An 1898 cartoon features newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst dressed as a cartoon character of the day, a satire of their papers’ role in drumming up U.S. public opinion for war by Leon Barritt (Wikimedia) An 1898 cartoon features newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst dressed as a cartoon character of the day, a satire of their papers’ role in drumming up U.S. public opinion for war by Leon Barritt (Wikimedia)

Part 2: How Neocons push for war by cooking the books

Most Americans outside of Washington policy circles don’t know about Team B, where it came from or what it did, nor are they aware of its roots in the Fourth International, the Trotskyist branch of the Communist International. Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985 attributed the intelligence failure represented by 9/11 to Team B and had this to say about it in a 2004 article for the Los Angeles Times.

“The roots of the problem go back to May 6, 1976, when the director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush, created the first Team B… The concept of a "competitive analysis" of the data done by an alternative team had been opposed by William Colby, Bush's predecessor as CIA director and a career professional… Although the Team B report contained little factual data it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate… Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. But it was flawed in the other direction.”

Korb went on to explain that a 1978 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence review concluded; “that the selection of Team B members had yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. And a 1989 review concluded that the Soviet threat had been ‘substantially overestimated’ in the CIA's annual intelligence estimates… Still, the failure of Team B in 1976 did not deter the hard-liners from challenging the CIA's judgments for the next three decades.”

Now long forgotten, the origins of the Team B “problem” actually stretched back to the radical political views and biases of James Burnham, his association with the Communist Revolutionary Leon Trotsky  and the creation of powerful eastern establishment ad hoc groups; the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council. From the outset of the Cold War in the late 1940s an odd coalition of ex-Trotskyist radicals and right wing business associations had lobbied heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism. Vietnam was intended to prove the brilliance of their theories, but as described by author Fred Kaplan, “Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America’s national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations and scenarios was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action.” (Wizards of Armageddon page. 336) Kaplan ends by writing “The disillusionment for some became nearly total.” Vietnam represented more than just a strategic defeat for America’s defense intellectuals; it represented a conceptual failure in the half-century battle to contain Soviet-style Communism but for Team B, that disillusionment represented the opportunity of a lifetime. 

Trotskyist Intellectuals become The New York Intellectuals become Defense Intellectuals

Populated by an inbred class of former Trotskyist intellectuals, the Team B approach represented a radical transformation of America’s national security bureaucracy into a new kind of elitist cult. In the 1960s Robert McNamara’s numbers and statistics justified bad policy decisions, now personal agendas and ethnic grudges would turn American foreign policy into an ideological crusade. Today those in control of that crusade fight desperately to maintain their grip, but only by de-encrypting the evolution of this secret “double government” can anyone understand America’s unrelenting post-Vietnam drift into despotism over the last 40 years.

Rooted in what can only be described as cult thinking, the Team B experiment tore down what was left of the CIA’s pre-Vietnam professional objectivity by subjecting it to politicization. Earlier in the decade, the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research (OSR) had been pressured by Nixon and Kissinger to corrupt their analysis to justify increased defense spending but the Team B’s ideological focus and partisan makeup so exaggerated the threat, the process could never return to normal.

The campaign was driven by the Russophobic neoconservative cabal which included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle and a handful of old anti-Soviet hardliners like Paul Nitze and General Danny Graham. It began with a 1974 article in the Wall Street Journal by the famed nuclear strategist and former Trotskyist Albert Wohlstetter decrying America’s supposed nuclear vulnerability. It ended 2 years later with a ritualistic bloodletting at the CIA, signaling that ideology and not fact-based analysis had gained an exclusive hold on America’s bureaucracy.

The ideology referred to as Neoconservatism can claim many godfathers if not godmothers. Roberta Wohlstetter’s reputation as one of RAND’s preeminent Cold Warriors was equal to her husband’s. The couple’s infamous parties at their Santa Monica home acted as a kind of initiation rite for the rising class of “defense intellectual”.  But the title of founding-father might best be applied to James Burnham.  A convert from Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s inner circle, Burnham’s 1941, The Managerial Revolution and 1943’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom championed the anti-democratic takeover then occurring in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy while in1945’s Lenin’s Heir he switched his admiration, if only tongue in cheek, from Trotsky to Stalin.

George Orwell criticized Burnham’s cynical elitist vision in his 1946 essay Second Thoughts on James Burnham, writing “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.”

Orwell is said to have modelled his novel 1984 on Burnham’s vision of the coming totalitarian state which he described as “a new kind of society, neither capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery.”

