY EVERY MONARCHY ON THE GLOBE.'”

- Source: Eustace Mullins' "Secrets Of The Federal Reserve"

The $5 Trillion Cold War Hoax
by Eustace Mullins
(The Phoenix Project May 21, 1996)

PT Barnum said it for all time, "There's a sucker born every minute." For more than four decades, the American people have been terrorized, not by a foreign threat, but by their own govern ment. In order for the Federal Reserve System central bankers to continue to loot the nation after the successful conclusion of the Second World War, they had to invent a new threat. The only candidate was our erstwhile gallant ally, the Soviet Union. The central bank conspirators faced the task of continuing to mobilize the people against a terrible threat, taxing them heavily in order to save them from destruction.

Today, we are burdened by a $5 trillion national debt. Coincidentally, that is the sum we have spent on "national defense" since 1945. The World Order billionaires launched a complex, long-term plan to demonize Soviet Russia. Overnight, they would undergo a sea change, from the darlings of the American political Establishment to a dangerous and possibly overwhelming enemy. la my researches of more than fifty years, I finally located the smoking gun which exposed this conspiracy, a little known article in the August 1977 issue of American Heritage magazine, "Who Started the Cold War?" by historian Charles L. Mee Jr., editor of Horizon magazine, and author of one of the first cold war books, Meeting at Potsdam.


"SCARE THE HELL OUT OF THE COUNTRY"

In this article, Mee writes that on Feb. 27, 1947, "President Truman met with Congressional leaders in the White House. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson was present at the meeting, and Truman had him tell the Congressmen what was at stake. Acheson spoke for ten minutes, informing the legislators that nothing less than the survival of the whole of Western civilization was in the balance at that moment; he worked in references to ancient Athens, Rome, and the course of Western civilization and freedom since those times. The Congressmen were silent for a few moments, and then, at last. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a prominent Republican who had come to support an active foreign policy, spoke up. All this might be true, Vandenberg said, but, if the President wishes to sell his program to the American people, he would have to 'scare hell out of the country'. It was at that moment that the Cold War began in earnest for the United States."

This is one of the most revealing statements in American history. This is the smoking gun which proves that the federal government used a terror campaign to frighten the American people into supporting four decades of Cold War spending on armaments. The initial campaign was the "atom bomb scare", which raged for some years; it finally lost its effectiveness, and was replaced by the ogre, based solely on falsified and invented CIA statistics, that Soviet Russia was the most terrifying military power, with the fastest growing economy, in the world. These two CIA claims were mutually exclusive; no nation could have the world's greatest military machine and at the same time support the world's fastest growing economy, but the statisticians successfully sold this scare story for years.


CHURCHILL LAUNCHES COLD WAR

The Cold War, the Hegelian invention of Soviet Russia and the United States at each other's throats, the "free world" vs. the "slave empire", Capitalism vs. Communism, was the final triumph of dialectical ma terialism, also invented by the German philosopher, Hegel. He laid down the dictum that to rule the world, you create a problem; you find an antidote to that problem; and you throw the two conflicting theses against each other, to result in a consensus or resolution. This diabolical and cynical formula reached its apogee in the Cold War. Hopefully, we will not see another such travesty of history.

Hard on the conclusion of the Second World War, the Colossus of the United States stood astride the entire world. With the world's largest economy, never touched by a single bomb or artillery shell throughout the war, the largest army, and a proud and victorious people, it was incredible that the United States could for a moment seriously regard the war-devastated Soviet Union as a threat. Stalin lost forty million people during the war; his nation was in rains. He desperately needed a breathing space in which to recover. Miraculously, the World Order invention of the Cold War came to his rescue. None other than Stalin's co-conspirator, Winston Churchill, was chosen to launch this new "problem".. Now unemployed, Churchill was desperate to get back into the limelight. At the invitation of President Truman, Churchill was brought to the United States to deliver a speech at little Fulton College, in Truman's home state of Missouri.

On March 5, 1946, at Fulton, Churchill made his famous "Iron Curtain" speech. He warned that an "Iron Curtain" had descended upon Europe, the Communist enslavement of the Eastern European countries. He failed to mention that he and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had joined at Yalta to deliver Eastern Europe to Stalin, with Alger Hiss, the originator of the plan, beaming in the background. Not a single journalist, anywhere in the world, mentioned Churchill's overwhelming personal complicity in creating and maintaining the dire situation which he now publicly deplored.


THE CONVERSION OF SENATOR ARTHUR VANDENBERG

One of Washington's leading political strategists, Senator Arthur Vandenberg had warned his co-con spirators at the Feb. 27, 1947 White House meeting that to sell the prospective Cold War program, they would have to "scare hell out of the country". He had an interesting background. A millionaire newspaper publisher in Grand Rapids, Michigan (later to become famous as the home of President Gerald Ford), Vandenberg had been elected to the Senate in 192S. A rock-ribbed Republican, he voted against New Deal measures such as the Social Security Act. He was Republican minority leader, and Capitol Hill's leading isolationist. When the United Nations proposal came to Congress, no one in Washington doubted that Vandenberg would shoot it down.

All of Washington was amazed when Senator Vandenberg rose on the Senate floor, on January 10, 194S, and called for the establishment of the United Nations. As George Stimpson, founder of the National Press Club, later explained to me, America's leading isolationist had become a rabid internationalist in a single night. A beautiful blonde agent from British Secret Intelligence Service had been sent to his room. After an all night political discussion, Senator Vandenberg awakened to become the new champion of the United Nations. Although a little known story, it epitomizes how things are accomplished in Washington, today as yesterday.

This is the Senator who is described in the Dictionary of National Biography as "a jingoist and chauvinist who supported the aggressive foreign policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Taft." Franklin D. Roosevelt rewarded Vandenberg for his treachery by sending him as a special delegate to San Francisco with Alger Hiss to draft the United Nations Charter. The White House continued to shower gifts on Vandenberg, even going so far as to make his favourite nephew. General Hoyt Vandenberg, Commanding General of the United States Air Force.


THE FLOOZIES OF WASHINGTON

During our discussions at the National Press Club in 1948, the subject of Senator Arthur Vandenberg's overnight conversion to the congressional champion of the United Nations was examined in detail. We recalled a fellow agent of the blonde British Secret Service agent who accomplished this mission, one Kaye Summersby, who had been chosen to mollify General Eisenhower, Commanding General of the entire European Theater during the Second World War. Summersby's intelligence training included the arts of the ancient Byzantine hetairae, who were skilled in the arts of "unendurable pleasure, indefinitely prolonged". With Summersby as his chauffeur, Eisenhower was delivered to small country hotels in England, while his adviser, the political commissar Capt. Edward M. M. Warburg, of the banking family, ran the war from London. The enraptured general notified his superior, George Marshall, that he was divorcing Mamie Eisenhower to marry the princess of endless delights, which of course was never in the cards. Marshall promptly reported this development to President Truman, who was furious, notifying Ike that it was out of the question (Plain Speaking, by Merle Miller). Kaye ended her days as a permanent house guest on a Rothschild estate on Long Island.

Another British agent, Pamela Digby Churchill, married to Winston Churchill's son, later married Averill Harriman, the unofficial foreign minister of the United States. Harriman's exploits in travelling the world, instructing the heads of nations in how to conduct their affairs, was legendary. He became the subject of a series of novels by Upton Sinclair, chronicling the feats of one Lanny Budd (Harriman) throughout the world. Harriman spent the last two years of World War II at Stalin's Kremlin headquarters, dictating to Stalin how he should conduct the war. After his death, Pamela Churchill Harriman took over the Democratic National Committee. She is now our Ambassador to Paris, the most desired appointment in our foreign service, presiding over 1100 employees.


HARRIMAN'S REPLY

When Charles T. Mee Jr.'s historic article appeared in American Heritage magazine in August of 1977, the editors notified Averill Harriman and gave him the chance to reply in the same issue. Harriman's response was headlined "We Can't Do Business with Stalin". The Communist dictator who had been Harriman's lackey throughout the war was now dismissed as uncooperative! Harriman recounts in great detail the repressive policies of Stalin towards the captive nations in Eastern Europe (policies which Harriman himself had initiated), and goes on to denounce Mee's astounding report as "revisionist". "Mr. Mee has made his own sketchy revision of standard revisionist doctrine," quoting Mee's statement that "the Cold War served everybody's purpose." Truman needed an excuse for deficit spending, because without it he could not have kept the American economy busy and productive. Thus he waged a Cold War, after the hot war was won, to justify continued deficit spending. With the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the encouragement of American multinational companies, and a set of defense treaties that came finally to encom pass the world, he institutionalized it."

As Charles T. Mee Jr. points out in his article, Stalin was a principal beneficiary of the Cold War. " Stalin needed the Cold War, not to venture out into the world again after an exhausting war, but to discipline his restless people at home. He had need of that ancient stratagem of monarchs—the threat of an implacable external enemy to be used to unite his own people in Russia." Mee also names Winston Churchill as a prime suspect in the Cold War conspiracy. He states that Churchill "emerged from World War II with a ruined empire, irretrievably in debt, an empire losing its colonies and headed inevitably toward bankruptcy. Churchill's scheme for saving Great Britain was to arrange to have America and Russia quarrel, while America and Russia quarrelled, England would—as American diplomats delicately put it—'lead' Europe". As had been the case for some three hundred years, "leading" Europe and the United States meant that Great Britain would make frequent use of its secret weapon, the Secret Intelligence Service. Its powers included, as we have seen, reversing the entire foreign policy of the United States overnight, from isolation ism to an abject embracing of the United Nations; making the most prominent American general and future President a "love slave" of a ruthless intelligence agent, and much, much more, most of which we shall never know.


THE FIRST VICTIMS OF THE COLD WAR

The first victims of the Cold War were not soldiers, they were American politicians who were reluctant to embrace the new campaign. The first casualty was elder statesman Henry Stimson, who wrote a memo to President Truman in the autumn of 1945, cited by Mee as the cause of Stimson's disappearance from Washington. Stimson's memo denounced the projected Cold War as a serious error, and called for "satisfactory relations" with Russia. Henry Wallace, Secretary of Commerce, also protested against the Cold War, he was allowed to resign. Mee identifies the "comers" in Washington as those who were quick to latch onto the Cold War as "the wave of the future". Those who tended to believe in an aggressive attitude toward Russia, were spotted, and promoted—young men such as John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk. George Kennan, then in the American Embassy in Moscow, was discovered after he sent a perfervid 8,000 word telegram back to Washington. "We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken." Mee mentions that, in his memoirs, Kennan says that he now looks back on his cable 'with horrified amusement'. "At the time, however, he was ideal for Truman's use, and he was recalled from Moscow and made chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Committee, or as the New York Times called him, 'America's global planner'."


THE EGGHEADS

Critics of the new Cold War foreign policy quickly found a nickname for its architects, "the eggheads". Like George Kennan, they were liberal intellectuals, often prematurely bald, and unanimous in their dislike of the American people, whom they hated and feared, and their Constitution. Their goal, which they now seem to have achieved, was to liberate the federal government, which Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers had written to "bind down the government with the chains of the Constitution". While ostensibly following an "anti-Communist" policy, the eggheads never forswore their dedication to Marxism, and its monolithic state.

During the four decades of the Cold War, Hollywood, which never failed to bolster the goals of the Cold War architects, reserved its bitter scorn for "red-blooded Americans" who stood for flag and country. While forbearing from ever presenting lifelong Communists in a deprecating way, Hollywood made films deriding "anti-Communists" as flagwaving American Legion boobs, a stance which it continues to this day. If any one of the eggheads and their Hollywood lackeys were to be called a "patriot", they would be overcome with shame.


