The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity

In Praise of Liberty and Mutual Aid:
A short review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021)

 

By Peter d’Errico, © December 2021, source: academia.edu

The Dawn of Everything, a “new history of humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow, an anthropology and archaeology research team, joins a burgeoning global awareness that life on Earth is in social and ecological crisis and that the crisis is tied to the system of industrial state corporate society. The book’s contribution is to help us understand why we are having a difficult time figuring a way out of the mess. The reason, they say, is that our thinking is trapped by belief in the story that modern corporate state society is the end state of human evolution, the inevitable result of “progress” from “barbarism” to “civilization.” The obstacle to thinking of alternatives to the current organization of society is a belief that there is no alternative to this organization.

This belief dominates received opinion. Francis Fukuyama, in the heady days of US self-congratulation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said we are at the “end of history.” Recently, even as ecological data confirmed that the current social system is problematic, Jared Diamond persists in promoting the view that it is “unrealistic,” because of “biogeographical” factors, to expect to live without “kings, presidents, and bureaucrats” except in “some tiny band or tribe.” He insists on this limiting view even though the event he presumes caused the dilemma, the so-called “agricultural revolution,” is “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” If we believe received wisdom, we can only conclude there is no way out of a world out of balance.

Speaking of Fukuyama and Diamond, Graeber and Wengrow say, “The truly remarkable thing is that, despite the self-assured tone, such pronouncements are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence.... There is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian—or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies.” Notions of a “necessary” human evolution from small-scale egalitarian to large-scale hierarchical societies “are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or...laws of history.”

The Dawn of Everything is a riposte to received wisdom. But The Dawn is not a polemic. It is a detailed survey of scientific data about ancient human civilizations from archaeological and anthropological investigations that have only recently become possible (archaeobotany, DNA analysis, “statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials,” etc.). The conclusions they draw from this data are directed against all stories of irreversible historical inevitability, those derived from Rousseau’s notion of an original human egalitarianism ruined by the “agricultural revolution” and those tied to Hobbes’s proposition of an original “nasty, brutish” humanity rescued by “sovereign government.” The Dawn rejects both versions on the grounds that they “simply aren’t true; have dire political implications; [and] make the past needlessly dull.”

These three analytical categories shape the authors’ overall approach and tone of the book: First, occupying the greatest portion of the book, is the scientific data; second are discussions of political implications of various readings of history; third are speculations aimed to enliven our “sense of human possibility.” The authors suggest that our “future now hinges on our capacity to create something different” and they ask a question to motivate readers through the nearly 700 pages of text: “What if, instead of...[repeating the conventional story], we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

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The book’s opening salvo is, “Most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway.” The authors then declare their intention to go where most people don’t go, to take up “the sort of grand dialogue about human history that was once quite common.” In fact, as the authors quickly make clear, lots of people do talk about human history, “from industrial psychologists to revolutionary theorists...[to] popular writers.” The problem, they say, is that the talk generally shares the same “foundational story...the prevalent ‘big picture’ of history [that]...has almost nothing to do with the facts.” They embark on the task of backing up their assertion by exposing the ethnographic and historical assumptions incorporated into the dominant story of human evolution to state-of-the-art scientific work. The result, they promise, will not simply be a catalog of new data, but “a conceptual shift” in thinking about the “notion of social evolution,” a shift “retracing...the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development...hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on.”

Ursula Le Guin [“Books Aren’t Just Commodities” (National Book Awards Speech, 2014)] also reminded us of human possibility and the power of conceptual shifts to motivate historical change: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

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I approached The Dawn of Everything with a view to bolster my own work studying Indigenous peoples’ legal issues, a field I’ve been working for more than 50 years. From that perspective, rooted in scholarly study and personal experience, I long ago realized the falsity of the Anglo-European proclamation of civilizational superiority. I wasn’t looking for “proof” that Indigenous peoples of the past built sophisticated societies and grappled with complicated social problems. I understood that Indigenous perspectives about human society today offer valuable alternatives to the political economy of industrial extraction and “wealth production.” I knew Rousseau’s “noble savage” and Hobbes’s “brute” were efforts to bracket and come to terms with evidence of alternative modes of human existence from the “New World.” I had already done what Graeber and Wengrow decide to do: “To move away from European thinkers like Rousseau entirely and instead consider perspectives that derive from those indigenous thinkers who ultimately inspired them.”

The authors’ core thesis is that the story of a “necessary” human evolution from “barbaric tribes” to “civilized states” was produced by European writers to rationalize the great differences between their societies and the societies “discovered” in the “New World.” The Dawn refers to this process as Europeans responding to the “Indigenous critique,” ideas put forward by Indigenous people criticizing European Christian civilization. The most significant reports of the Indigenous critique were provided by Jesuits and other missionaries in the Northeast Woodlands region: That Native peoples are very generous with one another, that there’s no one who goes hungry within their communities unless everyone is hungry, that there are no beggars within their communities and no jails. The reports also noted that Indigenous chiefs only have authority in as far as they’re eloquent, and that no one will do anything when ordered to do so unless they find it agreeable. Scandalized missionaries reported that Indigenous women had full control over their bodies; colonial authorities noted that women often took part in Indigenous governance.

Public figures in Europe directly encountered the Indigenous critique from Natives visiting Paris, London, and other cities, who saw beggars in the streets and attributed this to a lack of charity on the part of the Europeans, condemning them for it. The contrasts between European hierarchy and domination, selfishness and greed, and the way of life of Indigenous peoples had a profound impact in Western thinking and was one of the major streams of thought flowing into the Enlightenment.

In a nutshell, The Dawn of Everything says the theory of human evolution from “barbarism to civilization” was developed specifically to defend European feudal societies against the overall Indigenous critique. Europeans were shaken by the unmistakable openness and fluidity of Northeast Woodlands Indigenous societies and the paradoxical (to Europeans) combination of Indigenous insistence on individual autonomy with an equally strong insistence on group solidarity. The central theme of the European arguments was that individual autonomy and self-determined group cohesion were viable only among “primitive” peoples and had to be abandoned as humans “evolved.” Followers of Rousseau and Hobbes alike argued that “advanced civilization” was “necessary” in human “development” and that the life of “tribes” was doomed by this necessary “progress.”

The Dawn notes that Europeans did not perceive such dangerous ideas from the Aztec and Inca, whose urban civilizations and empires rivaled Europe. Neither did they bother to figure out how their theory of “human progress” could explain such “advanced” Indigenous societies. The only explanation they needed to combat such peoples was the “heathen and infidel” argument that, with religious notes, also composed a hierarchical scale putting European Christendom at the top.

The eventual outgrowth of European defense against the Indigenous critique produced a combination of “human evolution” and the doctrine of a “right of Christian discovery,” a combination adopted into US law in 1823 by the Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. McIntosh. Justice Joseph Story [Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833)] characterized that decision as “...the title of the Indians was not treated as a right of propriety and dominion; but as a mere right of occupancy. As infidels, heathen, and savages, they were not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent nations.... The territory, over which they wandered, and which they used for their temporary and fugitive purposes, was, in respect to Christians, deemed, as if it were inhabited only by brute animals.”[Chapter XVI. General Review of the Colonies, p.102] (Not surprisingly, “Christian discovery” originated as a Portuguese “right” to the African slave trade in 1452.)

That doctrine and the “evolution” story remain dominant at the legal foundation of contemporary US claims of inevitable supremacy. Recent examples include City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation (2005), where Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “Under the ‘doctrine of discovery,’...fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign—first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.”... [she denied Oneida land ownership]; and McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), where Justice Neil Gorsuch said Congress has “authority to breach its own promises and treaties” with Native nations, based on “Christian discovery” precedents [he said Congress had not done this yet with the Creek Nation, but “remains free to...[do so] at any time”].

Indigenous critique also persists in the 21st century, including: Idle No More (founded 2012)—Led by women, with a call for “refounded nation-to-nation relations...a movement for Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water, and sky”; Independent Lakota Nation Declaration on Lakota Nationhood and the Dakota Access Pipeline Conflict (2016)—“We do not recognize United States or state permits to gather, pray, or otherwise demonstrate our cultural, social, and political institutions on our own aboriginal lands”; Yakama Nation amicus in Washington State v. Cougar Den (2018)—“The Court should expressly repudiate the doctrine [of Christian discovery] and instead rely on the Yakama Treaty”; Manoomin, et.al., v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, et.al. (Case No. GC21-0428 in White Earth Tribal Court, 2021)—“an action for declaratory and injunctive relief to declare Manoomin, or wild rice, within all the Chippewa ceded territories is protected and possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.”

In short, the 16th century dynamic cited at the core of The Dawn remains active in the 21st century, providing global humanity with the same opportunity and challenge that faced Christian European colonial powers: to shape human societies harmoniously and sustainably.

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Even as apparently “simple” Indigenous societies befuddled and disturbed European intellectuals, they attracted on-the-ground colonists. James Axtell [The Invasion within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985)] summarizes what colonists said about their experiences living among Native peoples: “They found Indian life to express a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity...[as well as] social equality, mobility, adventure...the most perfect freedom,...ease of living, the absence of...corroding solicitudes....”

The record of contacts between colonial invaders and Native peoples illustrates what Axtell and The Dawn say: The Puritans, for example, were embarrassed by the fact so many of their kind fled to the “Indians,” while so few Natives wanted to adopt the Puritan world. Sebastian Junger [Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016)], like Graeber and Wengrow, quotes Benjamin Franklin bemoaning that white captives “liberated from the Indians” and returned to “stay among the English...take the first good opportunity of escaping again" to their Native communities. On the other hand, Franklin said, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us...if he goes to see his relations...there is no persuading him ever to return.” Junger recounted that when Colonel Henri Bouquet, a Swiss mercenary under British General Jeffrey Amherst, attacked Odawa Chief Pontiac’s forces (after delivering smallpox-infected blankets to Fort Pitt [see d’Errico, “Amherst and Smallpox” (2001, 2020)]) and demanded return of white captives, Native families had to bind those people and forcibly bring them in. Many later escaped and returned to their Native communities.

Junger, echoing Axtell, says colonials gravitated to the "intensely communal nature" of Indian life: Not only the "rough frontiersmen," as he puts it, but also "the sons and daughters of Europe" were drawn to the natural sociability of Indian life, even as against "the material benefits of Western civilization." He quotes French immigrant writer Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur, saying, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European. There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.”

Graeber and Wengrow launch their book against this background: “Revisiting [the encounters of Indigenous peoples and Europeans]...has startling implications for how we make sense of the past today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.” They suggest that “The ultimate question of human history...is not our equal access to material resources..., much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.” Contemporary diatribes against “tribal politics” in the US have forgotten this long-existing perspective that “tribal” life is more humane than state civilization.

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European efforts to counter the Indigenous critique and neutralize its threat, combining the “human evolution” story and religious theory, ultimately merged into a field of “natural law,” a domain of thought explicitly triggered by debates about the moral and legal implications of European Christianity’s “discovery” of the “New World.” The core debate focused on the question: What “rights” do humans have even if they exist in a “state of nature” ignorant of “revealed religion”? The answer, generally, was that they have some rights, but that these are inferior to the rights of civilized (read, European Christian) humans.

The argument in Dawn only touches on the development of “international law” from these natural law origins. That history is told by Carl Schmitt [The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950; trans. 2003)] and will be helpful to recap here: Schmitt says,

The traditional Eurocentric order of international law...arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world.... The Age of Discovery, when the earth first was encompassed and measured by the global consciousness of European peoples...resulted in ...a Eurocentric international law: the jus publicum Europaeum.... Its nomos was determined by the following divisions. The soil of non-Christian, heathen peoples was Christian missionary territory; it could be allocated by papal order to a Christian prince for a Christian mission....European international law considered Christian nations to be the creators and representatives of an order applicable to the whole earth. The term ‘European’ meant the normal status that set the standard for the non-European part of the earth. Civilization was synonymous with European civilization.... The first question in international law was whether the lands of non-Christian, non-European peoples...were at such a low stage of civilization that they could become objects of organization by peoples at a higher stage.

Schmitt has this to say when he focuses specifically on the claim of “a right of Christian discovery”:

The meaning of the legal title ‘discovery’ lay in an appeal to the historically higher position of the discoverer vis-à-vis the discovered. This position differed with respect to American Indians, and other non-Christian peoples, such as Arabs, Turks, and Jews.... From the standpoint of the discovered, discovery as such was never legal. Neither Columbus nor any other discoverer appeared with an entry visa issued by the discovered princes.

In the same vein that Graeber and Wengrow decry the absence of questioning of all this, Schmitt says, “Jurists...have in view...only the system of a specific state legality. They are content to reject as ‘unjuridical’ the question of what processes established this order.”

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We might expect that The Dawn’s thesis will be rejected by many commentators. After all, contemporary edifices of power, whether in academia, media, corporations, or statehouses, is dependent on public belief in the inevitability of the edifice; more, a fear that the absence of the edifice would mean a loss of “quality of life.” Nevertheless, a quick rejection is not viable. Proper evaluation of the thesis requires engagement with nearly 700 pages of information from the most recent scientific work related to human history. I will point readers to the book itself for that task and close my review with a comment about anarchy, which some may assume must be the underlying philosophy of The Dawn, especially because Graeber was known as an anarchist.

The dominant story of “human evolution,” to which mass society and professional commentators seem equally wed, has no room for anarchism. Liberty and mutual aid are either gone forever or limited to their bureaucratic manifestations in the “welfare state.” Anything else is said to be wishful thinking, hopelessly naïve, even “anarchy.”

If it be anarchism to challenge the received (and celebrated) story of inevitable statist domination of human life, so be it. On the other hand, anarchism is not the same as anarchy. Specifically, anarchism is “a political theory advocating the abolition of hierarchical government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion”; anarchy is “a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems.” Anarchism not only comprehends social order but celebrates such order that arises from and is compatible with liberty and mutual aid. One need not be a Marxist to embrace these values; Friedrich Hayek did also. To explore the significance of that coincidence requires more than I can do here.

Suffice it to say, quoting Carl Schmitt again,

Anarchy is not the worst scenario. Anarchy and law are not mutually exclusive. The right of resistance and self-defense can be good law, whereas a series of statutes shattering every notion of resistance and self-defense, or a system of norms and sanctions suppressing anyone who proposes resistance and self-defense can presage a dreadful nihilistic destruction of all law.

I have long been fond of a remark by Professor Grant Gilmore [The Ages of American Law (1977)], who, to my loss, left Yale Law School as I was entering, and I close with it:

Law reflects, but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society.... The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven, there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.... The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.

by Dave Ratcliffe

Nuclear Weapons Detonation: HIGH-ALTITUDE ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (HEMP)

Source: Steven Starr's Nuclear Famine

from the beginning of: https://nuclearfamine.org/connect/

HIGH-ALTITUDE ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (HEMP)

A nuclear weapon detonated in the upper atmosphere will produce a High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP). While no blast, fires, or ionizing radiation will be felt on Earth, a single HEMP will instantly create intense electromagnetic fields that will blanket tens or hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Earth’s surface. These fields will induce highly destructive transient electric voltages and currents into any electrically conductive material located in the affected regions, including overhead power transmission lines, telecom lines, and cables. Any unshielded modern electronic equipment, containing solid state circuitry connected to these lines, will be damaged or destroyed.

READ 121 page analysis: High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP): A Mortal Threat to the U.S. National Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants, 18 April 2023

15 page Executive Summary: High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP): A Mortal Threat to the U.S. National Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants

Bullet point summary of High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP):

— A single high-altitude nuclear detonation will create a massive Electromagnetic Pulse that will bring down most or all of the US national electric grid (and that goes for any national electric grid that has not been shielded from an Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP)

— In a few billionths of a second, the E1 component of HEMP can induce peak voltages of 2 million volts into long overhead medium-voltage power lines and telecom line, which can create a current of 5000 amps in these lines

— The extreme voltages and currents created by the E1 component of HEMP will damage/disable/destroy any unshielded solid-state electronics found in all modern electronic devices, especially those connected to the grid. The affected area will cover many tens of thousands of square miles

— All critical national infrastructure relies on modern electronic devices to operate; most or all of the critical infrastructure in this affected area will cease to function, including ground, sea, rail, and air transportation systems, fuel and food distribution systems, water and sanitation systems, telecommunication systems, financial systems, and emergency services and governmental services

— E1 will also destroy tens of millions of insulators found on power distribution lines. The loss of a single insulator can stop power distribution

— The E3 component from a single HEMP will cover most of the continental US; it will damage or destroy most or all of the Large Power Transformers in the US national electric grid (which are required for the distribution of 60% to 70% of all electric power in the U.S.)

— Current lead times for Large Power Transformers are 18 to 24 months (overseas suppliers); Large Power Transformers require custom design, very specialized manufacture, they each weigh between 100 and 400 tons and are very difficult to ship, transport, and install. It would likely take more than a year to replace them; most of the US would be without electric power for a year or longer

— After the grid comes down, nuclear power plants will execute emergency shutdowns, but because the E1 component will disable their on-site power sources (Emergency Diesel Generators and Battery Banks), there will be no electric power available to run the active Emergency Core Cooling Systems (ECCS)

— Also, the active ECCS systems contain many motor-driven pumps, motor-operated valves, pressure and temperature sensors, and SCADA control units that will be disabled by E1, so even if power was available, they would not operate

— After emergency shutdown, the decay heat in the core of a nuclear reactor still creates 7% of the heat present when the nuclear reactor is operating at full power. In a large commercial nuclear reactor, hundreds of millions of megawatts of heat would still remain in the reactor core

— A failure of the active Emergency Core Cooling Systems to operate will cause the core to melt down in as little as 30 minutes

–Spent fuel pools, which are adjacent to each nuclear reactor, each contain at least 3 to 5 times more radiation than does the reactor core; without a cooling system that constantly cools the pools, the water in the pools will boil off and allow the spent fuel rods to release massive amounts of radioactive materials that can leave an area the size of an entire state uninhabitable for centuries.

— Dozens of nuclear US power plants could be within the area where E1 is greater than 12,500 volts/meter, and they will simultaneously melt down.