As a Princeton and Oxford educated English scholar (one of his professor’s at Balliol College was J.R.R Tolkien) Burnham landed a position as a writer and an instructor in the philosophy department at New York University just in time for the 1929 Wall Street crash. Although initially uninterested in politics and hostile to Marxism, by 1931Burnham had become radicalized by the Great Depression and alongside fellow NYU philosophy instructor Sidney Hook, drawn to Marxism.

Burnham found Trotsky’s use of “dialectical materialism” to explain the interplay between the human and the historical forces in his History of the Russian Revolution to be brilliant. His subsequent review of Trotsky’s book would bring the two men together and begin for Burnham a six year odyssey through America’s Communist left that would in this strange saga, ultimately transform him into the agent of its destruction.

As founder of the Red Army and a firebrand Marxist, Trotsky had dedicated his life to the spread of a worldwide Communist revolution. Stalin opposed Trotsky’s views as too ambitious and the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death splintered the party. By their very nature the Trotskyists were expert at infighting, infiltration and disruption. Burnham reveled in his role as a Trotskyist intellectual and the endless debates over the fundamental principle of Communism (dialectical materialism) behind Trotsky’s crusade. The Communist Manifesto approved the tactic of subverting larger and more populist political parties (entrism) and following Trotsky’s expulsion from the Communist party in November 1927, his followers exploited it. The most well-known example of entrism was the so called “French Turn” when in 1934 the French Trotskyists entered the much larger French Socialist Party the SFIO with the intention of winning over the more militant elements to their side.

That same year the American followers of Trotsky in the Communist League of America, the CLA did a French turn on the American Workers Party, the AWP in a move that elevated the AWP’s James Burnham into the role of a Trotsky lieutenant and chief advisor. 

Burnham liked the toughness of the Bolsheviks and despised the weakness of the liberals. According to his biographer Daniel Kelly, “He took great pride in what he saw as its hard-headed view of the world in contrast to philosophies rooted in ‘dreams and illusions.’” He also delighted in the tactics of infiltrating and subverting other leftist parties and in 1935 “fought tirelessly for the French turn” of another and far larger Socialist Party the SP some twenty thousand strong. The Trotskyists intended “to capture its left wing and its youth division, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL),” Kelly writes “and take the converts with them when they left.”

Burnham remained a “Trotskyist Intellectual” from 1934 until 1940. But although he labored six years for the party, it was said of him that he was never of the party and as the new decade began he renounced both Trotsky and “the ‘philosophy of Marxism’ dialectical materialism” altogether. He summed up his feelings in a letter of resignation on May 21, 1940. “Of the most important beliefs, which have been associated with the Marxist Movement, whether in its reformist, Leninist, Stalinist or Trotskyist variants, there is virtually none which I accept in its traditional form. I regard these beliefs as either false or obsolete or meaningless; or in a few cases, as at best true only in a form so restricted and modified as no longer properly to be called Marxist.”

In 1976 Burnham wrote to a legendary secret agent whom biographer Kelly referred to as “the British political analyst Brian Crozier” that he had never swallowed dialectical materialism or the ideology of Marxism but was merely being pragmatic given the rise of Hitler and the Depression.

But given the influential role Burnham would come to play in creating the new revolutionary class of neoconservatives, and their central role in using Trotsky’s tactics to lobby against any relationship with the Soviet Union, it’s hard to believe Burnham’s involvement with Trotsky’s Fourth International was only an intellectual exercise in pragmatism

Join us next time as we explore how Burnham’s involvement with the OSS and the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom would set the stage for a sophisticated doctrinal campaign that would neutralize any political opposition (Communist or not) to Anglo/American culture and make the world safe for the rise of the Machiavellian elite.

Copyright © 2017   Fitzgerald & Gould   All rights reserved

Part 3 of “Universal Empire” will explore how James Burnham’s involvement with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom set the stage for a sophisticated doctrinal campaign that would neutralize any political opposition (Communist or not) to Anglo-American culture and make the world safe for the rise of the Machiavellian elite.

Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell

Part 3: How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’

Part 4: The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America

 

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By Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul's television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance , they found themselves in the midst of a swirling controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in 1981 brought them into the middle of the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the pictures and the people inside Soviet occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast to Americans.

Following their exclusive news story for the CBS Evening News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds ) for PBS and in 1983 they returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation Project director, Roger Fisher. They were told that the Soviets wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. