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Oct 3rd 2020

The Quiet Americans. By Scott Anderson.Doubleday; 576 pages; $30. To be published in Britain by Picador in February 2021; 20.

THIS INTRIGUING book is an indictment. From its first page it argues that the CIA lost its way, in all senses, in the first decade of the cold war. Its witnesses are four courageous and initially idealistic patriots. Frank Wisner oversaw some of the earliest efforts to roll back communism in Europe. Michael Burke was a daredevil figure in the same game. Edward Lansdale was an minence grise in the Far East. Peter Sichel, a German-born Jewish wine-merchant and Wunderkindand the only one of the four still aliveheld his nose as he co-opted former Nazis into the agency, an initiative cited as one of its original sins.

Scott Anderson, a veteran foreign correspondent and novelist, weaves a beguiling if sometimes puzzling narrative from their criss-crossing careers. He takes in the Philippines, Vietnam and the CIAs early venality in Central America. He traipses along the Iron Curtain to unveil a string of early disasters in eastern Europe. His verdict is damning, yet also imprecise.

All four agents had brave, brilliant starts in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIAs forerunner, during the second world war, and were driven largely by principle. The author shows how they were all laid low, in moral and career terms, by the wrong-headedness of their political overlords, which they only occasionally resisted. The villains include J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss who, jealous of the CIA, stoked paranoia among allies as well as enemies, and Senator Joseph McCarthy, who ruined hundreds of lives in his quest for reds under the bed; but also, less predictably, the Dulles brothers, John Foster as secretary of state and Allen as head of the CIA. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower are castigated. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and even Barack Obama take a few knocks.

Of the four spies, Lansdale and Burke ultimately left the CIA in despair, stricken by the moral compromises they had been asked to make. Wisner committed suicide. The agents whom he and Burke infiltrated into Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and East Germany all disappeared; most were probably killed. Worse, in Mr Andersons view, were the results of two early successes, the coups against democracy in Iran and Guatemala, which tarnished the CIA for ever in the eyes of many in the Middle East and Latin America.

Telling this tale of woe through the four men is a clever device, and Mr Anderson is a fine narrator. Each of the quartet had remarkable early achievements. Lansdale, a former adman in California with a gift for empathy, almost single-handedly steered Ramon Magsaysay into the presidency of the Philippines in 1953 (he died in an air crash). Lansdale then became the most trusted adviser to Vietnams president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted and killed in 1963. Many of the CIAs failures stemmed from familiar shortcomings. We all have this tendency to look for information that confirms our beliefs and to ignore what conflicts with them, explains Mr Sichel. Its very hard to give somebody information he doesnt want to hear, and the more senior they are, the worse it is.

Early in his own career Mr Anderson witnessed the murderous brutality of a right-wing regime in El Salvador that was backed by the CIA. The very phrase anti-communist, he writes, took on a squalid quality when I considered the crimes done in its name. He duly dismisses out of hand the cold war strategy of Truman, Eisenhower and their successorsbased on the threat of massive retaliation, including nuclear war, if the Soviets overstepped the mark, while the CIA undertook a constant lower-level pushback, including covert operations. He lambasts George Kennan, a fabled diplomat, for encouraging the CIAs policy of containment, which was designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce. This anti-communist refrain, he complains, lasted until communism collapsed. Oddly, he ignores the possibility that this outcome was precipitated at least partly by relentless outside pressure from the CIA and others.

More questionable still is his assertion that Americas over-zealous leaders and submissive spooks undercut the moderate faction within the Kremlin and bolstered the militants, and thus, especially after Stalins death in 1953, missed a golden opportunity to dramatically alter the course of the cold war. He even implicates the CIA in the suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956: by egging it on but backing away, Mr Anderson charges, the agency encouraged Moscow to crack down. Hungarian rebels may have picked up mixed signals from the Americans. But it is surely fanciful to suggest that Nikita Khrushchev was poised to let Hungary go, before the CIAs machinations changed his mind.

Espionage, intelligence-gathering and covert operations are by definition dodgy trades, whatever the motives of their practitioners. Mr Anderson vigorously argues that his quartet epitomised Americas slide into moral ambiguity and strategic muddle. Intelligence officers like them provided the fuel for the nuclear arms race and drove nations into the orbits of East or West. Spies on both sides were the cold wars first frontline soldiers.

But then Mr Anderson switches his animus back against the presidents and policymakers. Virtually every major covert mission undertaken by the CIA from its inception until today, he says, has been done under the express, if unwritten, orders of presidents. The agency is doomed to be the ultimate fall-guy. So were the flawed four both culprits and victims? A puzzling conundrum.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Original sins"

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An indictment of the CIA, through the lives of four spies - The Economist

If its presidential election time, then, like clockwork, its time for Republicans to continue the US national security establishments sixty-year-long attack on Cuba. Thats because Republican presidential candidates feel the need to pander to Cuban American voters in Florida as a way to show how tough they are on communism.

Well, not all communism. The US government, especially the Pentagon, loves the communist regime in Vietnam, the one that killed some fifty-eight thousand American men in the Vietnam War. Today, the US and Vietnamese regimes are living in peaceful and friendly coexistence, exactly what the national security establishment said was impossible during the Cold War.

President Trump now continues this electoral tradition by slamming additional sanctions on the Cuban and the American people. He has issued an edict prohibiting American citizens from staying in hotels in Cuba that are owned by the Cuban government. He has also ordered Americans not to bring back to the United States Cuban rum or Cuban cigars.

Those measures are on top of those taken by Trump last year to reduce travel to Cuba, which included bans on cruise ships, yachts, fishing boats, and group educational and cultural trips to Cuba.

Oh, in bringing up the US governments close and friendly relationship with the communist regime in Vietnam, I forgot to mention that Trump, by his own admission, fell in love with the communist dictator of North Korea. Why, Trump even salutes communist generals in that country.

But not Cuba. US officials, including Trump, hate Cuba. No falling in love with Cubas communist rulers. No peaceful and friendly coexistence there. Thats because over the decades, Cuba has indirectly exposed the corrupt sham of the entire Cold War and the corrupt machinery of the US national security establishment.

After all, recall what the Pentagon and the CIA said throughout the Cold Warthat Cuba posed a grave threat to US national security. They said that the island was a dagger pointed at Americas throat. They said America couldnt stand with a communist regime ninety miles away from American shores.

And yet, despite the continued existence of Cubas communist regime, the US government is still standing, more powerful and more omnipotent than ever. And while it certainly has become more socialist (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, public schooling, etc.), no one is claiming that it has been taken over by the Russian or Chinese Reds.

But Americans were told to be afraid of Cuba, very afraid. Thats why there were repeated CIA and Pentagon regime change operations against the Cuban regime, including top-secret assassination plots, in partnership with the Mafia, on the part of the CIA.

In fact, Trump announced his new measures at a White House event honoring Bay of Pigs veterans. But lets keep something important in mind: this was a CIA operation from the get-go, one designed to use Cuban exiles as the invaders so that Americans wouldnt know that the US government was behind the operation.

The question naturally arises: Under what legal authority did the US government conspire to invade Cuba or assassinate its rulers? There certainly was no congressional declaration of war against Cuba, which the Constitution requires as a prerequisite to waging war against another country. And one thing is for sure: an invasion is most definitely an act of war and an assassination is an act of murder.

The fact is that there never was a legal justification for the CIAs invasion of Cuba. But once the US government was converted into a national security state after World War II, the powers of the national security branch of the governmenti.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and theNSAessentially became omnipotent. The Constitution became irrelevant, at least insofar as the other three branches of the federal government were concerned.

There was also OperationNorthwoods, the infamous plan by the Pentagon to conduct deadly and destructive terrorist attacks on American soil and make them look like they were done by Cuban agents. The idea was to provide a false and deceptive pretext for invading Cuba and effecting regime change.

Where was the constitutional authority for OperationNorthwoods? There was none, but that was considered irrelevant.

In fact, the reason that the Cuban regime invited the Soviet Union to install nuclear missiles in Cuba was because the Castro regime knew about the Pentagons and CIAs desires to invade Cuba. The Cubans wanted the missiles to deter US officials or, in the worst case, to defend themselves from a Pentagon-CIA attack. Thus, it was the US national security establishment that was indirectly responsible for bringing the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

Through the entire Cold War and beyond, Cuba never attacked the US or even threatened to do so. It has always been the US government that has been the aggressor against Cuba, including with its embargo, sanctions, assassination plots, and state-sponsored terrorism within Cuba.