— As many as 50 nuclear power plants could melt down in France as a result of a single HEMP

— Shielding and technical fixes exist that can be used to protect the national electric grid and critical national infrastructure – including nuclear power plants – from HEMP/EMP  

— All efforts to mandate funding to protect the grid and critical infrastructure from HEMP/EMP have been blocked by electric and nuclear utilities

by Dave Ratcliffe

Subverting Medicine:
The Role of the Federation of State Medical Boards

Today I received a copy of this post on Global Research by my supremely dear friend, Dr. Emanuel Garcia which is reproduced and enhanced below.

To all who read this: Uncover and expose Who Funds the Federation of State Medical Boards and the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities? At the core—as Dr. Garcia frames it,

The outstanding question remains: Where does the FSMB derive its authority to regulate United States medical boards and, through its apparent international partner, the IAMRA, direct medical councils around the world to discipline doctors?

Before now I had not heard of either the FSMB nor the IAMRA. It would appear that the source of their combined authority merits hyper-focused scrutiny, exposure, ripping away the veil, and calling out. I am not a lawyer nor trained in medicine. I am simply a member of our single, supremely precious human family becoming evermore desperate to find ANY of the keys that unlock the doors breaking the spell of the weasels seeking to force our family into a gruesome digital dark age.

Investigate the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and the
International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA)
which both share the same address: 400 Fuller Wiser Road, Euless, TX 70039
and expose its finances, its corporate status, and its paymasters.
Author: Dr Emanuel Garcia
Global Research, 22 Aug 2022
 
Subverting Medicine: The Role of the Federation of State Medical Boards
An Appeal for Dr Billy Ralph
By Dr. Emanuel Garcia, Global Research, August 22, 2022
https://journal.ratical.earth/2022/08/22/subverting-medicine-the-role-of-the-federation-of-state-medical-boards/

I obtained my medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986 (and at the same time I was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society). The education I received there was an education in critical thinking and clinical wisdom. Drugs and procedures come and go with the times, but the ability of a physician to glean from the complexities of a presenting illness and its effect on a patient a mode of healing, using knowledge and experience and respecting a patient’s uniqueness, is the hallmark of good medical practice.

Since 2020 this kind of medical practice, this kind of sensible and ethical medical approach, has been subverted and wholly undermined. Honest medical councils that should have encouraged and honored the likes of Dr. Ralph have instead betrayed the profession whose ideals they claim to uphold.

Why?

An answer may lie in Texas, of all places, where the headquarters of two little known but connected organizations sit: the Federation of State Medical Boards and the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities, which share the very same address near Dallas: 400 Fuller Wiser Road, Euless, TX 70039.

Coincidence?

The Chair-Elect of the IAMRA, Joan Simeon, just happens to be the CEO of the Medical Council of New Zealand, and the Secretary of the IAMRA, Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, just happens to be the President and CEO of the FSMB. The Medical Councils of Ireland and New Zealand are members of the IAMRA.

The outstanding question remains: Where does the FSMB derive its authority to regulate United States medical boards and, through its apparent international partner, the IAMRA, direct medical councils around the world to discipline doctors?

Read Compete Post

by Dave Ratcliffe

History Will Not Absolve Us
Invoke the Bond With Your Creator
and Be Liberated From the United States of Denial

image: Not Our Future, Bob Moran, bobmoran.co.uk

 
by David T. Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 22 Dec 2022

The consequence of the Doctrine of Domination is the increasing-to-the-breaking-point concentration of financial wealth and exercise of control in fewer and fewer hands. The Domination System Original Free Peoples have been dealing with for over 500 years is now coming after the 99%. We are confronted with a global spiritual world war of unbridled dimensions, ever more treacherous given its purpose is cloaked in the false promise of biosecurity. Everyone’s birthright of free will, exercising one’s unique wisdom and intelligence, is in danger of being subjugated, captured, vanquished, and, as has already occurred for many people, being extinguished and killed. Every person on Mother Earth has extraordinary gifts and powers, gifted by one’s Creator, to meet the challenges our species collectively faces. Once the numbing mind-fog spell of fear is faced and understood, there are no limits to what can be imagined and acted upon to contribute to discovering unknown possibilities of manifesting life-affirming processes that meet the needs of all.

This is the final part of trilogy, completing the circle.

Understanding is based on recognition of the fact that in each moment, I choose to interpret what I perceive in precisely the way I choose to interpret it. I choose. No one else is response able for my state of psychic being. This makes me absolutely accountable to my self for the psychic reality I construct in each moment. This response ability exists within each of us. Life perpetually invites us to see and act upon this constantly changing but ever-present opening to greater wholeness. The choice is ours alone to make.

In 1996, E. Martin “Marty” Schotz self-published History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy. Its incisive focus on the assassination of the 35th President “in a conspiracy organized at the highest echelons of power in Washington” “reveals the Orwellian techniques by which the public has allowed itself to be led into confusion about the assassination and assembles the documentary evidence necessary to know without a doubt who killed President Kennedy and why.” (See the nonpareil work of Jim Douglass, Vincent Salandria, and Marty Schotz to know without a doubt who killed President Kennedy and why.)

Today in 2022, the Orwellian techniques by which the public has allowed itself to be led into confusion about what constitutes “Pubic Health,” informed consent, freedom of thought and speech, and human dignity, are revealed in the unprecedented global, experimental medical intervention and integral censorship program smothering all perspectives not conforming to the single, all-encompassing one-size-fits-all official narrative.

While the actual facts involving the assassination of President Kennedy might not seem relevant today, official government statements, echoed and reinforced in corporate state press organs, indicate otherwise. Take the following, from the 10 June 2022 Boston Globe, page 1 headline, ‘The world is watching’: Jan. 6 evidence tells the story, by Luike Broadwater, New York Times, page A5:

The assertion of integrity in “landmark fact-finding committees” including the Kennedy assassination, is beyond ludicrous. And yet, who benefits by this class of statements that are continually trotted out as uncontested facts? Certainly not the 99% of humanity that this perception management operation is directed at.

Pre-eminent journalist, investigator, and author Gaeton Fonzi spoke in 1993 about Getting Slapped In The Face By US Intelligence Over and Over and Over Again – When Will We Wake Up? At one point he referred to Mr. Schotz’s observation that,

“It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

“And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth—as opposed to only believe the truth—is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.”

So Marty Schotz is absolutely right. Today most Americans BELIEVE there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but they don’t KNOW it. They don’t want to KNOW it—and our government doesn’t want to KNOW it and our elected representatives don’t want to KNOW it because KNOWING it would mean having to do something about it. That’s an awesome thought.

Decades later, we are living in period of 2.5 years and counting where many people continue to believe “the pandemic” is so uniquely dangerous that the cancellation of a vast array of inalienable rights is appropriate and necessary. What has been dictated from on high—lockdowns[†][††], chronically misused testing, masks, social (note: not physical) distancing, blackout of strikingly effective repurposed drugs and therapies keeping people out of hospital and recovering from illness, and the terrifying, unspeakable toll of injuries and death from experimental injections—has been effected by the concerted, singular playbook carried out almost universally around the globe. The corresponding suppression of the actual consequences of this watershed catastrophe in the history of our species has made it possible for people to evade knowing what has occurred. Hence the ultimate good of being empowered and confident in exercising one’s rational powers has been effectively cut off by the broken-record drumbeat of falsehoods and untruths buttressed by the suffocation of empirical knowledge demonstrating the hollow claims for what they are: lies, obfuscations, omissions and distortions.

In 2018 James Tracy assembled The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know in which are presented “historical and contemporary facts—by no means exhaustive—provid[ing] a glimpse of...the power such entities possess to influence if not determine popular memory and what respectable institutions deem to be the historical record.”

The GAO report on Operation Warp Speed (Feb 2021) opens with: “The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in catastrophic loss of life and substantial damage to the global economy, stability, and security.” The official narrative’s claim of catastrophic loss of life due to the lethality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is based on the categorical misuse of what the CDC branded as the “Gold Standard” diagnostic tool: the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction or RT-PCR test. Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR test, was very clear about it being designed as a manufacturing technique—not as a diagnostic tool. As Dr. Byram Bridle evaluated this in cogent detail, “Misuse of An Elegant Scientific Technique Has Plagued COVID-19 Science From the Very Beginning.” In this way, mis-informing/dis-informing data pronouncements by government officials and so-called medical experts created an extremely dangerous false narrative about the lethal nature of SARS-CoV-2 and counting deaths from Covid.

The following Appendices from History Will Not Absolve Us scratch the surface of the global holocaust occurring from the experimental injections being perpetrated by government decrees, mandates and relentless corporate state propaganda:

I. Deaths from C19 Vaccines
II. Pfizer Post-Marketing Data, Dec 2020 - Feb 2021
IV. C19 Vaccine Deaths: Analysis & Reports (updated 04-25-23)
V. C19 Vaccine Injuries: Analysis & Reports (updated 04-15-23)

Since February, 2022, Mark Crispin Miller has been publishing every week an ongoing compilation, In Memory of Those Who Have “Died Suddenly”. That no one authority in the FDA, CDC, NIAID, NIH, HHS, DOD will yet acknowledge nor address the inescapable anomalies and profound contradictions that belie the “safe and effective” parroting of government and media talking heads should give one pause:

Our single human family is dealing with the consequences of medical nemesis writ large. Ivan Illich wrote of clinical, social, and cultural iatrogenesis as being self-reinforcing: “Iatrogenesis is clinical when pain, sickness, and death result from medical care; it is social when health policies reinforce an industrial organization that generates ill-health; it is cultural and symbolic when medically sponsored behavior and delusions restrict the vital autonomy of people by undermining their competence in growing up, caring for each other, and aging, or when medical intervention cripples personal responses to pain, disability, impairment, anguish, and death.” Today, the Domination System’s imperative to permanently extinguish our vital autonomy is reaching critical mass. The immutable bond and individual relationship to the Big Holy each of us was born with is the eternal source of balance and strength guiding and informing our steps.

Fighting back today is an all-or-nothing struggle. Children and all those yet unborn look to us for the sake and integrity of their future; a life-affirming and life-loving future where humility, receptivity, compassion and empathy, and deep reverence inform all choices made on behalf of the seventh generation yet unborn. The close of the Introduction to Marty Schotz’s 1996 book brings us full circle to the challenge all of us who honor our Creator are summoned to be informed by.

As citizens who have turned away for thirty years from the truth of the murder of our elected head of state, we should not be surprised that today we find our nation in intellectual, political, and moral chaos. Confronting the truth of President Kennedy’s assassination and its coverup is but one small step on a long path out of that chaos and toward healing, a path along which we must confront the true nature of our democracy and the reality of what our nation has become for its own citizens and for people throughout the world. Such a process of healing is not pleasant. It is a difficult and painful path, but it is a necessary one. History will not absolve us.

The GOOD NEWS is the expanding mass of souls devoted to honoring and serving Life’s needs here on Mother Earth. Just now discovering Sasha Latypova’s re-ignited substack. Her Be Not Afraid: Introduction, My Background and Motivation acknowledges the silver lining to the Domination System’s spawn including the US military prototype project:

I collaborate with 100+ amazing people whom I met in this fight - scientists, doctors, engineers, software wizards, lawyers, journalists. As many will attest, the silver lining of the global descent into totalitarian hell is that we met each other. Working with these incredible individuals fills me with a profound sense of awe in the divine power that created and guides us, gives me (maybe irrational) sense of optimism, and motivates me to do more.

See Appendix 14 for some of the souls giving their all to support our single, fragile, supremely gifted human family. Annnd, those cited/referenced above in this essay, are but a very, very small number of people confronting the true nature of our society, what our nation has become for its own citizens and for people throughout the world, and committed to lay bare the darkness and promote the light.

It’s that everything [in the Cold War in 1962-1963] was totally out of control and then, through a kind of incredible process where these two men were communicating secretly with each other over the year previous [Sep 1962-63], and smuggling letters back and forth to each other, in the midst of this conflict, they were beginning to trust each other.... It’s a remarkable process. And it’s all beneath the surface. But so are all the things that count as Merton understood.... And that’s why I have some hopes that if we are willing to go deeply enough into the darkness – and Kennedy was, and Khrushchev was – anything can happen for the good. But if we don’t go into the darkness it doesn’t happen

—Jim Douglass at Elliot Bay Books, 6 May 6, 2008

Read the Complete Essay

by Dave Ratcliffe

Latypova with Watt: SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 is a US DOD Military Prototype Project

SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 is a US DOD Military Prototype Project
Discussion with Katherine Watt
on the U.S. Domestic Bioterrorism Program

Sasha Latypova, Due Diligence, 4 Nov 2022

Complete annotated transcript of the above recording, with references & mp3 at:
https://ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/ALwKW-DomesticBioteroProg-110422.html

This discussion centers on Katherine Watt’s analysis in American Domestic Terrorism Program, published 28 April 2022 on her substack with many ongoing updates. The OVERVIEW sets the framework:

I started looking closely at the legal architecture supporting the Covid national prison panopticon on Jan. 30, 2022, after hearing Attorney Todd Callender’s interview, which provided information about the American domestic legal framework; how it fit with the oddly-coordinated pandemic story told by governments worldwide; and how it relates to the World Health Organization International Health Regulations of 2005 at the center.

I wrote up the interview:

Prior to that day, I’d spent a lot of time, with increasing confusion and alarm and despair, trying to figure out why the U.S. Constitutional legal system hadn’t put a stop to the nonsense as its nonsensicality became obvious to so many people.

Why did it continue, with no end in sight, and not even a glimpse of a path to the end?

Since then, as I’ve dug into Callender’s analysis following the supporting paper trails, I’ve learned why, and how.

A whole lot of things that once were federal and state crimes and civil rights violations have been legalized by Congress through legislative, statutory revisions to the United States Code, signed by US Presidents, and implemented at the administrative, regulatory level by the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense through the Code of Federal Regulations.

I’ve reported on those findings in small bits and pieces, connecting the laws to court cases, executive orders, guidance documents for industry and researchers, academic papers, intellectual property patents, regulatory amendments, psychological manipulation programs, geopolitical developments and other facts as they’ve floated across my field of view.

I think the critical decay began around 1983, when the ‘public health emergencies’ section was added to the 1944 Public Health Service Act, although the 1944 PHSA itself represented an additional militarization of human medicine in the United States.

Most of the worst laws have been passed since 2000 – just before 9/11 and the US Department of Defense false flag anthrax attacks.

They are listed below, with links to the full text of each law, and a short summary of what I understand about how each one fits into the overall scheme.

The basic goal of the architects, which has been achieved, was to set up legal conditions in which all governing power in the United States could be automatically transferred from the citizens and the three Constitutional branches into the two hands of the Health and Human Services Secretary, effective at the moment the HHS Secretary himself declared a public health emergency, legally transforming free citizens into enslaved subjects.

That happened on Jan. 31, 2020, in effect as of Jan. 27, 2020 through the present day.

In other words: Congress and US Presidents legalized and funded the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. government and the American people, through a massive domestic bioterrorism program relabeled as a public health program, conducted by the HHS Secretary and Secretary of Defense on behalf of the World Health Organization and its financial backers.

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Related reporting:

 

On 12 November in a Side Note near the top of More SARS-CoV-2 and spike protein biology, immunology and vaccinology from Nov. 3 CHD panel discussion with Jonathan Couey, Robert Malone and others, Katherine Watt crystalizes the mind-bending inculcated, media-reinforced, self-blinding mechanism beguiling many people and preventing breaking through the mind-fog to actually see clearly what is happening in our world.

I was on a legal strategy and information call yesterday with Sasha Latypova and some others, and the discussion turned briefly to how difficult it is for many people to wrap their minds around the horrific truth that the US Government, functioning as a front company and project manager for the owners of the Bank of for International Settlements [†][††], is working to ruin and prematurely end the lives billions of people around the world, and has made a very good start to achieving the mass murder campaign’s goals since launching Covid-19.

Sasha, who was born in the Soviet Union, observed that it really shouldn’t be hard to understand, because it’s one of the most common features of governments. Sooner or later, most of them kill off a lot of their own people, and a lot of people of other countries.

It’s a blind spot for many Americans mostly because Americans don’t learn about the government-run genocides of history in public schools, because that information is deliberately suppressed in American public school curricula.

I’m a product of American public schools; I graduated from high school in 1992. My history classes never discussed Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian or other government-sponsored genocides of the 20th century, or the persecutions and pogroms of previous centuries. They’re not discussed in most high school curricula now.

My ability to see these things is largely due to anomalies of my home life as a child and adolescent. God put me into the world as the daughter of a culturally mixed marriage (European mother, American father). I grew up in a psychologically-abusive family system my parents created and maintained, due to the forces that shaped them when they grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Those forces shaped my strong critical thinking and bullshit-detection skills. I had to learn through painful, personal experience to see through lies, gaslighting and suppression of relevant counter-evidence, in order to maximize my odds of emotional and cognitive survival.

I’ve worked with evidence of diabolical, deadly government corruption daily for many years, so I have a deep understanding of how real it is. I still have to fight against the inculcated, media-reinforced self-blinding mechanism that recurrently nudges me back toward “this can’t be real.”

Sasha’s point being: government-run mass murder is not at all an inconceivable crime.

It’s one of the most regularly-conceived and executed crimes in human history.

I’ll add to her point: this may be one of the first times that a government, [or dozens of governments simultaneously, coordinated and/or coerced by the US Government,] has launched a population cull under the public health pretext and manipulated the available information so thoroughly that a large proportion of the victims have, in a seemingly-voluntary way, committed individual acts of suicide and homicide, under the instilled delusion that the cultural project is about protecting self, others, “Grandma” and the public good.

But that too, can be seen as the logical progression from the Holocausts, genocides, and abortion campaigns launched last century, which each began under the pretext that the healthy, wanted members of society could and should protect themselves from the dangers posed by undesirables, by rounding up and killing the undesirables and leaving only the wanted people alive to carry civilization forward.

by Dave Ratcliffe

Open Letter to Oliver Stone On the Wisdom of Pursuing Nuclear Power

In mid-May, I heard Oliver Stone interviewed by Lex Fridman focusing on Ukraine. Near the beginning, for 12+ minutes, Oliver Stone talks about nuclear power and a new documentary he is finishing up. As he puts it, "nuclear energy is going to end the dominance of oil ... because it’s the only sane way for the world to proceed."

I was intrigued and concerned about Stone's reasoning for advocating nuclear power and decided to write an Open Letter to present a differing perspective on the risks and consequences of pursuing nuclear power as our species' primary energy source. The Open Letter is here: https://ratical.org/radiation/OpenLetterToOliverStoneOnN-power.html

My hope is to provoke reconsideration about the unlimited energy so many of us are used to having at our fingertips and, as Richard Heinberg wrote in 2003, how "each [U.S.] American has the equivalent of over 150 “energy slaves” working for us 24 hours each day. In energy terms, each middle-class American is living a lifestyle so lavish as to make nearly any sultan or potentate in history swoon with envy."

Grateful to be present at this unique rite-of-passage moment in our species’ creative evolutionary adaptation into our post-industrial-mind epoch.

For the children, all our other than human kin, and all that follow us here,
Dave Ratcliffe
Assistant Director
Museum of Hidden History
Hidden History Center
Donations are tax-deductible

 

by Dave Ratcliffe

Fukushima:
Penultimate Expression of Human Folly
and The Final Failure

On 23 July 2022 the following appeared on page A4 the Boston Globe:

Additional references to this approval are reported in teleSUR, 072222 and China.org.cn, 072322. The situation of ever-increasing contaminated radioactive water at Fukushima was reported in 2019 by The Asahi Shimbun in “Contaminated water tanks in Fukushima will be full in 3 years” with the following graph:As of 2022, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has now received its Get Out Of Jail Free card from the Japanese government to prepare for one of The Final Failures of this catastrophe without end. Dumping continually increasing levels of water containing a cocktail of radioactive elements including tritium, iodine, ruthenium, rhodium, antimony, tellurium, cobalt and strontium into the Pacific Ocean will increase contamination of the biosphere to incalculable levels.

Dr Ian Fairlie is an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment with a degree in radiation biology and doctoral studies concerning the radiological effects of nuclear fuel processing. In May 2022 Dr Fairlie updated a 2019 analysis of the implications of TEPCO's drive to dump massive amounts of tritiated water at Fukushima into the sea from the radioactive water that has been created for more than a decade from the process of cooling the melted reactors that remain extremely radioactive. (In February 2017, TEPCO announced radiation levels inside No. 2 reactor were estimated to be up to 650 sieverts per hour.) Over a million tons of tritium-contaminated water has been created—and increasing by approximately 300 tons a day—resulting in about one thousand storage tanks on-site at Fukushima. Citing many opinions in the debate about the pros and cons of dumping tritium into the ocean, “most [being] either incorrect or uninformed or both,” Dr Fairlie’s focus is “to rectify matters and the put discussion on a more sound technical basis.”

An introduction to this analysis is provided in a Beyond Nuclear repost  dated 22 May 2022.

On May 18, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority gave its initial approval for Tokyo Electric Power to release radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, claiming that there are no safety concerns. But science disagrees with this conclusion. In a September 2019 blog entry, now updated by the author, Dr. Ian Fairlie looks at the implications of dumping largely tritiated water into the sea and whether there are any viable alternatives.

Should TEPCO / Japanese Government Dump Tritium-Contaminated Water from Fukushima into the Sea?

At the present time, over a million tonnes of tritium-contaminated water are being held in about a thousand tanks at the site of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power station in Japan.  This is being added to at the rate of ~300 tonnes a day from the water being pumped to keep cool the melted nuclear fuels from the three destroyed reactors at Fukushima. Therefore new tanks are having to be built each week to cope with the influx.

These problems constitute a sharp reminder to the world’s media that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima did not end in 2011 and is continuing with no end in sight.

Recently TEPCO / Japanese Government have been proposing to dilute, then dump, some or all of these tritium-contaminated waters from Fukushima into the sea off the coast of Japan. This has been opposed by Japanese fishermen and environment groups.

There has been quite a media debate, especially in Japan, about the merits and demerits of dumping tritium into the sea. It remains to be seen whether the newly-appointed (and reportedly anti-nuclear) Japanese Environment Minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, will agree to these proposals.

Many opinions have been voiced in the debate: most are either incorrect or uninformed or both. This post aims to rectify matters and put the discussion on a more sound technical basis – especially for Mr Koizumi’s information.

  1. TEPCO / Japanese Government have argued that, as tritium is naturally-occurring, it is OK to discharge more of it. This argument is partly correct but misleading. It is true that tritium is created in the stratosphere by cosmic ray bombardment but the argument that because it exists naturally it’s OK to dump more is false. For example, dioxins, furans and ozone are all highly toxic and occur naturally, but dumping more of them into the environment would be regarded as anti-social and to be avoided.
  2. TEPCO / Japanese Government have argued that it is safe to dump tritium because it already exists in the sea. Yes, tritium is there but at low concentrations of a few becquerels per litre (Bq/l). But the tritium concentrations in the holding tanks at Fukushima are typically about a megabecquerel per litre (MBq/l). In layman terms, that’s about a million times more concentrated.
  3. TEPCO / Japanese Government have argued coastal nuclear plants routinely dump water that contains tritium into the ocean. Yes, this does (regrettably) occur as their cooling waters become tritiated during their transits of reactor cooling circuits. But two wrongs do not make a right. Moreover the annual amounts are small compared with what is being proposed at Fukushima. A one GW(e) BWR reactor typically releases about a terabecquerel (trillion Bq) of tritium to sea annually. But Fukushima’s tanks hold about one petabecquerel (PBq or a thousand trillion Bq) of tritium – ie a thousand times more. A much bigger problem.
  4. Readers may well ask where is all this tritium coming from? Most (or maybe all) the tritium will come from the concrete structures of the ruined Fukushima reactor buildings. After ~40 years’ operation they are extremely contaminated with tritium.  (Recall that tritium is both an activation product and a tertiary fission product of nuclear fission.) And, yes, this is the case for all decommissioned (and by corollary, existing) reactors: their concrete structures are all highly contaminated with tritium. The older the station, the more contaminated it is. In my view, this problem constitutes an argument for not building more nuclear power stations: at the end of their lives, all reactor hulks will remain radioactive for over 100 years
  5. What about other radioactive contaminants? Reports are emerging that the tank waters also remain contaminated with other nuclides such as caesium-137 and especially strontium-90. This is due to the poor performance of Hitachi’s Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS).  Their concentrations are much lower than the tritium concentrations but they are still unacceptably high.
  6. For example, on 16 October 2018, “Japan plans to flush Fukushima water ‘containing radioactive material above permitted levels’ into the ocean,” the UK Daily Telegraph stated, “Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) which runs the plant, has until recently claimed that the only significant contaminant in the water is safe levels of tritium, which can be found in small amounts in drinking water, but is dangerous in large amounts. The [Japanese] government has promised that all other radioactive material [apart from tritium] is being reduced to “non-detect” levels by the sophisticated (ALPS). Documents provided to The Telegraph by a source in the Japanese government suggest, however, that the ALPS has consistently failed to eliminate a cocktail of other radioactive elements, including iodine, ruthenium, rhodium, antimony, tellurium, cobalt and strontium.” That adds to reports of a study by the regional Kahoko Shinpo newspaper which it said confirmed that levels of iodine-129 and ruthenium-106 exceeded acceptable levels in 45 samples out of 84 in 2017.  Iodine 129 has a half-life of 15.7 million years and can cause cancer of the thyroid; ruthenium 106 is produced by nuclear fission and high doses can be toxic and carcinogenic when ingested. In late September 2017, TEPCO was forced to admit that around 80 per cent of the water stored at the Fukushima site still contains radioactive substances above legal levels after the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry held public hearings in Tokyo and Fukushima at which local residents and fishermen protested against the plans. It admitted that levels of strontium 90, for example, are more than 100 times above legally permitted levels in 65,000 tons of water that has been through the ALPS cleansing system and are 20,000 times above levels set by the government in several storage tanks at the site.”

 

So what is to be done?

First of all, the ALPS system has to be drastically improved. After that, some observers have argued that, ideally, the tritium should be separated out of the tank waters. Some isotopic tritium removal technologies have been proposed, eg by the IAEA, but the picture is complicated. The only operating facility I’m aware of, is located at Darlington near Toronto in Canada, though secret military separation facilities may exist in the US or France.

However the Darlington facility was extremely difficult and expensive to construct (~12 years to build and to get working properly), and its operation consumes large amounts of electricity obtained from the Darlington nuclear power station nearby. Its raison d’etre is to recover very expensive deuterium for Canadian heavy water reactors.

Other proposed remedies will probably be more expensive. One problem is basic physics. The tritium is in the form of tritiated water, which is effectively the same as water itself, so that chemical separation or filtration methods simply do not work so that chemical separation or filtration methods simply do not work. Another problem is inefficiency: with isotope separation, one would have to put the source hydrogen through thousands of times to get even small amounts of separated non-radioactive hydrogen. A third problem is that hydrogen, as the smallest element, is notoriously difficult to contain, so that gaseous tritium emissions would be very large each year.

None of these technologies is recommended as a solution for Japan: any such facility would release large amounts of tritium gas and tritiated water vapour to air each year, as occurs at Darlington. Tritium gas is quickly converted to tritiated water vapour in the environment. The inhalation of tritiated water vapour from any mooted Japanese facility would likely result in higher collective doses than the ingestion of tritiated sea food, were the tritium to be dumped in the sea.

I recommend neither of these proposed solutions.

There are no easy answers here. Barring a miraculous technical discovery which is unlikely, I think TEPCO/Japanese Gov’t will have to buy more land and keep on building more holding tanks to allow for tritium decay to take place. Ten half-lives for tritium is 123 years: that’s how long these tanks will have to last – at least.

This will allow time not only for tritium to decay, but also for politicians to reflect on the wisdom of their support for nuclear power.

 

by Dave Ratcliffe

Why The West’s Strategy in Ukraine Is So Dangerous

On April 7th the American Committee for US-RUSSIA ACCORD (ACURA) hosted Professor John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago in conversation with ACURA members Katrina vanden Heuvel, former Russian Ambassador Jack Matlock, Professor Nicolai Petro, and Professor Marlene Laruelle on Why The West’s Strategy in Ukraine Is So Dangerous.  The 1-hour, 9-minute film covers the critical analysis necessary to apprehend the fundamental dynamics of what has caused and led to the current situation in Ukraine.  The film, with summary, mp3s, sources, and transcript excerpts is at: https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MearsheimerUkraine.html.

In January 2018 I received a number of recommendations from Marty "History Will Not Absolve Us" Schotz, focused on the accelerating new Cold War between the U.S. and Russia including Johnson's Russia List and analysis by historian Stephen Cohen (Rest In Peace, 1938-2020).

In March 2015 Cohen, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University and professor emeritus of Russian studies and history at New York University, spoke at the annual US-Russia Forum in Washington, DC, and in April published an expanded version of his remarks in “Why We Must Return to the US-Russian Parity Principle - The choice is either a New Détente or a more perilous Cold War.” Cohen wrote the following introductory paragraph seven years ago:

When I spoke at this forum nine months ago, in June 2014, I warned that the Ukrainian crisis was the worst US-Russian confrontation in many decades. It had already plunged us into a new (or renewed) Cold War potentially even more perilous than its forty-year US-Soviet predecessor because the epicenter of this one was on Russia’s borders; because it lacked the stabilizing rules developed during the preceding Cold War; and because, unlike before, there was no significant opposition to it in the American political-media establishment. I also warned that we might soon be closer to actual war with Russia than we had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. In 2014, Foreign Affairs published his essay: “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault, The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin”.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is President of the American Committee for US-RUSSIA ACCORD.  In her April 7th introduction to Professor Mearsheimer, she described how he has “been receiving some 1,000 emails a day which I think speaks to the interest in, perhaps not agreeing with Professor Mearsheimer but hearing a different point of view, an alternative point of view, a counter to what we hear on our screens and on our computers. It’s very important to have that debate.” She went on to express the critical importance of “that alternative point of view which is missing in our media and politics.”

Professor Mearsheimer begins by noting that, “what we have here is a war between the United States and Russia and there’s no end in sight.” “Hubris” from the Greek hybris “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” is cited as causing the downfall of ancient Athens. The Encyclopedia Britannica states the term as meaning "the intentional use of violence to humiliate or degrade. The word’s connotation changed over time, and hubris came to be defined as overweening presumption that leads a person to disregard the divinely fixed limits on human action in an ordered cosmos.” 

In his April 7th remarks, Professor of Political Science Nicolai Petro spoke briefly about Tragedy and International Relations theory, highlighting three general characteristics: “the loss of the ability to communicate, the loss of a common legal framework, and the loss of shared values.” The third loss is especially toxic:

Our third tragedy has a rather long and distinguished pedigree. I am referring to the fruits of the poisoned tree of American exceptionalism, which causes many Americans to emphasize the values that divide us from the rest of the world, rather than the many interests that we share. This is what has transformed us from a mere nation state, into an all-judging Nation Church that, as Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, unites primarily to worship at the altar of American Greatness.  Since 2003, American officials have consistently chastised Russia for her “breach of values,” but make no mistake—other states are never far behind.

In the present circumstance our greatest need is to renew the ability to communicate, to truly listen and exchange points of view to perceive a greater range of perspective and understanding.  Professor Petro addresses this in his evaluation of our current impasse of engaging in genuine dialogue:

The loss of the ability to communicate precludes dialogue. Indeed many politicians and diplomats no longer understand what dialogue means. They think it means indicating what one wants to the other party. But that is what a prison warden does to his inmates. In fact, the logos in dialogos means “to gather together” and is sometimes rendered as “relationship.” The famous opening line of the Gospel according to St. John could thus be read: “In the beginning was the Relationship ...”

The proper objective of dialogue is not a momentary accord, but a profound self-transformation that establishes a new relationship with the Enemy. Classical Greek tragedy is thus, quintessentially, a series of dialogues in which we expose our own tragic flaws to ourselves. This exposure is meant to bring about catharsis—a purging of the soul that restores healthy perspective by removing hatred. Our reluctant willingness to sign technical agreements with other countries, while emphasizing our values disagreements with them, is the exact opposite of dialogue.

Our most basic need today is a profound self-transformation that establishes a new relationship with the Enemy. Projection of our own tragic flaws onto “the other” will continue to increase the tension and possibility of an inexorable slide into oblivion for all of eternity. 

The U.S. narrative promoting hatred of the Enemy as the source of all evil and criminal intent—broadcast 24/7 by government officials, mainstream and many so-called alternative media—is an indicator of the supremely dangerous war propaganda pushing all life on Mother Earth over the brink and into the abyss of nuclear extinction. If the dire warnings of souls including Cohen, Mearsheimer, and Petro—exercising their intelligence and intuitive wisdom with clarity and coherence—are not heeded, Martin Luther King’s understanding, spoken on the eve of his assassination, will be our species’ epitaph:

Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. Now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence in this world, it is non-violence or non-existence.

 

READ COMPLETE SOURCE

 

Grateful to be present at this unique rite-of-passage moment in our species’ creative evolutionary adaptation into our post-industrial-mind epoch.

For the children, all our other than human kin, and all that follow us here,
Dave Ratcliffe

“Respect the Earth as our Mother and have a Sacred Regard for All Living Things.”
Steven Newcomb, Toward a Paradigm Change for Mother Earth (2015)

 

by Dave Ratcliffe

Conscience and The Nuremberg Code
Informed Consent, Censorship, and Inalienable Rights

by David T. Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 19 Oct 2021
ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/Conscience-and-The-Nuremberg-Code.html

“Use your mind, to speak your own truth as coherently as possible, and repeat that truth over and over. It’s all one person can really do.”

 
I keep coming back to John Trudell’s appreciation of what it means to be a human being, and from that, to understand how this world we belong to by right of birth actually operates.
 

Begun in early Spring, this a reflection of the truth as I see it by following one's conscience in terms of The Nuremberg Code on Permissible Medical Experiments. Enacted in 1947, the war crimes tribunal judgement at Nuremberg established 10 principles which must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts. The incomprehensible human suffering during World War II resulted in a foundational code of medical ethics formulated during the Nuremberg Doctors Trial to ensure that human beings would never again be subjected to involuntary medical experimentation and procedures.

Each one of us must decide for our self how we perceive our world and what we choose to act upon, stand up for and stand with. Having and exercising the freedom to think and the freedom to choose is what it’s all about. I appreciate how Charles Eisenstein frames this: “Don’t let me or anyone else tell you what to do or when to do it. We are fighting for the end of the time of dictating each other’s choices, thinking I know better than you what you should be doing.”

The word conscience, which means our ability to judge our own actions according to right and wrong, is derived from the Latin word conscientia, meaning a knowing together with another or others. That word in turn derives from con (cum) = with + scire = to know. Thus conscience, which usually refers to one person’s conscience, also involves a sharing with others, a knowing with. The word science as we understand it today, also derives from scire, and in the 19th century before the modern understanding of science developed, the word science simply meant knowledge. Furthermore, the word consciousness also has the same root, suggesting the connection between conscience and consciousness and the social nature of the sense of right and wrong and shared human consciousness.

I see the present day crisis as what my parent’s generation experienced from the 1930s up to the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. Prior to that, it was not at all clear that (unknown at the time) Wall Street’s sock puppet in Germany would be defeated. Today, while billionaires continue making a killing during the fear pandemic, it is not at all clear that the push by oligarchs and plutocrats—including the World Economic Forum crowd, G7 Central Bankers, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Rockefeller Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Rothschilds & Pope Francis, WHO, etc., to implement the kind of “Great Reset” the Klaus Schwabs of the world intend—will be defeated AND a truly equalitarian framework will be implemented by and for our SINGLE, SUPREMELY GIFTED HUMAN FAMILY.

The concerted suppression of any perspective and analysis contrary to the official narrative is the actual source of increasing danger. Censorship is the ultimate tool to smother and extinguish the free exchange of ideas and from this the freedom to think. Robert Heinlein captured the essential power exercised by censorship in his 1949 novel, Revolt in 2010. The story revolved around efforts to overthrow a 100-year theocratic totalitarian United States of America:

I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Adopting today’s corporate empire medical dogma approaches a religious acceptance of sacrificing an array of inalienable rights—including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom to conduct commerce, and from these, freedom of thought—for the false promise of being safe via monetized media and big tech information cartels’ 24/7 fear programming. It is painful and wrenching to confront any situation where one has been misled by sources one has implicitly trusted. The concerted and increasing suppression of the free flow of information, is the Red Alert indicator Benjamin Franklin warned of when he wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” George Carlin channelled Ben Franklin on this.