A PHONY WAR
During most of its history, the Cold War was a propaganda war, in which the opponents hurled invec tives at each other. However, the military-industrial complex cannot make billions of dollars from propa ganda; there had to be occasions of real shooting. We endured the Korean War and the Vietnam War, with hundreds of thousands of casualties, while Soviet Rus sia did not lose a man in either war. Both Russia and the United States were careful to have the scenes of battle take place thousands of miles from their own lands, in poverty-stricken countries such as Korea and Vietnam. We had the Cuban missile crisis, a soap opera in which the media convinced Americans that they had been on the brink of atomic destruction, being saved just before the bombs were launched by the "incredible diplomatic skills" of John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev, neither of whom before or after this crisis had ever shown the slightest skill at diplomacy. The Berlin Wall was built, to prevent all of its population from fleeing the desolation of Communist East Germany. The egg heads greeted the Berlin Wall with praise. President John F. Kennedy made a special trip to Germany to put his seal of approval on the Berlin Wall, and to reassure the Communists that the United States would not re move it. And we never did. It was the Germans themselves, driven beyond endurance, who ripped it down, much to the consternation of our eggheads in Washington.


A METEORIC CAREER

Although few Americans recognize the name of George Kennan, he not only was the source of the nickname "egghead", he also was the bureaucrat entrusted with the maintenance of the Gold War in Washington for many years. He was named after his uncle. George Kennan, who spent many years travelling in Czarist Russia on "missionary work" for the world Communist movement. He was entrusted with many millions of dollars by Jacob Schiff, known as "A Prince in Israel", who was born in the Rothschild house in Frankfurt, and who, according to his grandson, John Schiff, had spent twenty-two-million dollars of his, personal funds to bring about the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Most of this money was spent on revolutionary propaganda, which Kennan, with journalistic cre dentials, distributed throughout Russia. Some historians credit George Kennan as the pivotal force in the Bolshevik Revolution, pointing out that it was his distributing of thousands of revolutionary leaflets to officers in the Czar's Army which turned them against the regime and led to the downfall of the Czar.

George Kennan also worked with Jacob Schiff in financing Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The Japanese government decorated Kennan with the Gold War Medal, and the Order of the Sacred Treasure. (The World Order, by Eustace Mullins, p. 64). Schiff instigated this war to strike a blow against the alleged oppression of Jews in Russia, and to create a govern mental crisis by which the Communists could seize power. The "1905 Revolution" failed miserably; the Communists had to wait twelve more years, with Schiff's continued support, before they could seize power.


REMARKABLE HERITAGE

To those who have studied the history of the twentieth century, it is not at all paradoxical that the American government should have entrusted its foreign policy towards Russia to someone named after the man who is credited with bringing about the Bolshevik Revolution. When Franklin D. Roosevelt, repaying Communist support which gave him victory in his presidential race against Herbert Hoover, promptly extended diplomatic recognition to Stalin, it was George Kennan who was chosen to accompany Ambassador William Bullitt to Moscow to reopen the American Embassy. It was George Kennan who wrote the notorious 8,000-word "long telegram" sent from Moscow to Washington on Dec. 22, 1946, where, as he points out, it caused a sensation, and led to his being summoned back to Washington to head the newly cre ated post of head of Policy Planning.

Kennan states in his memoirs that he had the only office directly adjoining the office of Secretary of State General George Marshall, and that it was lie, Kennan, who actually drafted the text of the Marshall Plan.


THE POLICY OF "CONTAINMENT"

However, it is as "X", the anonymous author of an article which appeared in the July, 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", that George Kennan continues to be remembered in Washington. This article laid down the principle of "containment" which was to be official U.S. policy towards Russia for the remainder of the Cold War. No wonder the New York Times called Kennan "America's global planner". Henry Kissinger, who inherited the Kennan policy of the Cold War, wrote in White House Years, p. 135, that "George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history."

Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, defined the "policy of containment" as follows: "The view from Washington was that a master plan for world Communist domination was unfolding and needed to be 'contained'." Walter Lippmann, who was a one-man think tank in Washington for fifty years, and an adviser to many Presidents, adopted Kennan's policy in his influential The Cold War; a Study in United States Foreign Policy, as America's senior elder statesman.

Kennan's "containment'' policy was just that; that the Soviet Union and world Communism would be contained, but never openly challenged or fought against. It was a permanent guarantee that the captive nations of Eastern Europe, which had been delivered to Stalin by Roosevelt, Churchill and Alger Hiss at Yalta, would never be liberated from Communism. An orga nization championing the captive nations was for many years the most hated and derided group in Washington, Composed of a few Congressmen from Chicago and Cleveland who had strong ethnic backing from Poles, Czechs and other Eastern Europe countries, it was a political embarrassment for many years to the oligarchs of the Cold War.


THE MEN BEHIND CONTAINMENT

In his memoirs, Kennan mentions that one of the principal sponsors of his containment policy was then Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who later, as Secretary of Defense, became one of a long list of "Washington suicides", a special category a la Vince Foster. Although published in Foreign Affairs, a magazine read only by the Elite, it was quickly taken up by Arthur Krock of the New York Times, the most influential journalist in Washington. He reprinted the article in the New York Times, describing it as the "most important foreign relations document of the century". A shorter version of the containment article was then published in Life magazine. It had now inundated the country.

Kennan states in his memoirs, "I emphatically deny the paternity of any efforts to invoke the doctrine of containment today." He downplays both the "long telegram" and the article by "X", claiming that they have been "misunderstood". He modestly ignores the fact that he laid down the policy which our government has followed for forty years. His reward was a post as professor at the elite think tank in Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has worked since 1950, with interim appointments as Ambassador to Russia and to Yugoslavia. He also was awarded the Albert Einstein Peace Prize, presumably for avoiding a Third World War by his policy of containment (my studies have shown that a Third World War between Russia and the United States was never seriously con sidered by anyone in authority). It was only a "War Game".