The Cuban communist regime has continued standing. What about the much-vaunted threat to national security that it supposedly posed to the United States, especially during the Cold War? It was always a crooked and corrupt sham, just like the entire Cold War was. Thats why US officials hate Cuba so muchthey know that the continued existence of the Cuban communist regime has shown the utter corruptness of the entire Cold War, something President Kennedy realized prior to his assassination.

After all, the United States is still standing. For that matter, so is the communist regime in Vietnam, which Pentagon and CIA officials said ultimately would cause a domino effect that would end with the Reds in control of the US government. How utterly ludicrous.

Through it all, it has not only been the Cuban people who have suffered from these antics. It has also been the American people, not just economically but especially through the destruction of their own economic liberty and freedom of travel.

After all, dont forget who Trumps orders and prohibitions are directed to: the American people. If they violate his edicts, it is they who will go to jail or be fined or both.

So, here you have the supreme ironyto oppose a Cuban regime that controls the economic activity of its citizens through its socialist system, US officials control the economic activity of the American people. Its called destroying liberty at home to oppose communism and socialism abroad.

Too bad the American people dont have the gumption to fight for their own fundamental rights here at home, including the fundamental rights of freedom of travel and freedom of trade that US officials have destroyed in their decades-long war against Cuba.

Reprinted from the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Link:
Trump Continues the By no means-Ending Struggle on Cuba - The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

by Vivian Gornick

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 161 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Verso, 265 pp., $19.95 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Picador, 164 pp., $15.99 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Picador, 165 pp., $16.00 (paper)

From birth to death, writes Vivian Gornick, in her memoir The Odd Woman and the City,

we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and dont want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressionsanger, cruelty, the need to humiliateyet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with.

From there the divisions multiply. We long for experience, we shrink from experience; we want to understand, we dont want to understand. We confuse our neuroses for our innermost truths and in the end it all boils down to: nothing. Pointless disharmony. Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities, she writes in another memoir, Fierce Attachments.

But then there are times when we feel ourselves whole. We stand at the center of our experience and something inside us flares into bright life. Under the influence of a conviction of inner clarity, we become eloquent, prolificwhat Gornick calls our expressive selves. This, we feel, is the meaning of life. This is what it means to be alive.

Gornick has published thirteen books in fifty years, fourteen if you count Woman in Sexist Society, the anthology of feminist writing she coedited with Barbara K. Moran in 1971. Most concern someone whose quest for the expressive self rises to the level of an addiction. In a new introduction to The Romance of American Communism, her 1977 book reissued earlier this year, Gornick observes that there is a certain kind of cultural herothe artist, the scientist, the thinkerwho is often characterized as one who lives for the work. This hero is her subject. Why do people devote their lives to causes that deprive them of love and comfort and ordinary happiness, Gornick asks? As a lifelong writer, a woman of blunt manner and deep feeling for whom the effort is agony, she has a personal investment in the answer.

Gornick has long enjoyed an audience of literary depressives and feminists. Now, a late-career revival is expanding her readership. In 2015 The Odd Woman and the City introduced her to a new generation. In 2020 four more Gornick titles have given occasion for a backward glance: Unfinished Business, a new bibliomemoir about rereading, and reissues of Approaching Eye Level (1996), The End of the Novel of Love (1997), and The Romance of American Communism. The timing of their publication could be chalked up to the return of American socialism, or to the tendency to rediscover women artists in old age. But the lasting value of her work lies in her commitment to the question of what it means to feel expressive: to experience the feeling that tells a person not approximately, but precisely who they are.

Because

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The Desk and the Daring | by Dayna Tortorici - The New York Review of Books

BLM and the Coming Danger Opinion October 8, 2020 , by Content Admin

By stealth and design, America, over the past five decades has allowed itself to be enveloped in the soothing fog of socialism where its corrosive philosophy has been allowed to incubate in our public schools until ultimately, it has let loose the legions of corrosive thinking cretins, BLMs, now attacking and burning our towns and cities, indeed our Americanism disguised as peaceful protesters but, anarchists all. The scary thing is that these people are for most part, Americans.