By increments We the People are colluding in the implementation of tyranny through tacitly accepting increasing suppression of freedom of speech resulting in the subjugation of freedom of thought. Dictated by public policy and political directives and enforced by ersatz truth cutouts, the agendas being executed are qualifiable Crimes Against Humanity when evaluating the risks and consequences posed by the experimental injections.

In 1986 Congress granted pharmaceutical corporations complete blanket legal immunity from liability for injury caused by licensed vaccines right up to the present day with Covid-19 experimental injections including Moderna and Pfizer experimental gene therapies in phase 3 clinical trials for more than 10 months. The actual ongoing effects and repercussions of these injections will never be acknowledged by the truth cutouts:

Post-vaccination deaths reported to the US VAERS system, 1990 to 2021 ( OpenVAERS)

That these official reporting systems of Covid vaccine injury and fatality data—estimated to account for only ONE PERCENT of harms caused—are being uniformly ignored, censored, and suppressed both by corporate media and corporate truth police, reveals one level of the totalitarian agenda of subjugation and domination being pursued by what Catherine Austin Fitts calls Mr. Global. More on this below.

The America’s Frontline Doctors lawsuit—Plaintiffs Motion For Preliminary Injunction - Against Use of COVID Vaccine in Children: AMERICA’S FRONTLINE DOCTORS, et al., Plaintiffs, vs. XAVIER BECERRA, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, et al., Defendants, filed in U.S. District Court For The Northern District of Alabama, 07/19/21 (pp. 67)—includes the 2-page DECLARATION OF Jane Doe wherein is stated:

... I am a computer programmer with subject matter expertise in the healthcare data analytics field, an honor that allows me access to Medicare and Medicaid data maintained by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). I earned a B.S. degree in Mathematics and have, over the last 25 years, developed over 100 distinct healthcare fraud detection algorithms, both in the public and private sector. It has been my mission to protect federal tax dollars by preventing and detecting healthcare fraud, a process which leads to both recovery of overpayments and law enforcement leads. A large part of what I do is focused on the quality of care for the beneficiary; for example, I identify providers who prescribe an egregious amount of opioids to patients with a history of overdosing. Instead of titrating the patient off of opioids, they prescribe more, oftentimes leading to patient death. When the COVID-19 vaccine clearly became associated with patient death and harm, I was naturally inclined to investigate the matter.
   It is my professional estimate that VAERS (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) database, while extremely useful, is under-reported by a conservative factor of at least 5. On July 9, 2021, there were 9,048 deaths reported in VAERS. I verified these numbers by collating all of the data from VAERS myself, not relying on a third party to report them. In tandem, I queried data from CMS medical claims with regard to vaccines and patient deaths, and have assessed that the deaths occurring within 3 days of vaccination are higher than those reported in VAERS by a factor of at least 5. This would indicate the true number of vaccine-related deaths was at least 45,000. Put in perspective, the swine flu vaccine was taken off the market which only resulted in 53 deaths.
   I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct.
   Executed on July 12, 2021.

In addition to government recording systems, the following sources bear witness to people suffering injuries as well as deaths from these experimental pharmaceutical injections:

Steve Kirsch is the founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund. He has made public the 100 questions and 161 slides prepared for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting held on 27 Oct 2021. The committee endorsed Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, over the objections of Kirsch and multiple scientists and physicians. Among the questions Kirsch asked was: How could committee members do a risk-benefit analysis with Pfizer’s COVID vaccine if they did not know the under-reporting factor (URF) of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)? “This is extremely, extremely important,” Kirsch told the committee. “You have been assuming it has been one. It is not one. Using a URF of 41, which is calculated using CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] methodology, we find more than 300,000 excess deaths in VAERS. If the vaccine didn’t kill these people, what did?”

The horrors of World War II are being magnified globally now. Following their consciences, Holocaust survivors and their descendants delivered a letter, We For Humanity, to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on 25 August 2021. Signed by Concentration Camp survivors, their sons, and daughters, and grandchildren, including persons of goodwill and conscience, it began with:

We, the survivors of the atrocities committed against humanity during the Second World War, feel bound to follow our conscience and write this letter.

It is obvious to us that another holocaust of greater magnitude is taking place before our eyes. The majority of the world’s populace do not yet realize what is happening, for magnitude of an organized crime such as this is beyond their scope of experience. We, however, know. We remember the name Josef Mengele. Some of us have personal memories. We experience a déjà vu that is so horrifying that we rise to shield our poor fellow humans. The threatened innocents now include children, and even infants.

In just four months, the COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all available vaccines combined from mid-1997 until the end of 2013 – a period of 15.5 years. And people affected worst are between 18 and 64 years old – the group which was not in the Covid statistics.

We call upon you to stop this ungodly medical experiment on humankind immediately.

What you call “vaccination” against SARS-CoV-2 is in truth a blasphemic encroachment into nature. Never before has immunization of the entire planet been accomplished by delivering a synthetic mRNA into the human body. It is a medical experiment to which the Nuremberg Code must be applied. The 10 ethical principles in this document represents a foundational code of medical ethics that was formulated during the Nuremberg Doctors Trial to ensure that human beings will never again be subjected to involuntary medical experimentation & procedures.

The letter goes on to cite Principles 1, 6, and 10 of the Nuremberg Code. The terrible horrors of unconscionable human suffering and death carried out by other human beings resulted in the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and from this, the Nuremberg Code was created as a bulwark against such madness ever occurring again.

We find ourselves living in a time described by the meaning of the word from the Hopi language, ko.yaa.nis.qatsi: noun 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

Thousands of years old, Divide and Conquer has kept our species—our unitary single human family we all belong to—separated and fragmented within false divisions: male against female, young against old, "black"-"red"-"yellow"-"white" against "white"/"yellow"/"red"/"black", "left" against "right", "democrat" against "republican", "conservative" against "liberal", one faith against another, "vaxed" against "unvaxed" ... How many separations can you name and identify? What about rich against poor? Is that the same divide? Think feudalism, the Doctrine of Discovery, colonialism, slavery, imperialism.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world ...”. One definition of the term inalienable rights is rights that are not transferable or capable of being taken away or nullified. Inalienable rights are our divine birthright bestowed upon each of us by our Creator. Michael Swinwood reminds all of us are divine beings having a physical experience, how dogma has been put on everyone to take away the idea of our own divinity and put it in the hands of someone else, and that tyranny started with that idea of laying dogma on people and pulling everyone away from their own relationship to spirit:

What we have to come to grips with as human beings as individuals, is our own connection to spirit. Because everything that you see everywhere happens because of spirit. It’s the breath of the Divine that allows everything to grow and breathe and be. And so within that, that’s a very powerful force, much more powerful than the tyrannical force of this insane consciousness that is imposed on humanity. It represents the dark force. And what we represent in the end is the light force.

All of us who can dispel the hypnotic effects of corporate empire coercive dogma have a duty to our conscience, to our fellow humans, and to all who follow us here to resist and collapse the imposition of tyranny causing harms exponentially greater than the Second World War. Non-violent resistance following in footsteps of such souls as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, David Dellinger, Cesar Chavez, Sister Megan Rice, John Schuchardt, James Douglass is the most creative, constructive way to resist, oppose, and stop the increasing brutality of unfolding coercive totalitarianism and police state intimidation and violence. In the final analysis we answer to our Creator for what we express in these lives we’ve been given, here in this place at this time. It is always our decision how we perceive our world and what we choose to act upon, stand up for and stand with.

The Nuremberg Code is a map, created in response to incomprehensible suffering caused in a struggle where many people fought back for the sake of free will and freedom to choose one’s course without coercion. Evermore relevant and vital today, it is a light—remembering and honoring the sacrifices made—to shine the way for our species’ creative evolutionary adaptation into our post-industrial-mind conscience and experience of lived meaning. All our descendants yet to be born and explore their own lives look to and depend upon us here, now to champion their inalienable right to self-determination and the freedom to choose. We have a profound response ability to protect and defend their future lives in the choices we make and actions we take now.

“ 
 A friend wrote me about her dilemma. She owns a company employing hundreds of people and is a staunch critic of that-which-shall-not-be-named. She said she has been trying to fly under the radar until sanity is restored, but with looming mandates for large employers, the radar will soon turn on her. What will she do?

 

I will share with you the inner monologue that her note provoked in me.

 

* * *

 

A return to sanity? Sanity will not be restored for us by others. We are the ones that must restore it. We cannot wait for others to be brave on our behalf. We are here in this initiatory moment to choose who we are. The choice of whether to capitulate or to act is a declaration: Who am I to be? What is the world to be? Am I serious enough about my vision for the world to risk my security for it? That is not a challenge meant to goad myself into action. It is simply true. Through my choice, I will know myself as I am. I will become as I choose. The rehearsal is over.

 

* * *

 

Many people trust the authorities and willingly comply with their rules. They face no dilemma, no initiatory moment, no self-defining world-creating choice point, not yet.

 

But as the authorities’ narratives devolve into absurdity and their rules devolve into oppression, more and more of us face this choice:

 

To live your truth out loud, or
To live by a lie, consoling yourself with secret protest.
To do what you know is right, or
To cave in to the pressure, consoling yourself with words you don’t believe. “I had no choice.”

 

Yes, for many of us it has come to such a choice. The rehearsal is over.

 

* * *

 

The message is not “Act now.” Do not accept pressure, coercion, bribes or threats. Don’t let me or anyone else tell you what to do or when to do it. We are fighting for the end of the time of dictating each other’s choices, thinking I know better than you what you should be doing.

 

I trust you to know the right choice. Being trusted is an invitation to be trustworthy. Trusting you to be brave, you become brave, just as I become brave when people see me as brave. Bravery is not a personal achievement; it is a community function. It is a contagion. It is a mutual awakening.

 

Bravery means acting when you know it is time to act. It isn’t the convenient time. It is simply the time. It is the moment of, “Enough!” It is the moment of, “It is time to do something about it.” It is the moment of truth over consequences.

 

In that moment you act not because it is brave, but because it is necessary. You recognize that the moment has come. Why now? Because it is time. No other reason is needed.

 

Bravery means doing what is yours to do, when it is time to do it. Denying that knowing locks your heart in a box. Life becomes a chore. Despair descends like a fog, turning everything gray. Hope withers, leaving behind the dry empty husk called wishful thinking. And you face the dread of living the rest of life knowing, “I did not do what I was here to do, when the moment came and it counted.”

The rehearsal is over.

—Charles Eisenstein, 9 Oct 2021, The Rehearsal is Over
 
 

by Dave Ratcliffe

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty on The Pentagon Papers

I interviewed Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty in May 1989. Published in 1999, Understanding Special Operations is the transcript and account of that interview.

Concerning the release 50 years ago of The Pentagon Papers, the following provides Colonel Prouty’s first-hand experience and knowledge of this work including the actual sources of documents contained therein. As Prouty writes, “For example, despite their volume—nearly four thousand documents—there are remarkably few that actually bear the signature of military officers. In fact, many of those that carry the signature of a military officer, or that refer to military officers, make reference to such men as Edward G. Lansdale, who actually worked for the CIA while serving in a cover assignment with the military. When such papers are removed from the ‘military’ or ‘Pentagon’ categorization, what remains is a nonmilitary and non-Pentagon collection. For the serious and honest historian, this becomes an important distinction. To be truly ‘Pentagon’ Papers, the majority of them, at least, ought to have been written there.”

In this book, I have used various editions of the Pentagon Papers as reference material. They are useful and they are quite accurate as far as individual documents go, but they are dangerous in the hands of those who do not have the experience or the other sources required to validate and balance their content. This is because their true source was only marginally the Pentagon and because the clever selection of those documents by the compilers removed many important papers. This neglect of key documents served to reduce the value of those that remained to tell the story of the Vietnam War. From the beginning, the Pentagon Papers were a compilation of documents designed to paint President John F. Kennedy as the villain of the story, and to shield the role of the CIA....

This massive compilation of official documents produced by Secretary McNamara’s “task force...to study the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present” (1969) totally ignored the assassination [of President Kennedy].

The Pentagon Papers say simply, “Lodge confers with the President,” as though it were just another day in the life of a President. Which President? Didn’t that matter? What a way to dismiss Kennedy and his tragic death! This entire section of the Pentagon Papers, which were commissioned to be a complete account of the history of the Vietnam war period, cannot find a word to say about that assassination. This official history simply skips all mention of the death of the President of the United States and tells the story of the death of Diem as though it had occurred in a vacuum.

L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy
(Birch Lane Press, 1992, First Edition)
pages 272 - 283

As mentioned earlier, Diem had made it quite clear what his goals with the Strategic Hamlet program were. His position did not jibe with those who wanted to escalate the war in Indochina and who were not at all interested in the introduction of an ancient form of self-government into the battle-scarred countryside.

On top of this came Kennedy’s desire to get the United States out of Indochina by the end of 1965, as evidenced by his orchestration of a series of events such as the Krulak-Mendenhall visit to Vietnam in September 1963. By late summer, and certainly by the time of the McNamara-Taylor trip, closely held plans had progressed for the removal of the Diems from Saigon. President Kennedy had reached the decision that the United States should do all it could to train, equip, and finance the government of South Vietnam to fight its own war, but that this would be done for someone other than Ngo Dinh Diem.

On the same day that the President received this McNamara-Taylor report, Gen. Tran Van Don had his first “accidental” (it had been carefully planned) meeting with the CIA’s Lt. Col. Lucien Conein at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon. This was a meeting of great significance, and one that to this day has never been properly explained. General Don was the commander of the South Vietnamese army. He had been born and educated in France and had served in the French army during World War II. He and Conein were well acquainted.

Nearly twenty years later, in 1963, the CIA designated Conein, one of its most valuable agents in the Far East, to meet with his old friend of eighteen years, Cen. Tran Van Don, to arrange for the ouster of President Diem. Only ten years earlier, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and Conein had worked hard to get Ngo Dinh Diem started as the newly assigned president of South Vietnam.

Conein’s task was to stay close enough to key Vietnamese to assure them that the United States would not interfere with their plan to move in as soon as President Diem had left Saigon, and to keep Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Conein’s own CIA associates informed.

The plan prepared by the United States had been carefully drawn to leave Diem no alternative except to leave on this scheduled trip. There was much discussion and argument among members of the Kennedy administration, who knew of the President’s intention to oust Diem once he had left the country. With Madame Nhu and Archbishop Thuc already in Europe, Diem and his brother were to follow to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

The evacuation plan, carefully orchestrated under Kennedy’s direction, broke down, and Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were murdered. There have been many accounts of this coup d’etat. They do not tell the role that Kennedy played in the story, and many were created to cover the real plan and to protect those Vietnamese who had worked closely with the administration.

I was on duty in the Joint Chiefs of Staff section of the Pentagon on the day of the coup d’etat. My immediate boss, General Krulak, knew the full details of the plan to remove Diem from the scene by flying him and his brother out of Saigon. Krulak remained in contact with the White House as developments in Saigon were relayed. I can recall clearly the absolute shock in our offices when it was learned that Diem had not left on the proffered aircraft for Europe.

One of the most important narratives of this event was written by Edward G. Lansdale in his autobiography In the Midst of Wars. Few Americans, if any, knew Ngo Dinh Diem and the situation in Vietnam from 1954-68 better than Ed Lansdale. He wrote:

As the prisons filled up with political opponents, as the older nationalist parties went underground, with the body politics fractured, Communist political cadre became active throughout South Vietnam, recruiting followers for action against a government held together mainly by the Can Lao elite rather than by popular support. The reaped whirlwind finally arrived in November 1963, when the nationalist opposition erupted violently, imprisoning many of the Can Loa and killing Diem, Nhu, and others. It was heartbreaking to be an onlooker to this tragic bit of history.

It was some time before the news became known that Diem had fled to Cholon and been captured and killed there. This news was flashed around the world; this was the story that everyone heard. The public never heard of the planned flight to Europe that the Kennedy administration had arranged for him.

Thus it was that the file of routine cable traffic between Washington and Saigon eventually became known with the release and publication of the Pentagon Papers. This is how it happened that Howard Hunt was able to locate certain top-level messages to and from the White House and Ambassador Lodge in Saigon that contained information referring to “highest authority”—the cable traffic code for President Kennedy.

None of these messages contained any reference to a plot to kill President Diem and his brother or came even close to it. Concealed within these messages were carefully worded phrases that gave Ambassador Lodge the information he needed in order to direct all participants into action and to begin the careful removal of the two brothers to Europe by commercial aircraft.

According to information that came out during the Watergate hearings, those files that had been forged to smear President Kennedy were put in Hunt’s White House safe, where they remained until discovered by investigators later.

There is much about this episode that has become important upon review. There are those who have been so violently opposed to Jack Kennedy and all that he stood for that they have stooped to all kinds of sordid activities to smear him while he was alive, to attack his brother Bobby while he was still alive, and to hound Sen. Edward Kennedy to this day. Nixon’s gratuitous reference to Kennedy’s “complicity in the murder of Diem” after a decade of silence on that subject speaks for itself. The efforts of Howard Hunt and Chuck Colson (both employees of the White House at the time) to dig up old files in order to besmirch the memory of President Kennedy provide another example.

In an ominous way, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate episodes were cut from the same fabric, and most important, their exposure was a direct outgrowth of the nationwide dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War. Because the development of the war in Indochina had been spread out so long, since 1945, and because most of the events that brought about this terrible form of modern genocide in the name of “anti-communism” or “containment” were buried in deep secrecy or not even available in written records, Robert S. McNamara, then secretary of defense, directed, on June 17, 1967 that a task force be formed to collate and study the history of U. S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present.

This project, which produced thousands of documents of all kinds from many sources, was the primary source of that group of more than four thousand documents that were surreptitiously released to various news media and called the Pentagon Papers. Almost four years later, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among others, started the serialization of the Pentagon Papers. Few people have been more articulate on the subject than the then senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel:

The Pentagon Papers reveal the inner workings of a government bureaucracy set up to defend this country, but now out of control, managing an international empire by garrisoning American troops around the world. It created an artificial client state in South Vietnam, lamented its unpopularity among its own people, eventually encouraged the overthrow of that government, and then supported a series of military dictators who served their own ends, and at times our government’s ends, but never the cause of their own people.

In his brilliant introduction the senator included an extract from the works of the English novelist and historian, H. G. Wells, who once wrote:

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession” and its days are numbered.