TECHNIQUES OF THE COLD WAR

The government propaganda techniques by which the American people were terrorized for some forty years began with the dire threat of nuclear annihilation. School children went through daily drills of falling to the floor in terror of the atomic bomb which would destroy their school. Their parents built backyard "bomb shelters" stocked with food and water. Because "scientific studies" showed that the radiation peril would last for at least five hundred years, the survivors apparently expected to spend that much time in their shelters. Nationwide philosophical debates ensued as to whether the survivors, huddled in their shelters after the blast, should open the door to neighbours or to "minorities" who had neglected to build bomb shelters, or whether they should shoot those who battered down the doors to get food. Hollywood loyally produced many movies about the coming atomic de bacle, such as Dr. Strangelove, in which insane fascists were determined to use the bomb to destroy the civi lized world; War Games, in which a mad computer tried to trick the United States and Russia into destroying each other; and a steady stream of films depicting "Bette Davises" as little old librarians who were deter mined that students should be allowed to read the works of Karl Marx.


THE CIA RIDES TO THE RESCUE

After years of exposure to the imminent threat of being vaporized in an atomic blast, Americans began to ignore the threat; many of them bulldozed their bomb shelters into swimming pools. It was obvious to our masters that new techniques of terror had to be developed. The Central Intelligence Agency now became the vehicle of mass terrorism. It became known as "the Company" under the leadership of stock promoter Bill Casey. He became highly skilled at peddling alarming statistics about the threat of Communism to Congress, who hastily voted vast increases in the "defense" budget. The oligarchs abandoned the now worn out doctrine of nuclear annihilation. There would be no need to spend two-hundred-and-fifty-billion dollars a year on tanks, guns and airplanes if they were all to be vaporized by a single bomb. The defense budget had been brought from a low of $13 billion in 1947 to a continuous budget in the hundreds of billions. With its top secret budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, never to be examined by anyone, the CIA sent its own James Bonds all over the world usually to attack and overthrow "anti-Communist" governments and "dictators" such as Ferdinand Marcos, who had been indiscreet in their denunciations of Communism. The CIA hired hundreds of journalists to write books and articles promoting its version of the Cold War, always at the highest prevailing rates.


EFFECTS OF THE COLD WAR

The effect on both Russia and the United States of the Cold War conspirators has been devastating. Russia's economy is in a state of collapse, with no improvement in sight. The United States has been looted; its infrastructure, its roads, bridges and other assets need many billions in immediate repair. We have the $5 trillion Cold War debt; but the most destructive effect on our nation is the Cold War's effect on our morality.

The years of being terrorized by the atomic threat had a very destructive effect on morality. If we were to be vaporized at any time, it seemed worthwhile to seize the moment, to take pleasure, money and any other rewards while they were available, without (bought for the consequences, since there would be no consequences. We have now endured the effects of this poisonous doctrine for several generations.

The effect of the CIA propaganda lies about the "great Soviet Union" which might take over the world at any moment has been equally destructive. When conservative economist Paul Craig Roberts landed in Moscow during the height of the CIA propaganda campaign, he was stunned to find that Soviet Russia had "a Third World economy". I had proved in my writings that the United States taxpayer had been subsidizing the Soviet Union since 1917. In fact, Americans have been living a lie for four decades, the lie that we were in dire peril from "the Communist threat". This lie has been demoralizing; it has placed us on the brink of bankruptcy; and it poses the challenge to us: When are we going to get rid of our Cold War conspirators? They must pay the price for the destruction they have wrought on our nation. We must drive them out of every office; bring them to trial for their high treason; and restore the Republic which our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us. It is this task—not sad jokes about "balancing the budget"—which will determine whether this nation will survive to the twenty-first century.

- Eustace Mullins

"Don't Be A Victim Be An Activist!"

Deep politics of Honduras' coup

From CANNONFIRE:

Most of you have not paid the slightest attention to the last year's coup in Honduras. You should. For at least four reasons:

1. Wikileaks released a July 24, 2009 State Department memo which makes clear that the Obama administration knew full well that the Honduran military acted illegally when it removed the (mildly) left-leaning Honduran president Mel Zelaya. Obama tried to square the circle -- tepidly condemning the coup while continuing to do business as usual with the new (extra-legal and despotic) government.

This all happened on Obama's watch. And on Hillary's, sorry to say.

2. The administration's lukewarm and vague response to the coup managed to piss off both the right and the left. Tea party types castigate Obama as a friend to Zelaya, whom the rightists (predictably and stupidly) picture as the very incarnation of Marxism. Meanwhile, many people in Central and South America consider Obama the secret author of the action against Zelaya.

One side damns Obama as a commie; the other side damns him as an imperialist bastard. It takes talent to fuck up on that level.

3. The "imperialist bastard" label is probably much closer to the truth.

The real powers behind the coup were two companies, Dole and Chiquita. Chiquita was previously known as United Fruit -- and if that name doesn't ring any bells, you should read up on your CIA history.

Zelaya pissed off these firms when he moved to raise the minimum wage above bare subsistence. This article by John Perkins tells the story...

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”

Here's a cute little data-point you probably didn't know:

President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder had been a Covington partner and a defender of Chiquita when the company was accused of hiring “assassination squads” in Colombia (Chiquita was found guilty, admitting that it had paid organizations listed by the US government as terrorist groups “for protection” and agreeing in 2004 to a $25 million fine).

(The firm of Covington and Burling lobbies for Chiquita.)

Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner -- guys like that can be found all over Team O. Yet half the American population thinks that Obama is some sort of socialist. That's because half the population is bugfuck nuts.

4. On a deeper level, this coup is about drugs -- the great unmentionable factor in American politics. (The trade takes in $300 billion annually.) Zelaya took real action against the drug lords, which may have been his greatest "sin." Colombia's drug thugs use Honduras as a trans-shipment point.

Most people in the United States would be shocked to learn that Chiquita's ships have transported cocaine. Our neighbors to the south are better educated about such things. Dig:

Drug enforcement agents and customs officials in Belgium and the United Kingdom found a total of more than a ton of almost pure cocaine hidden in at least seven Chiquita ships in 1997, according to European custom services and Chiquita sources.