I am slightly confused. I always thought that BLM identified the Bureau of Land Management, a government quasi law enforcement entity to protect Americas wide open spaces and Indian reservations. I was alarmed when BLM got directly involved against private enterprise when they assumed a Nevada rancher, the Bundy family, were in violation of some land use rules empowering them, the BLM, to seize Bundys cattle without due process. This occurred under a Democrat government when then House Speaker Harry Reid, wanted the land Bundy used for cattle grazing to sell to a renewable energy company to install solar collectors. That constituted an Executive Action requiring a legal punishment, (theft of Bundys cattle), an unconstitutional act, unless they got away with it. They didnt, and that part of the story died. Also quickly ignored was the singular fact that armed American citizens confronted the BLM usurpers and prevailed.

In any event, we are now confronted with a different BLM, hoards of black clad young, mostly white Americans, organized or not, volunteering for political reasons or for pay, to support the BLM group of self styled and admitted Marxists who are determined to bring America down.

As this lot runs around city streets and cafes attempting to humiliate dining patrons, it is more an expression of Maoism than Marxism. In any event, their mission is the same, destroy America. A shocking video interview of a young white male with a plastic face shield truthfully answering the interviewers questions, admitted that capitalism had to be overthrown and replaced by socialism. By his attitude he thought it was an event sure to happen. Where did he get such anti-American ideas? From the revisionists of American history, in the Common Core syllabus indoctrinating its neophytes about how rotten America has been to people of color, to the poor and the undocumented immigrants swarming here for a better life, free of charge of course!

Americas long and successful exercise in representative government, where decorum between contending ideas, (except for the Civil War period), even with those that clearly flouted the US Constitution, were argued out in the public domaine with a basically honest media reporting the results, not trying to make them. All that has been washed away with the corrupting marriage between commerce and government, the source of the vast pot of easy cash endlessly flowing to buy the votes of politicians. Thats one step away from Fascism, Mussolinis idea that one can keep his business so long as his business produces what government tells him to produce.

Nobody could seriously believe that Joe Biden is up 16 points over Donald Trump except CNN who said so. Thats a fear inducing tactic! What is happening is a post Trump Leftist scheme to give us two choices in what government, we will have, Fascism or Communism, aka: Socialism. To Democrats, it really makes no difference because both concepts are Far Left and will only survives under the heel of Totalitarian, protected by a police state.

Mostly, Americans now live comfortably adjusting to deflation and inflation, lower interests rates and affordable fuel and food prices. That comfort could soon end and Conservative Americans must be prepared for two choices, give in or water the roots of the Liberty Tree.

Remember, freedom is the goal, the Constitution is the way. Now, lets get awesome! (06Oct20)

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BLM and the Coming Danger - TownsTowns - Fetchyournews.com

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LETTER: PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosas latest reminder that it is the ANCs intention to reduce the ownership of farmland by whites (The Mercury, Tuesday) is yet another reference to the ANCs adherence to the Freedom Charter.

Compiled by communists in 1955, the Freedom Charter should be renamed the Servitude Charter, because it advocates state control of every aspect of life and enterprise, just as oppressed people in the Soviet Union experienced.

Specifically on the land issue it states: Restrictions on land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended and the land re-divided. All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose.

From that, it is obvious that expropriation of land without compensation is pure Servitude Charter dogma.

Ironically, under the heading There shall be houses, security and comfort, the Charter proclaims that food will be plentiful. What, of course, is missing there is the fact that state control of food means that it would be available only in terms of ration cards, as the oppressed people of communist Russia experienced. Communism is a failed evil that pervades every detail of the Servitude Charter.

To date, the restitution of land by the ANC has had only negative outcomes: 90% of the beneficiaries have opted for cash rather than land and where farms have been handed over, most have reverted to nature. Zebediela, the greatest citrus estate in the world, was handed over in Nelson Mandelas time. Within a short while, only 10% of it remained productive.

Food security in South Africa depends on those boere sons of the soil. That is a reality that was proved in Zimbabwe. When white farmers were evicted from their farms because they were white, food production declined by 90%. Famine is a way of life in Zimbabwe.

Food is a weapon, as communists know full well. But in South Africa it is a weapon they dont control yet.

In the face of the on-going killing of farmers, which is all part of repossessing land as the Servitude Charter advocates, white farmers need to weaponise food.

Each time there is a farm attack or murder, the price of foodstuff should be increased.

White farmers have the ability to hit back at the ANCs plan to rob them of their land and to impoverish all in the process.

Duncan du Bois - Bluff

The Mercury

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LETTER: Each time there is a farm attack or murder, the price of foodstuff should be increased - IOL