The publication of the Pentagon Papers became an event unique in American history. One day after their publication had begun in the New York Times, I received a call from the British Broadcasting Corporation requesting that I travel to London to participate in a series of programs, live on prime-time TV, with Daniel Ellsberg. I did travel to London and did take part in a daily series on the subject, but Ellsberg did not participate in the broadcasts, because his lawyer advised him not to leave the country at that time.

In this book, I have used various editions of the Pentagon Papers as reference material. They are useful and they are quite accurate as far as individual documents go, but they are dangerous in the hands of those who do not have the experience or the other sources required to validate and balance their content. This is because their true source was only marginally the Pentagon and because the clever selection of those documents by the compilers removed many important papers. This neglect of key documents served to reduce the value of those that remained to tell the story of the Vietnam War. From the beginning, the Pentagon Papers were a compilation of documents designed to paint President John F. Kennedy as the villain of the story, and to shield the role of the CIA.

This vast stack of papers has been labeled the Pentagon Papers, but that is a misnomer. It is quite true that most of them were found in certain highly classified files in the Pentagon, but they were functionally limited files. For example, despite their volume—nearly four thousand documents—there are remarkably few that actually bear the signature of military officers. In fact, many of those that carry the signature of a military officer, or that refer to military officers, make reference to such men as Edward G. Lansdale, who actually worked for the CIA while serving in a cover assignment with the military. When such papers are removed from the “military” or “Pentagon” categorization, what remains is a nonmilitary and non-Pentagon collection. For the serious and honest historian, this becomes an important distinction. To be truly “Pentagon” Papers, the majority of them, at least, ought to have been written there.

In a letter to the then secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, dated January 15, 1969, Leslie H. Gelb, director of the Study Task Force that assembled the Pentagon Papers, said: “In the beginning, Mr. McNamara gave the task force full access to OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] files, and the task force received access to CIA materials, and some use of State Department cables and memoranda. We had no access to the White House files.”

Despite this disclaimer, there are many White House files in the Pentagon Papers—and it was this group of documents, in fact, that was the source of the anti-Kennedy forgeries.

The files from which most of these papers were obtained were in that section of the Office of the Secretary of Defense called International Security Affairs. Although this office was in the Pentagon, it was lightly staffed with military officers, and most of its activities concerned other government departments and agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House. That is why its files consisted of papers that originated outside the Pentagon, giving the Pentagon Papers production an entirely nonmilitary slant.

Another reason for caution regarding the utilization of the Pentagon Papers as history is that, as Gelb said, “These outstanding people [those who worked on the task force] came from everywhere—the military services, State, OSD, and the ‘think tanks.’ Some came for a month, for three months, for six months . . . in all, we had thirty-six professionals working on these studies, with an average of four months per man.”

That says it all! They had become experts in four months!

John Foster Dulles, formerly secretary of state, once declared that one of the most complicated periods in this nation’s history began in Indochina on September 2, 1945. There is no way that this group, averaging “four months per man” in its studies in 1967, and 1968, was going to be qualified to present a true and accurate account of that war by the compilation of a scattering of papers that contained bits and pieces of the story.

This reveals one of my greatest misgivings concerning the accuracy of the study. There are altogether too many important papers that did not get included in this study, too many that were absolutely crucial to an understanding of the origins of, and reasons for, this war.

This has been a complaint of historians who have attempted to teach the facts of this war. They have found that the history book accounts of it have been written by writers who were not there, who had little or nothing to do with it—or, conversely, that they have been written by those who were there, but who were there for a one-year tour of duty, usually in the post-1965 period. Few of these writers have had the comprehensive experience that is a prerequisite to understanding that type of contemporary history.

Regarding the Pentagon Papers themselves, Senator Gravel wrote:

The Papers do not support our good intentions. The Papers prove that, from the beginning, the war has been an American war, serving to perpetuate American military power in Asia. Peace has never been on the American agenda for Southeast Asia. Neither we nor the South Vietnamese have been masters of our Southeast Asian policy; we have been its victims, as the leaders of America sought to preserve their reputation for toughness and determination.

He added:

The elaborate secrecy precautions, the carefully contrived subterfuges, the precisely orchestrated press leaks, were intended not to deceive “the other side,” but to keep the American public in the dark....For too long they have been forced to subsist on a diet of half-truths or deliberate deceit by executives who consider the people of the Congress as adversaries. [Senator Gravel wrote these words in August 1971 for the introduction to The Pentagon Papers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). They were timely and applicable then. The reader cannot help but note that they are equally timely and applicable to the more recent Iranian “hostages for arms” controversy and even to Desert Storm.]

It is important to understand the Pentagon Papers’ subtle anti-Kennedy slant. Nothing reveals this bias more than the following extract taken from the section “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, May-November 1963.”

At the end of a crucial summary of the most momentous ninety-day period in modern American history, from August 22 to November 22, 1963, this is what the authors of the Pentagon Papers had to say:

After having delayed an appropriate period, the U.S. recognized the new government on November 8. As the euphoria wore off, however, the real gravity of the economic situation and the lack of expertise in the new government became apparent to both Vietnamese and American officials. The deterioration of the military situation and the Strategic Hamlet program also came more and more clearly into perspective.

These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu conference on November 20 when [Henry Cabot] Lodge and the country team [from Vietnam] met with [Dean] Rusk, [Robert] McNamara, [Maxwell] Taylor, [George] Ball, and [McGeorge] Bundy. But the meeting ended inconclusively. After Lodge had conferred with the President a few days later in Washington, the White House tried to pull together some conclusions and offer some guidance for our continuing and now deeper involvement in Vietnam. The instructions contained in NSAM 273, however, did not reflect the truly dire situation as it was to come to light in succeeding weeks. The reappraisals forced by the new information would swiftly make it irrelevant as it was overtaken by events.

Recall what had been going on during that month of November 1963. President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother had been murdered, and the administration of South Vietnam had been placed in the hands of Gen. Duong Van “Big” Minh. Then, in one of the strangest scenarios of recent history, most of the members of the Kennedy cabinet had flown to Honolulu, together, for that November 20 series of conferences. The full cabinet meeting—even the secretary of agriculture was there—in Hawaii was to be followed by a flight to Tokyo on November 22. Again, almost all of the Kennedy cabinet members were on that flight to Tokyo. They were on that aircraft bound for Tokyo when they learned that President Kennedy had been shot dead in Dallas. Upon receipt of that stunning news, they ordered the plane to return directly to Hawaii and, almost immediately, on to Washington.

But consider here the strange and impersonal words used by this “official history.” The Pentagon Papers, in its long section on the events of that tragic period, ends its own narrative report of those events by saying: “Put probably more important, the deterioration of the military situation of the Vietnamese position....”

What could have been the basis for that conclusion? What caused the Papers’ authors to say that in 1968? Let’s look at the record from the pages of their own work:

1) On September 11, 1963, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had cabled to Secretary Rusk saying:
“I do not doubt the military judgment that the war in the countryside is going well now.”

2) On September 16, 1963, President Kennedy had written a personal letter to President Ngo Dinh Diem in which he said:
“...the contest against the Communists in the last year and one half has gradually but steadily turned in our favor.”

3) On September 29, 1963, Secretary McNamara and General Taylor met for three hours with President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. As reported, President Diem said:
“The war was going well, thanks in large measure to the strategic hamlets program...” Diem concluded his optimistic presentation by noting that “although the war was going well, much remained to be done in the Delta area” [where most of the Tonkinese had been sent].

4)( Then we have the McNamara/Taylor “Trip Report” of October 2, 1963, that became the body of NSAM #263 on October 11, 1963, that concludes:

#1. “The military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress.

#2. “A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.

#3. “...the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.

#6. “...We believe the U.S. part of the task can be completed by the end of 1965.”

News of this “White House Report” was splashed across the front page of the U.S. armed forces Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper of October 4, 1963, in banner headlines: U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.

These are quotes taken from official documents of that time, all taking an optimistic view of the war by the leaders closest to it and including statements by President Kennedy and President Diem. The official Kennedy White House policy document, National Security Action Memorandum #263, was dated October 11, 1963, and there is no evidence that the situation, as perceived by Kennedy and his closest advisers, had changed over the next month. General Krulak was as close to the President and his policy as he had ever been, and I worked directly with General Krulak on the Joint Staff. We never heard of any changes in plans from the White House.

Just four days after Kennedy’s death and less than sixty days after Kennedy published NSAM #263, which visualized the Vietnamization of the war and the return of all American personnel by the end of 1965, Lyndon Johnson and most of the JFK cabinet viewed the situation in an entirely different light. In Johnson’s NSAM #273 they saw the military situation deteriorating (“the deterioration of...the Strategic Hamlet program”) and all of a sudden saw the program as a failure. (“These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu Conference on November 20....”)

This is a remarkable statement. On that date, John Kennedy was still alive and President of the United States. Yet this report says that his cabinet had been assembled in Honolulu to discuss “these topics”—the very same topics of NSAM #273, dated November 26, and a vital step on the way to a total reversal of Kennedy’s own policy, as stated in the Taylor-McNamara report and in NSAM #263, dated October 2, 1963. The total reversal was completed with the publication of NSAM #288, March 26, 1964.

This situation cannot be treated lightly. How did it happen that the Kennedy cabinet had traveled to Hawaii at precisely the same time Kennedy was touring in Texas? How did it happen that the subject of discussion in Hawaii, before JFK was killed, was a strange agenda that would not come up in the White House until after he had been murdered? Who could have known, beforehand, that this new—non-Kennedy—agenda would be needed in the White House because Kennedy would no longer be President?

Is there any possibility that the “powers that be” who planned and executed the Kennedy assassination had also been able to get the Kennedy cabinet out of the country and to have them conferring in Hawaii on an agenda that would be put before President Lyndon Johnson just four days after Kennedy’s death?

President Kennedy would not have sent his cabinet to Hawaii to discuss that agenda. He had issued his own agenda for Vietnam on October 11, 1963, and he had no reason to change it. More than that, he had no reason at all to send them all to Hawaii for such a conference. It is never good practice for a President to have key members of his cabinet out of town while he is on an extended trip. Why was the cabinet in Hawaii? Who ordered the cabinet members there? If JFK had no reason to send them to Hawaii, who did, and why?

Keep in mind, through this series of vitally important questions, that we are piling circumstance upon circumstance. It is the body of circumstantial evidence that proves the existence of conspiracy.

As soon as the Honolulu conference broke up, these same cabinet members departed from Hawaii on an unprecedented trip to Japan. No one has explained why the Kennedy cabinet was ordered to Japan at that time.

This trip to Japan was not some casual event. Someone had arranged it with care. A reading of newspapers from late November 1963 reveals that extracts of speeches supposedly given by some of these cabinet officers in Japan were made available and then printed, for example, even in the Washington, D.C., Star.

We all know now that these cabinet officers did not reach Japan and that their VIP aircraft returned to Hawaii. Why would newspapers in the United States print extracts of their speeches as though they actually had gone to Japan and delivered those speeches? Who had set this trip up so meticulously that even such details as the press releases appeared to validate the presence of the cabinet members in Japan when in fact they never went there?

Continuing this account of the period, the chronology prepared by the authors of the Pentagon Papers lists the following:

22. November 1963: Lodge confers with the President. Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.

23. November 1963 NSAM #273: Drawing together the results of the Honolulu Conference, and Lodge’s meeting with the President, NSAM #273 reaffirms the U.S. commitment to defeat the VC in South Vietnam....

These are astounding statements, considering that they were written sometime in 1968, when everyone knew that the most important fact of those two days was the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This massive compilation of official documents produced by Secretary McNamara’s “task force...to study the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present” (1969) totally ignored the assassination.

The Pentagon Papers say simply, “Lodge confers with the President,” as though it were just another day in the life of a President. Which President? Didn’t that matter? What a way to dismiss Kennedy and his tragic death! This entire section of the Pentagon Papers, which were commissioned to be a complete account of the history of the Vietnam war period, cannot find a word to say about that assassination. This official history simply skips all mention of the death of the President of the United States and tells the story of the death of Diem as though it had occurred in a vacuum.

Why do you suppose Leslie Gelb, director of the Pentagon Papers Study Task Force, chose to close his “Letter of Transmittal of the Study” with this quote from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “This is a world of chance, free will, and necessity—all interweavingly working together as one; chance by turn rules either and has the last featuring blow at events.”

Then, as if to introduce some reality into the study, he closes with this remarkable thought: “Our studies have tried to reflect this thought; inevitably in the organizing and writing process, they appear to assign more and less to men and free will than was the case.” This sounds more and more like the “God throws the dice” syndrome. What could Les Gelb have been thinking about when he saw “chance” taking “the last featuring blow at events?” Did the Vietnam War happen by “chance”? Was President John E Kennedy killed by “chance”? That takes a strange view of history. When Oliver Stone’s movie asked, “Why was Kennedy killed?” I doubt that anyone in the audience would have answered, “By chance.”

This “Letter of Transmittal” of January 15, 1969, was addressed to Clark M. Clifford, secretary of defense and a man we have quoted frequently during this work.

These questions and the subjects they unfold are the things of which assassinations and coups d’etat are made. The plotters worked out their plans in detail as they moved to take over the government that Kennedy had taken from them. As a result, every other public official became a pawn on that master chess board. Assassinations and coups d’etat permeate and threaten all levels of society.

by Dave Ratcliffe

Chernobyl: Understanding Consequences of Playing With The Poison Fire

This is the opening segment of a massive archive of research and data concerning the ongoing catastrophe affecting all Life on Mother Earth that commenced with the detonation of the Unit 4 Reactor at Chernobyl in 1986. The photograph above is from Chernobyl Legacy by Paul Fusco (1996).
“Photographer Paul Fusco faces the dark legacy of Chernobyl, focusing on the horrifying human consequences of the event that is now 20 years in the past. Fusco’s work forces us to remember an important nightmare that we would forget at the peril of our mortality and our future. Chernobyl Legacy is Fusco’s elegy to these innocent souls, and a haunting reminder to the rest of the world that anything man-made can [and will] eventually break.”
The complete archive is here: https://ratical.org/radiation/Chernobyl/

    “For millions of people on this planet, the explosion of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 divided life into two parts: before and after. The Chernobyl catastrophe was the occasion for technological adventurism and heroism on the part of the “liquidators,” the personnel who worked at the site attempting to contain the escaping radiation, and, in our view, for cowardice on the part of people in public life who were afraid to warn the population of the unimaginable threat to innocent victims. Chernobyl has become synonymous with human suffering and has brought new words into our lives—Chernobyl liquidators, children of Chernobyl, Chernobyl AIDs, Chernobyl contamination, Chernobyl heart, Chernobyl dust, and Chernobyl collar (thyroid disease), etc.
    “For the past 23 years it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundredfold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe. Chernobyl fallout covered the entire Northern Hemisphere.”

—Introduction: The Difficult Truth about Chernobyl, page 1,
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,
Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko,
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 1181, December 2009, 335 Pages.

Surface ground deposition of caesium-137 released in Europe after the Chernobyl accident.

© EC/IGCE Roshydromet (Russia)/Minchernobyl (Ukraine)/Belhydromet (Belarus), 1998; adapted from European Union 1998
Introduction

In early morning 26 April 1986 the number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine went critical and detonated, releasing more than 9 million terabecquerels (TBq) of radionuclides over much (>200,000 km2) of Europe and eastern Russia. In the September 1986 American Chemical Society Symposium on Low-Level Radiation, John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., in describing what was at that time, The Single Most Serious Industrial Accident Ever, stated:

It is correct to say that a single event—the Chernobyl accident—has caused between 600,000 and a million cases of cancer and leukemia. The radio-cesiums are on the ground, and humans are committed to receive the doses from them. To the extent that a share of the dose has already been received, a share of the malignancies is already underway, even though they will not become manifest, clinically, for years.
     The Chernobyl accident obviously represents the most serious industrial tragedy in the history of mankind, and by a very large factor....
     We can predict with high confidence that an honest study of the proposed population sample will simply confirm—but decades from now—the magnitude of radiation production of cancer, a magnitude we know quite well prior to such a study.
     The existing human evidence provides a solid basis for assessing the Chernobyl toll. The credible lower-limit of malignancies from the cesium fallout is approximately 640,000 cases, and a credible upper-limit is probably 1,600,000 malignancies. Only additional and reliable measurements of cesium fallout, made by independent scientists, can narrow the range.

Twenty-three years later, Dr. Gofman’s projections were borne out with the compendium release of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment which concluded 985,000 people died between 1986 and 2004 as a result of the release into the biosphere of radioactive matter from the detonation of Unit 4’s reactor core. Janette D. Sherman, M.D., a physician and toxicologist, specializing in chemicals and nuclear radiation that cause cancer and birth defects, was asked by senior author Alexey Yablokov to be the Contributing Editor for an English edition because the original was published in Russian. As she wrote in 2011:

On the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl, WHO and the IAEA published the “Chernobyl Forum Report,” mentioning only 350 sources, mainly from the English literature, while in reality there are more than 30,000 publications and up to 170,000 sources that address the consequences of Chernobyl. By 2006, there had been 10 major publications concerning Chernobyl published in England, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the United States, with scientists currently publishing new data.
     After waiting two decades for the findings of Chernobyl to be recognized by the United Nations, three scientists, Alexey Yablokov, Vasily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko undertook the task to collect, abstract and translate some 5,000 articles reported by multiple scientists, who observed first-hand the effects from the fallout. These had been published largely in Slavic languages and not previously available in translation. The result was Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009.