The seized cocaine is worth up to $33 million in its pure form, and valued at more than $100 million if sold on the streets, according to Van Quarles of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, D.C.

Spokesmen for the DEA, and customs agencies in Belgium and United Kingdom, confirmed that sei-zures of illegal drugs there in 1997 were made on Chiquita ships and not on those of its competitors, such as Del Monte, Dole or the Irish company Fyffes, that also ship fruit from South and Central America.

Also see this piece from last July about a lawsuit against Chiquita:

These plaintiffs come right out and accuse Chiquita of direct involvement in drug and weapons shipments, to demonstrate a close link between the Chiquita payments and other actions, on the one hand, and acts of kidnapping and murder, on the other.

There's more after the jump...

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

This morning, a press release popped into my inbox. That's not unusual; most press releases can safely be ignored. But this one -- from something called the International Action Center’s Committee in Solidarity with Latin America & the Caribbean -- makes for genuinely interesting reading. Yeah, you'll find some lefty boilerplate here, but there are also many points which deserve further investigation.

The bottom line of this argument comes to this: The Obama administration engineered the coup.

Will Markos Moulitsas allow any mention of this on Daily Kos? Will any so-called "progressives" shout "Oh my God! Get this to Keith!"? I doubt it.

And away we go:

* * *

Latin American solidarity and anti-imperialist activists around the world, as well as the people of Latin America did not need WikiLeaks’ “leaked” documents to tell them what they already knew: the U.S. government was well aware that the June 28, 2009 ouster of democratically and legitimately elected President Jose Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was illegal and unconstitutional.

This “leaked” information however is far from the whole story.

Not only did the U.S. government know that the ouster and kidnapping of President Zelaya was against all kinds of legal and political norms, there is ample proof that sections of the U.S. government and Pentagon were behind the coup.

The 2000 cables on Honduras are part of over 250,000 cables that WikiLeaks provided to several mainstream media outlets including The New York Times. Information revealed include documents that expose the fact that the “US is using its embassies around the world as part of a global spy network and asking diplomats to gather intelligence.” Somehow this is shocking “new” information.

It is not known, however, how many “Top Secret” documents have never been revealed. In addition, none of the media outlets that received the information are actual critics of U.S. imperialism.

The Obama administration and the bourgeois media are nonetheless up in arms about the leaks, which are said to be sending shock waves throughout the diplomatic world.

The mainstream media is repeating again and again how the leaks are placing U.S. soldiers and other government representatives in danger, somehow overlooking the fact that it is war and imperialist intervention that puts U.S. soldiers in harms’ way, not information about the lies used to justify the war.

US Imperialism & Latin America

For countless decades, U.S. imperialism has treated Latin America as its “backyard.” The U.S. government has found innumerable ways to intervene in the region. All its plans have been made in order to dominate and control the area, exploit its workers and steal its riches.

When the people’s struggles get in the way of U.S. plans, imperialism will stop at nothing to continue its domination.

U.S. aims in Honduras are no exception.

The take in several news sources on the WikiLeaks released documents are that U.S. Embassy officials spin on the June 2009 developments in Honduras prevented cutting aid to Honduras at the time. The U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa refrained from calling the kidnapping and ouster of President Zelaya a “military” coup. By merely calling it a “coup” U.S. aid could continue.

The coup was condemned by every multilateral Latin American body, as well as the United Nations, the European Union and many others. The Organization of American States and the UN General Assembly called for the immediate and unconditional return of President Zelaya. Most Latin American governments, including Venezuela and Bolivia, refused to recognize the government after the coup.

The U.S. Ambassador to Honduras at the time was Hugo Llorens, a well known enemy of the peoples’ struggle in Latin America. Llorens is Cuban American and very hostile to the Cuban Revolution.

The cable he signed dated July 24, 2009 said that elements in the Honduran legislative and judicial branches “"conspired" with the military to remove Zelaya from power. Llorens also admitted that President Zelaya’s letter of resignation was a pure fabrication.

But Llorens will not admit U.S. military complicity in the coup, which he knows about and may have even organized.

Well-known researcher Eva Golinger however demonstrates how in the weeks after the coup the U.S. base Soto Cano in Honduras played a fundamental role in the downfall of President Zelaya.

And according to many sources, including Rolando Valenzuela, a minister in Zelaya’s government who was assassinated in Honduras after the coup, Llorens knew about the coup before it occurred.

On November 29, 2010 exiled President Zelaya said the leaked cable demonstrated "complicity" in the coup on the part of the U.S.

The resistance in Honduras also writes about the WikiLeaks information:

“The transnational media outlets would never dare to seriously damage the interests of the U.S. The first important Tegucigalpa cable dated 2009-07-24 appeared in El Pais clearly shows a dismissal of significant information of the story told from viewpoint of Hugo Llorens in which he appears to be arguing on the basis of only one topic; the golpistas’ argument on the legality of the coup as if they never made it to sell a credible story on the Honduras crisis.

“The message seems to focus blame on how the oligarchy of Honduras failed on doing a smarter job completely. However, we wonder, is this really something we would have had to wait years or decades to see otherwise?” End of quote from Honduras.

Solidarity with Honduras resistance decisive

The U.S. role in Honduras is not just an exercise in constitutional law.

There is a bloodbath going on in Honduras today. Unionists, teachers, students, campesinos, women and youth are being beaten, tortured, killed, disappeared and exiled. An illegal government is carrying out U.S. imperialism aims in order to hold back the peoples movement in Honduras.

President Manuel Zelaya attempted to put in place policies that would help the people, policies like raising the minimum wage and nationalizing certain industries. This terrified and angered capitalist interests, especially from the U.S.

This is why the coup occurred.

The coup also took place to send a message to the movements of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and the country of Cuba: do not dare to fight back against U.S. imperialism.