Radioactive contamination of the biosphere, of course, affected all Life forms, not just human as is demonstrated in reports of studies by Dr. Timothy Mousseau[1][2] and colleagues[1][2], among others (e.g., Chapter III. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for the Environment from Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment). A significant barrier preventing addressing the health impacts and concerns by adequately responding to the agony and suffering caused by the catastrophe at Chernobyl is from nuclear proponents who still promote the deceptions that nuclear power is safe, clean, carbon free, and a viable solution to the deepening ecological crisis including global overheat. As Dr. Yuri Bandazhevsky wrote in 2018:

Thirty-three years have passed since the accident at Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, yet the seriousness of this event for all humanity is still of concern. During the whole post-accident period, the nuclear lobby made many efforts to weaken public interest in this event....
          The Institute for Congenital and Hereditary Diseases, Ministry of Health of the Republic of Belarus, directed by Prof. G. I. Lazjuk, Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences, also assessed the effect of a radiation factor occurred as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident on the prenatal development of human embryos. Gennady Ilyich established this unique Institute back in Soviet times, and over the years, along with his highly qualified students and colleagues he studied the morphological manifestations (congenital defects) of human genetic disorders, also in the context of consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. The Institute was closed down in the beginning of the 21st century, as the nuclear lobby was afraid of results of its activities....
          Almost every inhabitant of the Republic of Belarus has experienced radiation exposure directly. So it is no surprise that there has been an increase in cardiovascular diseases and cancers due to this, including among children of the second post-Chernobyl generation.
          That is why the country’s leadership should have asked for serious humanitarian aid and support of the world community in the 1990s and not refused it, as it was done. A method of assessment of radiation doses received by the population and individuals formed the basis for governmental decisions to render assistance to the population with a view to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. A concept based on results of effects of external radiation exposure on humans was used. The influence of incorporated radionuclides on separate organs and systems was hardly considered. However, millions of people have suffered and are suffering currently because radioactive elements have been entering and are entering their body causing damage to vital organs and systems. These people are not recognized as victims of the Chernobyl disaster at the state level.
          This is the main problem of Chernobyl and its negative impact on human health in the long term.

(Emphasis added.)

Iniencephaly
Iniencephaly as a result of radiation exposure. Photograph reproduced with permission of Dr Wladimir Wertelecki. See Dr. Wertelecki’s film presentation, Congenital Malformations in Rivne Polossia and the Chernobyl Accident, given at March 2013 Symposium: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident).

Critical Analysis

“We did not yet possess a system of imagination, analogies, words or experiences for the catastrophe of Chernobyl.”

The Chernobyl and Fukushima catastrophes have caused, are causing, and will continue to cause living and dying agony and nightmares for untold generations and millenia. The purpose of this archive of historically significant source materials is to assist younger people—and as many others as possible—in learning about our true history, how our world actually operates, and re-mind how we must collectively weigh the consequences of every decision our species makes, reflecting on and being informed by the vital numinous awareness that all Life is sacred, and that the needs of the future, of all life yet unborn, must guide every choice and decision made in the present.

A good introduction to this history is “Chernobyl: Consequences of the catastrophe 25 years later” by Janette D. Sherman, M.D., and Alexey V. Yablokov, Ph.D.

Chronological Timeline of Included Sources
2019      
2018   
2017   
2016   
2015    		2014      
2013   
2012   
2011   
2010    		2009      
2008   
2006   
2003   
2001    		2000      
1998   
1997   
1996   
1995    		1993
1992
1991
1990
1986
On the second sarcophagus covering Reactor 4 ...
and the longevity of lethal Radioactivity After Chernobyl Accident that will last for hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of years

The arch is a vast project – “the largest movable structure to be built in the history of mankind”, as one of those involved has called it.

    But critics argue it is a little more than a carpet to sweep the main problem under, because the fuel within the wrecked reactor will simply be left as it is.

    “The new, stable and environmentally safe structure will contain the remains of the reactor for at least 100 years,” says a press release from the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which will disburse the 840 million euros ($1bn) the arch is expected to cost.

    “During (this) time an even longer-lasting solution to the Chernobyl problem must be found.”

    To Mykhailo Khodorivsky, a member of a consortium which in the 1990s investigated ways of removing the fuel, this seems like storing up problems for the future.

    The arch will last for 100 to 300 years, while the fuel will remain deadly for thousands.

    “A new confinement is necessary, but it does not tackle the root of the problem,” Mr Khodorivsky says. “Our conclusion was that in 100 years the problem will not get simpler.”

    For one thing, some of the plutonium will be decaying into americium, which is even more hazardous for health.

    “If nothing is done with the fuel, and the arch is contaminated from the inside, what do you do when it gets old?” he asks. “Build an even bigger one on top?”
from: “Chernobyl’s continuing hazards,” Stephen Mulvey, BBC News, 25 apr 2006

by Dave Ratcliffe

Advocacy for Humanity and Citizen’s Diplomacy: Global Network Russia Study Tour Declaration

This is an excerpt of the original compilation. Read the full account here.  

Numbers don’t lie. Russia is a country of just 144 million people, with average income of $400 a month, or $13 a day. Their annual military budget is $60 billion and decreasing. The U.S. military budget is $800 billion and increasing. The U.S. has more than 800 bases encircling the world.

The following is produced by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (space4peace.org). A wonder full example of people not waiting for someone in a white house, or otherwise so-called authority, to get on with directly communicating, connecting, and caring for our entire single, irreplaceable human family for the sake of the future of all alive now and yet to be born.

Global Network Russia Study Tour DeclarationOur 24-person study tour delegation included people from the US, England, Nepal and Russia. We met in Moscow and then journeyed to Crimea and St. Petersburg. Our friends from Nepal have created a GN chapter in Kathmandu and have been trying to get Visas to our annual GN conferences for the past three years. This time they finally made it. This declaration was written with input from several members of the group under the direction of John Schuchardt (2nd from right in the back) from Massachusetts.

(May 9, 2019) As an international delegation to the Russian Federation of 24 individuals, we have visited Moscow, St. Petersburg, and three cities in Crimea (April 25–May 9).

We came to learn, to listen, and to build a bridge of friendship through citizen diplomacy. We have had daily important meetings with Russian journalists, activists, academics, ordinary citizens, and gained firsthand information and historical perspective. The Russian people met us with warmth, openness, and generosity.

We came because we are alarmed by the U.S. demonization of Russia and the NATO provocations which have created a world of increasing military confrontation, with the U.S. even threatening the first-use of nuclear weapons.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 US/NATO has encircled Russia with bases, so-called ‘missile defense’ systems, escalating ‘war games’ right on its borders, and with warships increasing military operations in the Black Sea.

Numbers don’t lie. Russia is a country of just 144 million people, with average income of $400 a month, or $13 a day. Their annual military budget is $60 billion and decreasing. The U.S. military budget is $800 billion and increasing. The U.S. has more than 800 bases encircling the world.

The Russian people love their country with a warmth and depth of love that is difficult for [U.S.] Americans to comprehend. It is a love born of centuries of history, culture and religious faith, and a love born of the suffering and sacrifice of the repeated defense of their Motherland.

On Victory Day, May 9 in St. Petersburg, we walked in solidarity with 1.2 million family members and survivors of the 1941-1945 defense of the former Soviet Union when Americans and Russians were friends and allies against the German fascist invasion and occupation. (It should be remembered that 28 million Soviet citizens lost their lives during the fight against the fascists.)

Our message is a call to end the demonization of Russia, remove US/NATO warships from the Black Sea, end the escalating war maneuvers on Russia’s borders, and build bridges of diplomacy and friendship.

 

1.2 million citizens joined the May 9 march through St. Petersburg. Most of the people carried photos of their relatives who died or survived the harrowing invasion and 900-day siege of St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) by the German fascists. All over Russia on May 9 similar marches were held—not to celebrate but to remember.

 

Inside the very moving Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow hangs this painting of American and Soviet soldiers, then WWII allies. The Cold War ended that short-lived friendship between our two nations.

 

Following our participation in the May Day parade in Simferopol we were invited to a conference that gave us a chance to hear from local leaders and four members of our delegation also spoke. Afterwards the Global Network board convener Dave Webb (UK) signed a peace, friendship and cooperation agreement with Yan Epshtein, Director of the Crimean NGO called the Black Sea Association for International Cooperation. This NGO supports the 175 ethnic groups in Crimea to ensure their unique cultures are not lost. During the May Day parade many different costumes were worn representing the many distinct cultures in Crimea.

 

While in Yalta, Crimea some of our group met with several Soviet- era veterans. In this photo Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran Will Griffin (Pennsylvania) poses with 93-year old WW II veteran who spoke to us about his strong desire for peace with the west and also told of his deep concern about climate change.

 

Co-sponsored by:
No to War—No to NATO www.no-to-nato.org
US Peace Council www.uspeacouncil.org
Veterans For Peace www.VeteransForPeace.org
Women's International League for Peace & Freedom www.wilpfus.org
WorldBeyondWar.org

 

by Dave Ratcliffe

BREAKDOWN = Strange Fruit of Capitalism’s Invisible Army: A Heritage of Stone ++ BREAKTHRU = Shifting from Domination to Partnership via eXtinction Rebellion

The following is an excerpt from the complete work at: https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/DtoPviaXR.html

breakdown = Strange Fruit of Capitalism’s Invisible Army: A Heritage of Stone
breakthru = Shifting from Domination to Partnership via eXtinction Rebellion
by David T. Ratcliffe
rat haus reality press
7 May 2019

    The day may come when time seems to hang suspended, when weeds cover our deserted streets and when the only sound is the arrogant squeak of the rat swarms, eager now for their turn at evolution. Someone from a distant place, searching through our artifacts, may chance upon a human skull. Perhaps he will pick it up, looking through the goggled sockets at the dusty hollow where a handful of gray tissue once took the measure of the universe.
    “Alas, poor man,” he might say. “A fellow of most infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. Where are your gibbets now? Your thumbscrews and your gallows? Your treasured hates and your fond cruelties?
    “What happened to your disinterested millions? Your uncommitted and uninvolved, your preoccupied and bored? Where are their private horizons and their mirrored worlds of self? Where is their splendid indifference today?
    “Now you can be silent forever.”

—Jim Garrison, A Heritage of Stone (1970)

“The transnationally operating LAWCAP in the early ’50s resurrected the twenty-year-dead FINCAP and its “capitalist” world and left only its American-flag-flying storefronts in the U.S.A. to cover its comprehensive financial withdrawal from the U.S.A. LAWCAP silently and invisibly moved capitalism’s big-time operations into the any-legally-propitious-elsewhere. With its invisibly operating CIA (Capitalism’s Invisible Army) LAWCAP exploited the unwitting citizens of the U.S.A. in order—they hoped—to destroy socialism.”

—Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (1981)

“Cultures are human creations, and you can play a role in accelerating the shift from domination to partnership worldwide. Let us break out of the domination trance that makes insensitivity, violence, and cruelty seem inevitable, and use our enormous capacities for creativity—as well as for consciousness and caring—to build the missing foundations for that more peaceful and equitable partnership future we so want and need—for ourselves, our children, and generations to come.”

—Riane Eisler, “Breaking Out of the Domination Trance” (2018)

“eXtinction Rebellion goes against all the rules. It’s a nonviolent direct action movement that says we are in danger of going extinct. And we are already sending many other species extinct at a colossal rate. We need to rebel against this. Any government which is committing us to possible extinction and exterminating ecosystems right, left, and center, is not a legitimate government. We don’t have to obey its rules anymore. We can nonviolently rebel against it.”

—Rupert Read, The Ethics of Climate Change (2019)

 

Before Words

What does it mean that we in the U.S. live in a society of illegitimate corporate governance wedded to denial of increasing global overheat, one of the vilest deceptions in history, and where, as formal federal policy, our unaccountable U.S. Intelligence Police, operate beyond the strictures of law and daily commit several hundred crimes including terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights? A 1996 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report titled “IC 21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century” confirmed criminal actions are carried out every day by the Clandestine Service (CS) of the CIA: “The CS is the only part of the IC, indeed of the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world ... A safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO (Directorate of Operations) officers engage in highly illegal activities.” As John Kelly wrote about this, “The report was the first official admission and definition of CIA covert operations as crimes which the committee, without explanation, equated with essential national security operations. In other words, the national security of the United States requires that more than one hundred thousand extremely serious crimes be committed every year.” This essay explores a primary root of this mind-bending criminal government lawlessness being a direct result and outgrowth of the assassination of President Kennedy by key elements within our Intelligence Police. Since 11-22-63 our law-breaking, illegitimate government continues to exponentially expand its death operations via policies carried out by CIA and Pentagon-based funding. For our species to survive this evolutionary moment, it is imperative to accelerate the shift from this collapsing dominator system to one based on partnership. As co-creators of our own evolution, we can choose the alternative of breakthrough rather than breakdown: that through employing all our imagination, intelligence, creativity, intuition, and wits, we can establish participatory structures of politics, economics, science, and spirituality to move into a Life respecting and caring partnership world. A critical factor in all this is the decades-in-the-making burning fuse of global overheat that must be addressed NOW if Life on Mother Earth that is not yet extinct—including our human family—has any chance to survive, much less further evolve....

 

A striking feature of our culture includes the specific set of illusions presented by commercial print and broadcast media which promote a chimerical representation of reality through omission, distortion, lack of contextual analysis, and disinforming opinion stated as obvious, incontestable fact. It is always our choice what lens we adopt to view the world and our place in it. Jim Garrison’s 1970 book, A Heritage of Stone provides a rich source of our genuine history, free of the inhumanity and suffocating control exercised by national security state managers whose allegiance is to LAWCAP’s U.S. Corporate Empire State. In a truly democratic society, this work would be a primary high school textbook for students to understand how their world actually works given prior struggles by those dedicated to finding and establishing ways for all on Earth to live in peaceful coexistence.

As District Attorney of New Orleans, Jim Garrison was the only Law Enforcement Officer in the United States who had the conscience, sense of duty, and the courage to conduct a trial for the assassination of President John Kennedy. Regarding what he learned from 1967 to 1969, “my staff and I found ourselves on a collision course with the most powerful force in the country. The battle that followed over those three years exposed us to a part of America that we never dreamed existed. It became very clear to me that this was no longer the country that I had grown up in as a boy. It was a nation controlled by an enormous domestic intelligence organization which would seek to discredit or destroy anyone who dared challenge its authority.” (p. 19)

 

By 1964, upon release of the Warren Report, “The Fix” was already in regarding commandeering U.S. media outlets to parrot the IP’s party line of a “random,” “senseless,” act of a “lone assassin” fairy tale for the extra-constitutional firing of the 35th President. By late 1963, the craft of deception as practiced by U.S. Intelligence Police, graduated to a supreme level of command whereby the actual authors of the crime released the carefully assembled cover story—notwithstanding such patently gross violations of fact as Newton’s second law of motion—to commercial press outlets within hours and days of the murder to hide the true sponsorship and operational control of the crime. However as Garrison pointed out in A Heritage of Stone, Chapter 2, Ornaments, if the assassination was the result of a lone drifter Marxist as the government proclaimed, why lock up all the sensitive evidence for a veritable lifetime?...

Given that the official pronouncement of Lee Oswald being the single, lone assassin came from the White House Situation Room to the new Presidential Party before 6pm on November 22, it can be understood how the extensive cover story which had been carefully planned, directed, and carried out long before November 1963, was now ready to go live and turn up the house lights on the decoy, first by fingering the prearranged scapegoat and then by murdering him before he was able to blow up the façade and tell what he knew about the situation from his vantage point.

A commission genuinely seeking the truth about the assassination would have taken particular note of the remarkable associations of this itinerant warehouse worker. In Dallas, his most frequent companion was an extremely sophisticated man who spoke five languages and had been an intelligence agent for France in World War II.[20] Obviously, such an individual would be most useful to contemporary American intelligence.... (p. 80)

In short, a committee of ordinary citizens exercising common sense would have necessarily perceived the accumulation of indications pointing to linkage of the accused assassin to an intelligence apparatus. Thus, a serious inquiry would have considered the implications of such an intelligence employee being on the scene. As the evidence began to indicate that he could not have accomplished the assassination but was instead set up to be trapped and blamed for it, there would have followed an inquiry into the involvement of the intelligence apparatus itself in the assassination. No committee of Americans would be happy with the task of having to confront this stark implication, but it is unlikely that men free of government connections would conclude that the truth should be hidden and the people fooled in the name of national security.... (pp. 81-2)

The intelligence activity itself is made to appear to be activity unrelated to intelligence by the use of a cover story. When a mission, such as an assassination, is accomplished, false sponsors are created by prior planning and by the planting of leads trailing away from the intelligence organization. These are to draw the attention of investigators who might want to dig below the surface of the cover story. At a more superficial level, an abundance of leads is planted by prior planning to provide a frame-up of the preselected scapegoat.

Our invisible government begins and ends with deception. Perceiving this deception is the key to understanding how the assassination of President Kennedy was accomplished. Understanding the motivation for his assassination is the key to understanding what has happened to America.... (p. 90)

The commission’s reluctance to examine information that Oswald was a government agent is reminiscent of its refusal to look at the photographs of the President’s autopsy. It is troublesome to imagine which would have been more injurious to the commission: finding out that the President was killed by a shot from the front when the scapegoat was positioned in the rear, or discovering that the official assassin was an undercover employee of a government agency when he had been governmentally depicted as a leftist.... (p. 117)

The resourcefulness of modern operational intelligence should not be underestimated. Facts are turned into cobwebs in the minds of witnesses while things which never happened are structured into occurrences which can be cemented into history. (p. 130)

The result of the cover story’s debut, relayed from the White House to the new Presidential Party on the afternoon of November 22, would become the historical record cemented into history with the October 1964 fraudulent Warren Report.

When a counterrevolution is occurring and a low level intelligence employee is being prepared for sacrifice so as to draw attention away from the power elite who are sponsoring a forthcoming assassination, it is perhaps old-fashioned to speak of the injustice being dealt to the scapegoat. Nevertheless, the observation must be made that the inhumanity demonstrated by the CIA, and the masked eminences for whom it performed was scarcely distinguishable from the inhumanity of the totalitarian governments which we had defeated in World War II. Actually we had taken the place of the totalitarian powers whom we had defeated. After our two decades as a superstate during the years of the cold war, we had become a different country.... (p. 133)

Employing subpoena power to conduct sworn testimony and the gathering and analysis of documentary evidence, the 1969 trial mounted by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office contributed greatly to the historical record of essential facts concerning the assassination of the President. The autopsy of President Kennedy was never completed. Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck—one of the three pathologists present at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of November 22—stated under oath that Admirals and Generals who were present said they were in charge, and forbade the autopsy doctors from removing and examining the organs of the neck. In this way the neck wound, which had been identified by the civilian doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas as a probable wound of entrance, was never dissected in the sham autopsy controlled by U.S. Military Officers in Washington.

A probe of the neck wound by the pathologists in the Bethesda autopsy room would have revealed which way the truth lay. In retrospect, it is easy to see that this is precisely why no such probe was allowed. The neck wound, with the indications of a bullet entry but no exit, was to be the last real hurdle for the planners of the assassination. Afterward, the federal government would seize control of the investigation despite its complete lack of legal authority and that would be, in more ways than one, the end of the matter.

It was five years after the assassination, at the trial in New Orleans, that it was learned that the neck wound had never been examined. Colonel Pierre Finck, the Army pathologist subpoenaed from Washington by the District Attorney’s office, had an unusually retentive memory for details. He simply could not recall, however, who ordered the pathologists not to look at the wound in the neck.[25] Considering the historic occasion and considering the implications of such a strange order, one would think he would never forget the man who issued this command. Finck was able to remember that the man was a general and that he was not a doctor, but then his memory failed him. (p. 166)

“The inhumanity demonstrated by the CIA, and the masked eminences for whom it performed was scarcely distinguishable from the inhumanity of the totalitarian governments which we had defeated in World War II. Actually we had taken the place of the totalitarian powers whom we had defeated.”

The Opening of Chapter 1 and the book’s final Chapter, “The War Machine” presents an effective summation of why the 35th President of the United States was killed by elements of his own government. It is refreshing and liberating to read the simple, honest, direct language, so lacking in the present day looking-glass reality produced daily by the bulk of monetized corporate state media.

A man who cares too much for the human race may find himself living in a hostile environment. His humanity may not be regarded as dangerous so long as his voice cannot be heard by too many people, but if he is eloquent, or if he is in a position to affect the affairs of the nation, then his humanity will be regarded by some men as a great threat.

After the United States ascended to the position of the most powerful military nation in history, in the midst of its accumulation of the most effective death machinery of all time, there occurred the accident of the election of a President who regarded the entire human race with compassion. By the time this happened, the cold war had become our major industry, and the Central Intelligence Agency had become the clandestine arm of our military-industrial complex and, in the process, the most effective assassination machine in the world. (p. 25)

A successful coup d’état affects not merely the history of a nation but may change its power structure. With the killing of John Kennedy, the very position of the Presidency was drastically reduced in status. Henceforth, the President would be a broker for the war machine. He would be an advocate and spokesman for the Pentagon. All Presidents who followed Kennedy would have to know their impotence, no matter what their public role.

Until the work of the Kennedy assassins is undone, Presidents will come and go but the warfare machine and its extensive intelligence tentacles, domestic as well as foreign, will remain in control. The assassination reduced the President of the United States to a transient official, a servant of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to speak as often as possible about the nation’s desire for peace, while he serves as a business agent in Congress for the military and their hardware manufacturers.... (p. 180)

If the government were to take its gold bullion from Fort Knox, fly it to the Pacific in daily flights and drop it in the ocean, this would not be far removed from what has been accomplished by our adventure in Vietnam since the removal of President Kennedy. Even as the dollar approached the value of a postage stamp, the westward flights of troops and weapons into Asia were continued without abatement.

It was not possible to have price controls because the government could not admit it was engaged in war. Consequently, as the Vietnam War continued, the buying power of the dollar steadily descended. What the average American was able to retain at the end of the year was swept up by the heavy taxation, to pay for the Vietnam War and for the CIA’s adventures throughout the world.

Seven years after the assassination and the subsequent Vietnam escalation, our economy was showing the strain of too much war production and too much investment in warfare adventures. War production fails to add to the well being of the people and distorts the national economy by adding to its waste and reducing its efficiency. Real income falls as uncontrolled prices continue to rise. Insufficient money is available for the cities, and the standard of living of workers suffers. The quality of public education deteriorates. Billions of dollars that might have been available for our new schools and other social needs have in effect been dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The CIA and the Pentagon are not interested in new schools and social needs. These are death-oriented operations.... (p. 182)

It is inconceivable that men high in our government today are not fully aware of what really happened to John Kennedy and why it happened. If it can be understood outside Washington, it can be understood in Washington. Yet their sophisticated silence remains unbroken as they continue to play the game that all is well in America.

Their continued silence is eloquent testimony that the military and intelligence power elite, which sponsored the assassination and which then initiated the Vietnam escalation, continues to retain covert control of the nation. It is all too apparent that this force in our government believes that violence is the ultimate solution to any problem. This is why the present period is a most dangerous one for America and for the world....

Just as the cold war provides reasons for the existence of autocratic power, so does chaos within the nation operate as a source of power. As chaos continues, the populace will tend to be less concerned about abridgment of individual rights and will more willingly grant to a strong centralized government such power it claims it needs. Thus the warfare state may continue to appear to be relevant even after it has had to reduce its international adventures to some degree because the people are sick of war.

Such seeming relevance depends, however, upon the existence of chaos. The government’s domestic intelligence can supply chaos in good measure by stirring the embers wherever there is social discontent, and in a society depleted by years of war there will be much of that.... (p. 184)

In any event, we need no longer pretend that there is any mystery left about the assassination of John Kennedy. The cold war was the biggest business in America, worth eighty billion dollars a year as well as tremendous power to men in Washington. The President was murdered because he was genuinely seeking peace in a corrupt world. As tired as we are of the horror of the subject, all of us must address ourselves honestly to the meaning and implications of the assassination of John Kennedy, or all of us will pay the price of living in tyranny. (p. 185)

This cartoon by Herblock was published in December 1969. It painfully and accurately reflects the reality of USG policy based on the Warfare State’s priorities coincident with the time period A Heritage of Stone was being written.

Garrison’s allegorical passage at the beginning envisions a non-Terran visiting Earth in a future timeline where our species effected our own extinction. It appears in Chapter 9, Nightfall. Except for the final line, it was originally written as the close of the Foreword he wrote for the 1966 book, Crime, Law and Corrections. Beneath the title of that FOREWORD is a centered line of text, A Heritage of Stone. Hence the summation of the 1970 book as distilled in its title, was originally composed as the introduction of Crime, Law and Corrections published four years earlier. A number of segments in the 1966 Foreword are reflected or exactly repeated in the 1970 Foreword.

Edited by Ralph Slovenko, one of Garrison’s former assistants, the 1966 criminology book is a well accepted volume with its intended audience of criminologists, prosecutors, and others in the profession. Serving five years during World War II, including combat in Europe, Garrison experienced first-hand the human capacity for evil expressed in the Nazi death camps, specifically Dachau. The following precedes the aforementioned allegory at the close of the Foreword:

HeritageOfStone/Dachau Victim, 1945, Photo by Jim Garrison
Man’s Prey: The favorite quarry of man is man. In the 20th century alone he has shot, gassed, hanged, stabbed or otherwise disposed of 100 million of his fellow creatures. The Nazis at Dachau had exhausted their supply of crystal for the gas chambers, and the victim above, one of the prisoners, was machine-gunned to death by the SS a few hours before the arrival of Allied troops. There is no record of who he was or where he came from. Dachau ... Auschwitz ... Mauthausen ... Sachsenhousen ... Treblinka ... New York City. What is your hometown?

What happened to your disinterested millions? Your uncommitted and uninvolved, your preoccupied and bored? Where are their private horizons and their mirrored worlds of self? Where is their splendid indifference today?

Now you can be silent forever.

Will we become silent forever? This question demands an answer from each of us. Steven Newcomb (Lenape/Shawnee) invites all “to walk with us on the Sacred Path, in honor of the first principle of our Original Nations: ‘Respect the Earth as our Mother and have a Sacred Regard for All Living Things.’” Oren Lyons (Onondaga) describes our situation in the following framework.

Maurice Strong who was the Secretary General of UNCED in 1992 in Rio asked me to repeat for him the instruction from the Peacemaker so that he could pass it on to the leaders of the world.[9] I said, Really. He says I think it’s a good instruction. So it goes, it’s very simple. The Peacemaker said to the assembled Chiefs that he had taken all this time to raise and instruct and give the Clans and the Nations and the responsibilities of the Women, responsibilities of the Men, responsibilities of the People—which is by far the largest responsibility. And he said that when you sit and you council for the welfare of the people think not of yourself nor of your family or even your generation, he said, but make your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming so they may enjoy what you have today.

It’s an instruction of responsibility. It was a very visionary instruction. It was a long-term instruction. It was one that looked seven generations and I’m talking the full life of a person. Not the generations they have today of twenty years or so. To us that’s not a generation.

So he was saying if you take care of the future you’ll be taking care of yourself. You yourself will have peace. Peace is what we want. Peace is what we’re after. The wars that are raging about now are violent, violent, I would say, examples of what happens when you refuse to acknowledge a better way of life. We have to do better if we’re going to survive.

I’ll tell you this: that the Earth is not going to disappear. They have a great regenerative power, this Earth. One of my good friends John Mohawk, young man, what I call resident intellect of the Iroquois; great, brilliant mind.[10] He said, I always thought that human beings are still a biological experiment. We’re here a short time. Haven’t been here long. In the time of the Earth, not very long at all and the Earth is not dependent on us, we’re dependent on it. So that if we choose to eradicate ourselves from this Earth by whatever means, the Earth goes nowhere and in time it will regenerate and all the lakes will be pristine, the rivers, the waters, the mountains. Everything will be green again. It’ll be peaceful. There may not be people but the Earth will regenerate. And you know why? Because the Earth has all the time in the world. And we don’t.

 

In 1966 Jim Garrison summarized his conclusions about man’s inhumanity to man as exemplified by his WWII experience, culminating with what he witnessed and felt at Dachau, and deepened with the ushering in of the age of nuclear weaponry, the ultimate killing machine that will, if not permanently abolished world-wide, produce a future where WE will “be silent forever.” As Garrison makes clear, our cruelty, detachment, and exponentially increasing violent capacity to terminate Life must be offset and superseded by enormous increase in compassion for and identification with the whole of our human family. How is such transformation and transcendence possible and how can it occur?

Buckminster Fuller devoted the bulk of his lifetime inquiring into the question, What would it take to make humanity a success in the universe? In her life’s work as author, cultural historian, systems scientist, and attorney, Riane Eisler has pioneered a multidisciplinary, systemic approach to the way forward if our species is to manifest success in the universe. In her book The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future (first published in 1987, the entire book is online), Eisler presents and details what she has called Cultural Transformation theory, proposing “that underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society.”

The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking, may best be described as the partnership model. In this model—beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female—diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.5

Cultural Transformation theory further proposes that the original direction in the mainstream of our cultural evolution was toward partnership but that, following a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption, there occurred a fundamental social shift. The greater availability of data on Western societies (due to the ethnocentric focus of Western social science) makes it possible to document this shift in more detail through the analysis of Western cultural evolution. However, there are also indications that this change in direction from a partnership to a dominator model was roughly paralleled in other parts of the world.6

The title The Chalice and the Blade derives from this cataclysmic turning point during the prehistory of Western civilization, when the direction of our cultural evolution was quite literally turned around. At this pivotal branching, the cultural evolution of societies that worshiped the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe—in our time still symbolized by the ancient chalice or grail—was interrupted. There now appeared on the prehistoric horizon invaders from the peripheral areas of our globe who ushered in a very different form of social organization. As the University of California archaeologist Marija Gimbutas writes, these were people who worshiped “the lethal power of the blade”7—the power to take rather than give life that is the ultimate power to establish and enforce domination. (p. xvii)...

 

Writing about Hitler and Adolf Eichmann, Jim Garrison observed in the 1966 Foreword to Crime, Law and Corrections, “The minds of men who hate humanity reflect the world they experienced when they were young.” Riane Eisler has devoted a great deal of research, thought, and action to the human experience of childhood relations when young. As she describes in the 2018 article, “Breaking Out of the Domination Trance”,

we know from neuroscience that what children experience and observe in their family and other early relations directly impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, and these experiences and observations are directly shaped by the degree to which a cultural environment orients to partnership or domination.

Consider that when family relations based on chronic violations of human rights are considered normal and moral, they provide models for condoning such violations in other relations. And if these relations are violent, children learn that violence from those who are more powerful toward those who are less powerful is acceptable in dealing with conflicts and/or problems and to maintain or impose control. They learn this not only on an emotional and mental level but on a neural level.

Condoning—as well as being inured to—such chronic violations in our relations with our planetary home can be seen as a further extension of the violence of domination our current sociological foundations are based upon. Neural programming influence is foundational to the world we collectively co-create, interact with, and relate to. As John Trudell clearly expressed:

In the reality
Of many realities
How we see what we see
Affects the quality
Of our reality ...

We are the DNA of Earth, Moon, Planets, Stars
We are related to the universal
Creator created creation
Spirit and intelligence with clarity
Being and human as power

We are a part of the memories of evolution
These memories carry knowledge
These memories carry our identity
Beneath race, gender, class, age
Beneath citizen, business, state, religion
We are human beings
And these memories
Are trying to remind us
Human beings, human beings
It’s time to rise up
Remember who we are
 

David Bohm was an uncommonly gifted physicist who made many contributions to science and philosophy. In a 1989 seminar on Dialogue and the Nature of Thought he touched upon the widespread condition of insensitivity to incoherence.

I think our whole society tries to stabilize itself by starting out to destroy sensitivity to incoherence starting with very young children. If people could see the vast incoherence that is going on in society they would be disturbed and they would feel the need to do something. If you’re not sensitive to it you don’t feel disturbed and you don’t feel you need to do anything.

I remember an instance, a daughter was telling her mother, “this school is terrible, the teacher is terrible, very inconsistent, doing all sorts of crazy things,” and so on. Finally the mother was saying, “You’d better stop this—in this house the teacher is always right.” Now she understood that the teacher was wrong obviously, but the message was, it was no use. Even the message may have been right in some sense, but still it illustrates that the predicament is that in order to avoid this sort of trouble, starting with very young children, we are trained to become insensitive to incoherence. If there is incoherence in our own behavior, we thereby also become insensitive to it.

Webster’s defines cohere as “to hold together”; coherence as “integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values.” Incoherence is lacking cohesion and the process of dis-integration. In our world incoherence is rampant in the runaway cults of materialism, militarism, and racism dominating culture and society. Some of the most potent forms are encapsulated in the following list.

 

Incoherence Indicators

  • Exponential growth of human population
    was 2.5 billion in 1950, today we’ve exceeded 7.7 billion. It took millions of years since proto-humans first appeared to reach 2.5 billion. In less than 70 years that number has tripled.
  • Nuclear War With Russia?
    “The risk of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War—and yet our public is blissfully unaware of the new nuclear dangers they face.” —William J. Perry, U.S. Secretary of Defense (1994-1997)
  • Human-induced Sixth Mass Extinction is underway
    “Threatened species occur across all taxonomic groups and in all parts of the world. Over the past few hundred years, it is estimated that humans have increased species extinction rates by as much as 1,000 times the background rates typical over Earth’s history.” (Global Biodiversity Outlook, p.36, CBD, 2006) “Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines” (PNAS, 2017).
  • Nuclear power’s lethal radioactivity will last into eternity
    In seven-plus decades more than 400,000 tones of man-made radioactive matter, inimical to all life on Earth, has been created. It will far outlast the entire span of time since proto-humans first appeared on Earth. As we have mastered this power of the universe, our discovery has outstripped human ability to understand the consequences.
  • U.S. military spending vs human needs
    U.S. Costs of War since 11 Sep 2001 is estimated at $5.9 trillion (in current dollars). War is a primary co-factor producing a national insecurity state of mind and its ensuing reality.
  • Racism, white supremacy, scapegoating, hate, and extremism on the rise
    Hate Groups increased in the U.S. from 599 in 2000 to 1,020 in 2018.
  • Runaway Technologic Maladaption: Autonomous AI and 5G/wireless
    Jay Tuck: “200 million pages of information can be digested by this computer, Watson, IBM computer, in three seconds.... The definition of Artificial Intelligence is ‘Software that writes itself.’”
    From Environmental Health Trust: Top 20 Facts About 5G And Your Health: What You Need To Know About 5G Wireless and “Small” Cells
  • U.S. Gov’t 24/7-365 criminal lawlessness
    Federal policy is for Capitalism’s Invisible Army to commit crimes against humanity with de facto impunity and congressional sanction.

And then there is the decades-in-the-making burning fuse of global overheat that must be addressed NOW if Life on Mother Earth that is not yet extinct—including our human family—has any chance to survive, much less further evolve. Time of Useful Consciousness Radio recently produced a two-part [I, II] program on the Extinction Rebellion movement presented by Dr. Rupert Read, speaking at a meeting in February at the University of East Anglia (UEA) where he teaches. A Professor of Philosophy, and a former Green Party Councillor (2004-11), Read covered a great deal of ground concerning our environmental crisis, facing societal collapse, and what to do about it.

 

After Words

In concert with its creation of Capitalism’s Invisible Army, LAWCAP’s decision at the close of the 1940s to start World War III in order to keep capitalism in business has, over the past 7 decades, resulted in the expanding dis-integration of our globally hegemonic civilization, industrial growth capitalism. In Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson identified human hubris and financial self-interest as the crux of the situation threatening all Life on Mother Earth. She dedicated the book to Albert Schweitzer quoting his wisdom, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall, he will end by destroying the world.” In recent millenia constituting recorded human history, “Man,” collectively and tragically, did lose the capacity to foresee and forestall because the dominator model of social organization became embedded in the essence of most society’s relationships between the two halves—female and male—of humanity. In this way, the genius and limitless creativity each of us is born with, of mutual caring and sharing within an embedded partnership form of social organization, was suspended in the cultural evolution of our species. While the culture of domination and violence reinforce each other there are highly significant indicators that in our collective past, prior to recorded history, this kind of “power over” and control was not the operative form of human kind and human relationships. Again, from The Chalice & the Blade:

We know that art, particularly religious or mythical art, reflects not only peoples’ attitudes but also their particular form of culture and social organization. The Goddess-centered art we have been examining, with its striking absence of images of male domination or warfare, seems to have reflected a social order in which women, first as heads of clans and priestesses and later on in other important roles, played a central part, and in which both men and women worked together in equal partnership for the common good. If there was here no glorification of wrathful male deities or rulers carrying thunderbolts or arms, or of great conquerors dragging abject slaves about in chains, it is not unreasonable to infer it was because there were no counterparts for those images in real life.10 And if the central religious image was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life—rather than death and the fear of death—were dominant in society as well as art. (pp. 20-21)

More than 5 decades after Silent Spring was published, our dominator system is advancing further into its terminal apex. Time has run out. It is no longer possible to defer acting on behalf of ALL our relatives here, including our single, indivisible, supremely gifted and fragile human family. We must determine what transformational adaption we can collectively create and implement to finally respond in this exceedingly late hour to the emergency of global overheat as well as the other pressing incoherence indicators that must likewise be addressed in kind. The possible outcomes include our societies collapsing and the extinction of our species.