Not only the people throughout Latin America but the people of Honduras are defying that message.

No illegal U.S. orchestrated coup will hold back the peoples struggle in Honduras or throughout Latin America. There is only one way out of the dire conditions the Latin American masses face: and that is the struggle for a better world, free of the shackles of U.S. imperialism.

Solidarity with Honduras and all the struggles in Latin America are decisive.

The movement in the U.S. is especially important, as it is this government that is behind all the misery in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as all the world. We cannot wait for another “leaked” document to raise the clarion call “U.S. imperialism out of Honduras! Victory to the Honduran Resistance!”

__________-

Related:

Latin America’s Twenty First Century Capitalism and the US Empire

Ronald Hadley Stark: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain

From Skilluminati:





'...revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science for the few who are competent to practice it. It depends on correct organisation and above all, on communications.' -- Robert Heinlen




11/30/11 -- The curse of doing research out here in Weirdoland is that the really fascinating people are nearly impossible to do research on. For instance, when you're covertly running the world's largest LSD manufacturing and smuggling operation for the CIA, you're not going to be doing interviews in Newsweek or publishing an autobiography. That's precisely the problem with Ronald Hadley Stark, who is one of the most insane characters in the history of LSD -- and that's really saying something, don't you think?


This article has been updated considerably since I first published it. Stark's life story is beyond belief, so I think it's important to be meticulous. There are, no doubt, still hundreds of errors here.


For anyone unfamiliar with the tangle of political, scientific, cultural and covert forces behind spread of LSD, this article could get confusing. Ronald Stark is a central figure in David Black's book ACID: A Secret History of LSD, but the best overall introduction to this material would be Acid Dreams, by Lee & Shlain. It's short and very readable, laying out the overall history in clear terms. For more serious seekers, I highly recommend HP Albarelli's masterpiece, A Terrible Mistake, which is meticulously documented and considerably broader than mere LSD history.

The Super-Context

Stark had been working with US intelligence agencies for at least 9 years by the time of his most infamous moment, a legendary meeting with the 'hippie mafia' drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (no joke.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of liquid LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. He claimed to have a dedicated lab in France, but it's his political philosophy that really makes Stark such an interesting character:


'He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics.'


The Brotherhood was sufficiently impressed to bring Ronald Stark into the fold, and what followed was the Golden Era of cheap, high-quality LSD. From 1969 through 1973, Stark and the Brotherhood dosed a generation and got away with it, too.





According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career. Hippie lore generally gives Owsley Stanley the crown of the Acid King, but by Stanley's own estimates, his total production was a half kilogram. That might not sound like much -- but it adds up to over 5 million hits of acid. You can see why the Army and Navy were so interested in this compound: it is unusually powerful as drug molecules go.


Although the LSD story is closely associated with the Sandoz pharmaceutical corporation in Switzerland, most of the CIA's supply was actually domestic. Since at least 1954, the Eli Lilly Company was working under secret contract to keep the various MKNAOMI and ARTICHOKE research projects stocked up with magic mindfuck juice. The figures on their total LSD output are classified.


David Black: 'Before clinching the deal with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute.'


Obviously this was a big money business, and organized crime involvement was inevitable. Since small batches of LSD have a literally exponential commercial profit margin, technical expertise was highly rewarded. Consider the case of Clyde Apperson, a specialist in quickly setting up a fully functional manufacturing lab just about anywhere. More importantly, he could take them down even faster. For set-up, Apperson would charge $100,000 in cash -- take downs were only $50,000. He was finally busted working in the infamous abandoned missile silo with William Leonard Pickard in 2000.





Everyone's always getting busted, though. The history of LSD is full of incredibly intelligent men making highly stupid decisions. Yet through it all, from Operation Julie to the Sand-Scully case, Ronald Stark just kept on trucking. He was a calculating cameo artist: always on the scene, never holding the bag.


Until he suddenly was: 'Whatever game Stark was playing took an abrupt turn in February 1975 when Italian police received an anonymous phone call about a man selling drugs in a hotel in Bologna. A few days later at the Grand Hotel Baglioni they arrested a suspect in possession of 4,600 kilos of marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. The suspect carried a British passport bearing the name Mr. Terrence W. Abbott. Italian investigators soon discovered that 'Mr. Abbott' was actually Ronald Stark.'-- Source: Acid Dreams, pg. 213





Terrence W. Abbott was holding a genuine British passport, number 348489A, which was issued in 1973. The story of how he got it will never be told -- British intelligence refused to release his files. The FBI refused to share their files with the DEA and the US State Department has actively interfered with many foreign attempts to extradite or prosecute Stark. The man led a charmed life.


'...the picture of Stark's activities began to broaden with the discovery of a vial of liquid and a cache of papers kept in a Rome bank deposit box. The vial was sent for forensic examination. The scientists reported back that they could not precisely identify the drug it contained. At best, they put it close to LSD. Perhaps it was the synthetic THC Stark had dreamt of creating; the papers included formulae for the synthesis. There were also plans for the bulk purchase of hemp seeds and calculations for shipments, investments and plant installation. Some of the papers went back to the Brotherhood days but they gave no details of his LSD operations after the Belgian episode. They did show that his range of interests in the drug world had expanded to include narcotics. There were details of the synthesis of cocaine.' Source: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love





Stark's time in Italy is the strangest and bloodiest chapter of his odd history. Although most accounts frame his 1975 arrest as a 'bust,' one commentator who does not is worth mentioning here: Phillip Willan. His view of Stark is shaped not by LSD folklore, but through earnest journalism and research into the history of political terrorism in Italy. The Ronald Stark that Willan presents is not a drug lord getting taken down, so much as an intelligence asset deliberately changing venues.


Willan: 'Stark's arrest in Italy was prompted by a mysterious phone call to the police and he seems quite happy to go to prison, where his time was gainfully employed in winning the confidence of captured Red Brigades leaders, given that he turned down the opportunity of bail in August 1978.'