As the abbreviated enumeration of runaway criminal policies directed by and serving U.S. Empire Corporate State interests in 2nd Mvmt indicate, this is not a legitimate government serving the needs and aspirations of people, inextricably embedded in and utterly dependent upon the web of all Life Mother Earth conceives, bears, and nurtures. It is in fact wholly illegitimate given the federally sanctioned policies of murder, assassination, terrorism, and violation of the rights of humans—and all our other than human kin—with its relentless pursuit of endless so-called economic growth: still building massive infrastructure, still facilitating expansions in animal agriculture, still spending more on war-making than the next seven countries combined, still serving the entrenched corporate fossil fuel nexus, still making and implementing U.S. National Insecurity State of Mind policies by means of peddling fears of implacable, supremely evil enemies with an updated and largely unconscious U.S.-War-in-Vietnam-Era Mantra, It became necessary to destroy the Earth to save it, still bent on “modernizing” our nuclear weapons stockpile over the next 30 years with its projected costs of 1.2 trillion dollars, and still officially denying and ignoring the pressing reality of global overheat and its looming, unspeakable consequences. Willful U.S. criminal inaction on the ecological catastrophe threatening Life Security throughout Mother Earth requires nonviolent rebellion to change course away from the dead-end future of a mass extinction event while determining what options still exist to be acted upon in the face of this unfolding crisis era of ecological emergency we are by day sinking evermore deeply into.

The requirement for this regenerative process of collective involvement within our entire human family encompassing a truly democratic dynamic to determine best strategies to deal with and respond to the climate and ecological emergency becoming evermore dire can be a driver and catalyst for accelerating the shift from domination to partnership. There are many complements to the nonviolent rebellion picking up steam described above. See for example, Zachariah Mampilly speaking on “How Protest is Redefining Democracy Around the World” (2017, 10:16), Julia Bacha summarizing her work on “How Women Wage Conflict Without Violence” (2016, 10:34), and Yanis Varoufakis covering how “Capitalism Will Eat Democracy—Unless We Speak Up” (2015, 19:08). More than ever, we find ourselves living in the time of Koyaanisqatsi, the Hopi word meaning “crazy life,” “life out of balance,” “life disintegrating,” and “a state of life that calls for another way of living.” May we all continually awaken to and be renewed by recognition of our participation in and partaking of life at this unique time of Koyaanisqatsi.

 

Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller devoted the bulk of his lifetime inquiring into the question, What would it take to make humanity a success in the universe? The Basic Bio of his specific journey is mind-expanding and provocative in the best creative sense. The following from Critical Path is the conclusion (p. xxxviii) to its Introduction: Twilight of the World’s Power Structures.

Each year I receive and answer many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael—who is ten years old—asks whether I am a “doer or a thinker.” Although I never “tell” anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant at this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927-inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

Dear Michael,

Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning “thinkers and doers.”

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don’t be disappointed if something doesn’t work. That is what you want to know—the truth about everything—and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.

Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools—and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.

You have what is most important in life—initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Sincerely yours,    

Buckminster Fuller

The political and economic systems and the political and economic leaders of humanity are not in final examination; it is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate.You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can’t deceive your mind-self—for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all the truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible.

Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

Imagine running out of imagine
Mistaking authority for power
Weaving lifes free spirit
Into patterns of control
—John Trudell, “Iktomi,”
Lines from a Mined Mind, p.259

by Dave Ratcliffe

History Will Not Absolve Us - Orwellian control, public denial,and the murder of President Kennedy

History Will Not Absolve Us
Orwellian control, public denial,
and the murder of President Kennedy
by E. Martin Schotz
Complete 1996 book is online

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one's rational powers.

—Unpublished letter, E. Martin Schotz to Vincent J. Salandria, May 14, 1992

 

Today most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but they don't know it. They don't want to know it — and our government doesn't want to know it and our elected representatives don't want to know it, because knowing it would mean having to do something about it. That is an awesome thought.

History Will Not Absolve Us is written for a boundless non-market of individuals who are not afraid, but anxiously seek, to have their thinking taken off its comfortable tracks, so as to be tested on more challenging and perhaps better embedded and truer lines. Each strand of this book’s analysis is woven into a developing pattern by an excellent web of reasoning that stretched my thinking to an incredible degree and stirred me to re-examine issues I thought were comfortably settled.

—Gaeton Fonzi, Author of The Last Investigation

 

February 2019: 1996 hardcover copies of History Will Not Absolve Us are availble for $10 (includes shipping & handling) to domestic destinations.

From the Introduction:

In our efforts to confront the truth of the assassination of President Kennedy we are at a very different point today than we were thirty years ago when the first critical analyses of the Warren Report were published. Dozens of books and thousands of magazine articles have been written about this case. Almost without exception, no matter what the author’s view concerning who killed President Kennedy or why, these works have directly or indirectly contributed to the public’s conviction that the murder of the President is a mystery. As a result, although a vast majority of our public believes that there was a conspiracy, most people do not know this as a fact and are convinced that they can never know for sure what happened.

On both points the public is mistaken. The murder of the President is not a mystery. The nature of the conspiracy that took President Kennedy’s life was from the outset quite obvious to anyone who knew how to look and was willing to do so. The same holds true today. Any citizen who is willing to look can see clearly who killed President Kennedy and why.

The fact that “no one knows this” is an example of a subtle process of Orwellian mind control which has enveloped our society and which our public has been more than willing to have foisted upon it. The process has been orchestrated by the CIA in defense of itself and the “powers that be,” but it has also been critically aided by the entire spectrum of our society’s intellectual and political establishments, right, center, and left.

The assertion that I and other ordinary citizens know, know for a fact, that there was a conspiracy and that it was organized at the highest levels of the CIA — such an assertion is likely to strike most citizens as the ravings of a fanatic, a person whose mind is closed to civilized discourse. The ordinary citizen, on reading a simple, honest, and critical analysis of the facts (see Appendix III) will typically experience an automatic psychological reaction of recoil because of the vast national process of cover-up which an honest analysis of the facts implies. “Something is wrong here. It can’t be this obvious,” is the natural response. It is a measure of the Orwellian mind set that pervades America today that to assert what is obvious and known (as in the tale The Emperor’s New Clothes) triggers such a psychological reaction. In reality it is the ordinary citizen’s mind which has been closed to the vast process of denial and cover-up which has pervaded our society.

Thus, my starting point is to awaken the reader to how, in an “open society” like our own, the CIA could murder the President and see to it that the crime is “covered up.” Once this befuddling matter is laid bare, the reader will be freed to go back and assimilate in an unobstructed manner what has long been quite obvious and known about who killed President Kennedy and why.

As I edited the April 5th letter for publication, it seemed logical to break the letter into two parts. The reason behind the division is the transition that occurs in the course of the letter, a transition in the underlying political ideological assumptions of the analysis. Part I is an analysis of the assassination for the light it throws on the Orwellian nature of our society. This section of the letter requires of the reader no particular ideological orientation other than a commitment to truth and logic, and a willingness to confront the dictates of logical analysis of facts wherever it leads. In other words, it requires a person whose mind is not bounded by the terms of American “Crimestop.” The first section deals with how our public, government, and media approached the available facts on the assassination and what this implies about the nature of our democracy.

Part II is directed toward exploring a broader issue of history, how we as a people came to be in such a state of affairs. Here a certain political ideological orientation is required of the reader, or at least a willingness to be open to a certain political ideological orientation. In my view the way in which our society reacted to the murder of its President by the CIA is part of a seamless web of historical development which has now been occurring for more than a century, ever since the destruction of the “Reconstruction” movement following the American Civil War. An awareness of this overall historical context is important if we are to appreciate the true dimensions of the political problems we face as a people.

The thirteen appendices which follow the April 5th letter provide a variety of documentary evidence as well as additional analyses. The reader will find amongst these appendices important analyses of both the “external” record as well as the “internal” record on four significant points: the development of President Kennedy’s thinking and activity with regard to the Cold War, the immediate reaction of the government of the United States to the assassination of its President, the work of the Warren Commission, and the role of The Nation magazine and the left/liberal establishment in the cover-up of the assassination.

The appendices begin with the text of President Kennedy’s June, 1963 speech at American University. This speech provides the context of the assassination and helps to clarify Castro’s view of Kennedy, which appears in Appendix II. Appendix II, a speech by Fidel Castro, constitutes a highly sophisticated analysis of the external record of the immediate reaction of the United States government and its media sources. This can be correlated with Appendix IV, where one will find an analysis of important internal data on this question. Three articles by Vincent Salandria appear in Appendix III. These articles, taken together, show the progress of his analysis of the work of the Warren Commission. He at first used only the Warren Report as a basis (the external record), and subsequently used an “internal record” of the Commission’s work, the twenty-six volumes of Commission exhibits which were released in early 1965. Appendix V provides data which identifies Lee Harvey Oswald as the CIA agent he was. Appendix VI presents a novel form of analysis which casts light on how the assassination of the President was covered up.

In Appendix VII the reader will find both an analysis of the “external record” of The Nation’s activity as well as a detailed memoir which represents an “internal record” of The Nation’s attitude toward the assassination. Finally, by correlating President Kennedy’s June, 1963 speech at American University (Appendix I) with Nikita Khrushchev’s January 31, 1963 letter to Fidel Castro (Appendix X), the McCloy-Zorin Agreement (Appendix IX), and Castro’s speech (Appendix II), one is able to correlate external as well as internal data on the significance of President Kennedy’s activity with regard to the Cold War as the motivating factor for his assassination. Appendix VIII, “The Work of Ray Marcus,” provides additional external as well as internal data on many questions concerning the nature of our society and its response to the assassination.

Appendices XI and XII provide psycho-social and philosophical analyses of the society’s response to the assassination. Appendix XIII is a speech by Fidel Castro to a recent United Nations-sponsored meeting. It provides a context for the continuing significance of the President’s assassination.

As citizens who have turned away for thirty years from the truth of the murder of our elected head of state, we should not be surprised that today we find our nation in intellectual, political, and moral chaos.[4] Confronting the truth of President Kennedy’s assassination and its coverup is but one small step on a long path out of that chaos and toward healing, a path along which we must confront the true nature of our democracy and the reality of what our nation has become for its own citizens and for people throughout the world. Such a process of healing is not pleasant. It is a difficult and painful path, but it is a necessary one. History will not absolve us.

by Dave Ratcliffe

“This steady, ineluctable course toward ending the cold war placed Kennedy on a collision course with the strongest forces in the United States government. His course, if continued, meant the end of the long hayride of billions and billions of dollars of military hardware purchases. It meant the end of the Pax Americana, the new imperialism which had crept into American foreign policy at the end of World War II. It meant the beginning of the end of the dominance of the Pentagon and the CIA over American foreign policy, and, indeed, over much of the domestic policy as well. It meant, in sum, the beginning of the end of two empires, one international and the other a bureaucratic structure internal to our government and more powerful than all the rest of the government put together.”

Jim Garrison’s 1970 book, A Heritage of Stone provides a rich source of our genuine history, free of the inhumanity and suffocating control exercised by national security state managers whose allegiance is to LAWCAP’s U.S. Corporate Empire State. In a truly democratic society, this work would be a primary high school textbook for students to understand how their world actually works given prior struggles pursued by people who were dedicated to finding and establishing ways to live in peaceful coexistence for all people on Earth.

As District Attorney of New Orleans, Jim Garrison was the only Law Enforcement Officer in the United States who had the conscience, sense of duty, and the courage to conduct a trial for the assassination of President John Kennedy. Regarding what he learned from 1967 to 1969, “my staff and I found ourselves on a collision course with the most powerful force in the country. The battle that followed over those three years exposed us to a part of America that we never dreamed existed. It became very clear to me that this was no longer the country that I had grown up in as a boy. It was a nation controlled by an enormous domestic intelligence organization which would seek to discredit or destroy anyone who dared challenge its authority.” (p. 19)

“The inhumanity demonstrated by the CIA, and the masked eminences for whom it performed was scarcely distinguishable from the inhumanity of the totalitarian governments which we had defeated in World War II. Actually we had taken the place of the totalitarian powers whom we had defeated.”

The Opening of Chapter 1 and the book’s final Chapter, “The War Machine” presents an effective summation of why the 35th President of the United States was killed by elements of his own government. It is refreshing and liberating to read the simple, honest, direct language, so lacking in the present day Alice-In-Wonderland ersatz reality churned out daily by the bulk of monetized media.

A man who cares too much for the human race may find himself living in a hostile environment. His humanity may not be regarded as dangerous so long as his voice cannot be heard by too many people, but if he is eloquent, or if he is in a position to affect the affairs of the nation, then his humanity will be regarded by some men as a great threat.

After the United States ascended to the position of the most powerful military nation in history, in the midst of its accumulation of the most effective death machinery of all time, there occurred the accident of the election of a President who regarded the entire human race with compassion. By the time this happened, the cold war had become our major industry, and the Central Intelligence Agency had become the clandestine arm of our military-industrial complex and, in the process, the most effective assassination machine in the world. (p. 25)

A successful coup d’état affects not merely the history of a nation but may change its power structure. With the killing of John Kennedy, the very position of the Presidency was drastically reduced in status. Henceforth, the President would be a broker for the war machine. He would be an advocate and spokesman for the Pentagon. All Presidents who followed Kennedy would have to know their impotence, no matter what their public role.

Until the work of the Kennedy assassins is undone, Presidents will come and go but the warfare machine and its extensive intelligence tentacles, domestic as well as foreign, will remain in control. The assassination reduced the President of the United States to a transient official, a servant of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to speak as often as possible about the nation’s desire for peace, while he serves as a business agent in Congress for the military and their hardware manufacturers.... (p. 180)

If the government were to take its gold bullion from Fort Knox, fly it to the Pacific in daily flights and drop it in the ocean, this would not be far removed from what has been accomplished by our adventure in Vietnam since the removal of President Kennedy. Even as the dollar approached the value of a postage stamp, the westward flights of troops and weapons into Asia were continued without abatement.

It was not possible to have price controls because the government could not admit it was engaged in war. Consequently, as the Vietnam War continued, the buying power of the dollar steadily descended. What the average American was able to retain at the end of the year was swept up by the heavy taxation, to pay for the Vietnam War and for the CIA’s adventures throughout the world.

Seven years after the assassination and the subsequent Vietnam escalation, our economy was showing the strain of too much war production and too much investment in warfare adventures. War production fails to add to the well being of the people and distorts the national economy by adding to its waste and reducing its efficiency. Real income falls as uncontrolled prices continue to rise. Insufficient money is available for the cities, and the standard of living of workers suffers. The quality of public education deteriorates. Billions of dollars that might have been available for our new schools and other social needs have in effect been dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The CIA and the Pentagon are not interested in new schools and social needs. These are death-oriented operations.... (p. 182)

It is inconceivable that men high in our government today are not fully aware of what really happened to John Kennedy and why it happened. If it can be understood outside Washington, it can be understood in Washington. Yet their sophisticated silence remains unbroken as they continue to play the game that all is well in America.

Their continued silence is eloquent testimony that the military and intelligence power elite, which sponsored the assassination and which then initiated the Vietnam escalation, continues to retain covert control of the nation. It is all too apparent that this force in our government believes that violence is the ultimate solution to any problem. This is why the present period is a most dangerous one for America and for the world....

Just as the cold war provides reasons for the existence of autocratic power, so does chaos within the nation operate as a source of power. As chaos continues, the populace will tend to be less concerned about abridgment of individual rights and will more willingly grant to a strong centralized government such power it claims it needs. Thus the warfare state may continue to appear to be relevant even after it has had to reduce its international adventures to some degree because the people are sick of war.

Such seeming relevance depends, however, upon the existence of chaos. The government’s domestic intelligence can supply chaos in good measure by stirring the embers wherever there is social discontent, and in a society depleted by years of war there will be much of that.... (p. 184)

In any event, we need no longer pretend that there is any mystery left about the assassination of John Kennedy. The cold war was the biggest business in America, worth eighty billion dollars a year as well as tremendous power to men in Washington. The President was murdered because he was genuinely seeking peace in a corrupt world. As tired as we are of the horror of the subject, all of us must address ourselves honestly to the meaning and implications of the assassination of John Kennedy, or all of us will pay the price of living in tyranny. (p. 185)

Webster’s defines tyranny as “oppresive power”. That we live in a state of oppressive power is everywhere apparent today. In the Foreword Garrison lays out the challenge—still to be addressed by all of us—that unless humankind ends war and learns to love the human family, we will become extinguished and, for the more complex life forms here, Earth will become a silent heritage of stone.

The descendant of the hairy Stone Age man would rebuild the earth, change the course of rivers and touch the very stars at which his ancestor stared from his cave at night. There was nothing he would be unable to do, so long as he was not asked to love his fellow man.

Man has invented the cross, the gallows, the rack, the gibbet, the guillotine, the sword, the machine gun, the electric chair, the hand grenade, the personnel mine, the flame thrower, the “blockbuster,” the obsolescent atom bomb and the currently popular hydrogen bomb—all made to maim or destroy his fellow man. These inventions, combined with hate and selfishness and lust for power, are responsible for the unending destruction of humans by other humans. Yet most dangerous of all is modern man’s interest in his own self. Hate and love of power could be dealt with were it not for the license they receive from the inertia of millions. The most dangerous of all humans are the gray mice: it is their silence that kills. It was the silence of the gray mice outside the German concentration camps that killed the millions inside.

Whether we survive the Thermonuclear Age may come down to the simple question of whether we learn to care about our fellow men. Perhaps our cruelty and detachment will lend to a final day of fire for the most rational creature who ever walked the earth. The computers which we have invented now tell us that our losses in a nuclear exchange will be many millions of American dead. We have come a long way from the first stone axe.

Is there an alternative to the extinction of man? Those gibbets, thumbscrews, gallows, treasured hates and fond cruelties must inexorably give way to the expansion of man’s intellect and reason. Along with this, he must increase enormously his compassion for and identification with the species. Failing this, he will become silent forever.

The book’s dedication speaks to the inheritors of Mother Earth. Garrison states that humanity will be saved from a heritage of stone only if it understands the meaning of the Kennedy assassination by the warfare state. Understanding how our world truly operates given what has happened before now liberates consciousness from the domination trance and opens infinite possibilities for life after empire.

To the Younger Generation.
May its members have the insight to
see the deceptions of the warfare state.
May they have the courage to stand
on the side of humanity.