Stark was no mere snitch, though. He was actively setting up infrastructure, teaching the principles of operational security and preaching the virtues of the 'cell' structure. 'He also provided them with a cryptographic system for coded radio communications,' Willan says, although it should be assumed that Stark was also passing that system on to his secret employers. Prison records show that he met with Italian police and intelligence agents many times while he was networking there. It was in Italy that a large part of Ronald Stark's operation collapsed into the visible world. The facts that emerged are an education in covert warfare and intelligence operations.

Some Heavy Dudes

'...his preferred to keep his range of contacts ignorant of each other's activities. Oftentimes he concealed the fact he was an American. His European associates were not privvy to his affairs in Africa, and those in Asia knew little about his work in the states. The brothers, for example, had no idea he was running a separate cocaine ring in the Bay Area.' -- Acid Dreams, pg 250


Researching Roland Stark, I was reminded of people like Porter Goss, Henry Karl 'Andijra' Puharich, or Barry Seal: it is unreal how much this guy got around. He stayed in close contact with the founders of 'The Process Church of the Final Judgement,' which is another hub in the Dark Network of occult history.


They began as a splinter group who broke ranks from Scientology, which meant they were waging spiritual war with L. Ron Hubbard from 1965 through 1974, which was a pretty bad year for 'The Teacher,' Robert DeGrimston. He was booted from his own cult and his wife divorced him on her journey to starting a successful chain of 'Best Friends' animal shelters. (No joke.)





All of which sounds way more lurid than it was. Stark was ultimately a drug dealer so beyond being Very Interesting, his link with the Process Church doesn't imply any shared philosophy...and doesn't exclude it, either. The oddball sociologist William Sims Bainbridge studied the group for months, and he didn't exactly make it sound like a blood magick sacrifice: 'there was no violence and no indiscriminate sex, but I found a remarkably aesthetic and intelligent alternative to conventional religion.' Then again, the Solar Temple was full of wealthy and sophisticated people who held refined parties and had very high-level conversations right up until the mass murder, mass suicide thing.


(For considerably more detail on the Process, refer to the Bainbridge essay Social Construction from Within: Satan's Process.)





Timothy Leary was a perfect avatar for the Age of Horus: playful, brilliantly creative and blissfully unaware of the bad consequences he was unleashing. Although there is little evidence to tie Leary himself to the drug smuggling and merchandising activities of the Brotherhood, there is no question he quickly became the spiritual center of the group. For what it's worth, Leary himself downplayed their significance:


LEARY: 'The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill.'


Maybe so -- but probably not. In September 1970, Leary escaped from prison in a complicated deal exposing just how serious the Brotherhood network had become. Money from Ronald Stark was paid to the Weather Underground, which is the precise point where the 'hippie mafia' became connected to actual hippie terrorists. Leary himself wound up in Algeria under the (very) armed watch of Eldridge Cleaver, himself in exile. A year later, Leary and his wife were in Switzerland, living under the protection of the arms dealer Michel Hauchard. For a story about spiritual thrills, there's definitely a lot of guns involved here.





At one point, though, the Brotherhood really was just a group of hippies with a couple trunks full of weed. The Weather Underground were harmless student activists for awhile, too. Once Stark was brought into the Brotherhood, he quickly took change of the entire operation, establishing secure shipments and managing every aspect of their finances. 'Stark warned them that buying real estate openly, as they had done, was much too risky -- but his lawyers could remedy the situation by hiding ownership in a maze of shell companies.'


This is a repeated pattern in Stark's operations: he is always ready to create an organization where none exists. After Owsley got busted and the Brotherhood went international, many of the original bay area chemists got wise to what Stark was really doing. 'We were definitely very gullible in believing the stuff he told us,' as poor Tim Scully would later observe.


The Brotherhood got plugged into Stark's global underground very quickly: massive marijuana imports from the Middle East, shadow bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, and he was somehow micro-managing everything. Once he had flooded the West Coast with Afghan weed, Stark turned his attention to New York City, which was completely unprepared for the sheer quantity the Brotherhood supplied. From distribution to organizing street-level dealers, Stark was there, establishing Ordo Ab Chao is his own specific way.





Skilluminati readers may already be familiar with Mr. Nice, the Welsh arms trader and Hashish entrepreneur who paved the pipeline that brought Afghanistan's finest exports into the hands of hippies and other connoisseurs all around the world. His real name is Howard Marks and his pioneering work in cultural exchange was the foundation for everything from the Cannabis Cup to Afghanistan's ongoing civil war, although of course neither was actually Howard's fault. Unlike Stark, he's made a modest living telling colorful and contrite stories of his drug dealing days. Part of the Mr. Nice gig, of course, is that he swears he's never used violence or trafficked in 'hard drugs' -- which was probably an even bigger factor in his early retirement than getting busted by the DEA. Afghanistan, of course, got very heavy very quick and Mr. Nice was steamrolled out of the picture in short order.


Howard Marks was very much a hippie. Ronald Stark was something else altogether.

Giorgio Floridia

Most of what's known about Ronald Stark today is through an Italian magistrate named Giorgio Floridia, who released Stark from Italian prison in 1979. After Stark had gotten himself caught in 1975, he busied himself trying to convince anyone and everyone that he was operating with the blessings of the United States government. Four years later, he finally managed to persuade Floridia, who cited 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' that Stark had given him.

At his appeals trial Stark changed identities once again, this time passing himself off as 'Khouri Ali,' a radical Palestinian. In fluent Arabic he spelled out the details of his autobiography, explaining that he was part of an international terrorist organization headquartered in Lebanon, called 'Group 14.' Stark's appeal failed, and he was sent back to jail.


But Italian police took a renewed interest in his case after they captured Enrique Paghera, another terrorist leader who knew Stark. At the time of his arrest Paghera was holding a hand-drawn map of a PLO camp in Lebanon. The map, Paghera confessed, had come from Stark, who also provided a coded letter of introduction. The objective, according to Paghera, was to forge a link with a terrorist organization that was planning to attack embassies.

Floridia also claims Stark worked for the Defense Department from 1960 on, and recieved paychecks from Fort Lee, in New Jersey. It is worth considering that Stark might have exaggerated his role and connections, and even fabricated evidence, in presenting his case to the magistrate who was in a position to free him. Either way, it worked. Stark was released on parole....and disappeared days later.


In terms of Floridia's motivation, it's worth considering the fate of the guy who came before him:

In June 1978 a Bologna magistrate, Graziano Gori, was assigned to investigate Stark and his astounding web of associates. A few weeks later, Gori was killed in a car wreck.

That, of course, might be the most 'impressive proof' of all.

Somehow Not the End

Ronald Stark turned up in Holland in 1982. There's not a lot of published details, but it clearly involves 16 kilos of hasish and a Lebanese cover identity. He was busted en route to New York City. He got deported the next year and apparently died in custody -- because when Italy requested that he be extradited on terrorism charges, the US replied with a copy of Stark's death certificate.


(You guessed it -- 'heart attack.')


His paper trail comes to an end here, although the reader can be forgiven for assuming his crusade continued covertly. There was certainly no retirement for a man like Stark. His mission was too important, too huge for a mere career.





...but then again, what was his mission, after all? Is it a mistake to place any stock in what he told the Brotherhood of Eternal Love? Perhaps not. Although Ronald Hadley Stark was many things to many people, the sole constant that emerges is Revolution. From the Weather Underground to the Red Brigades, from the PLO to the IRS, Stark was consistently moving in circles where the overthrow of government and the liberation of the people were central themes...circles that today would be considered 'Terrorist.' Certainly, Stark manipulated and lied to his contacts every step of the way, and it's safe to assume the speeches he gave to the Palestinians and Italians were much different from the picture he was painting in 1969 for the Brotherhood.


It's worth revisiting, though: '...in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people.' Now, Hadley's chosen network makes it pretty clear that he viewed automatic rifles and firebombs as equally valid tools for 'inducing altered states of consciousness,' and it's unlikely that a realist like Stark honestly believed that LSD was going amount to much more than a profitable business. Setting that aside, overthrowing both capitalism and communism sounds like an authentic statement of Stark's overall goals, or at least one that fits his sketchy and fast-moving modus operandi.


Stark was an infiltrator, creating back channels for communication between intelligence and police agencies and the underground movements that were trying to fight them. The fact he was so successful and so prolific is what makes him a remarkable character. Throughout his documented life, Stark is relentlessly working with, for and against dozens of competing players. He travels constantly, juggles multiple identities and stays actively involved in multiple conflicts simultaneously.


Looking over his strange, tangled career, it's hard to avoid thinking that LSD was really not the point. The single biggest producer of raw LSD the world has ever known was not a True Believer, he was just passing through on his way to bigger and better things. His work for US intelligence agencies had less to do with blowing minds than establishing connections. Vast quantities of acid was perhaps more of a bona fide, a calling card to establish himself as a legitimate criminal figure.




Which brings us, finally, full circle.

A Harsh Mistress

In 1966, Putnam & Sons published a new novel from Robert Heinlein named The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The plot concerns a worker's revolution on a Lunar colony, organized by a small group of people with considerable assistance from a self-aware supercomputer that controls the colony's infrastructure. Written in a distinctively abbreviated 'Moonspeak,' the book goes into remarkable detail about secure, secret communication networks. Stark was seldom without a copy and spoke highly of it around the world. Perhaps the closest we can ultimately get to unraveling his motives and beliefs is within the pages of a sci-fi story, rather than the life he left behind.


It's impossible to write about the character of Ronald Stark without discussing the character of Professor Bernardo de la Paz. As the brains behind the Lunar revolution, the Professor has several extensive monologues about the design principles behind covert operations. 'Revolution,' the Prof says, 'is an art I pursue, rather than a goal I expect to achieve.'


The end of the novel is pure Chinatown. The revolution gets subverted like revolutions always do, and Heinlein was really writing a love song about The Frontier itself. Revolution is the flame that extinguishes itself, for simple and practical reasons: 'Every new member made it that much more likely that you would be betrayed,' as the Prof puts it.


'Organization must be no larger than necessary -- never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy; therefore structure is small, secret and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal -- since there are always betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented.'







The Professor goes on to propose a mandala of three-member cells, all reporting through a single Leader node back towards the center. This compartmentalized approach allows the founders to both monopolize information flow and insulate themselves against exposure. The concept is simple and effective, and it has been proven here in the real world for decades, from terrorist networks to intelligence agencies to evangelical Christians. It is staggering to think of how much Ronald Stark was connected to, assuming he rigorously pursued the Professor's blueprint, as Art for Art's sake. It is sobering to realize that the long, wide trail of covert history I've outlined here was just a couple of cells that got busted, part of a larger picture that is gone completely here in 2010.


His greatest achievements were the successful conspiracies, the completed operations that will never get traced back to his careful planning and constant hard work. There are too many huge gaps and unanswered questions to leave much doubt that Ronald Hadley Stark had a very impressive batting average. He was in a line of work where invisibility is the goal, and his true legacy is hiding behind headlines we will never understand, out here in the herd.


pg 77 'Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily.'

Further Reading

Sorry, no LSD recipes here. Handy safety test: if you need to google the instructions, you're not qualified to perform them. Don't play with fire, kids.







Be sure to check out the Cult of the Dead Cow's review of Acid: A New Secret History of LSD' -- full of further information on Stark.


The always-excellent Gary Lachman offers a sober and detailed take on The Process Church.


If you want to learn more about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, that's good: you should. There's an outstanding book on the subject, predictably titled The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
I recently read a new book on the subject, Orange Sunshine, which wasn't nearly as good.


Finally, for deep background on WTF Ronald Hadley Stark was doing in Italy during those mysterious final years of his life, Philip Willan's book is essential: 'Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy.'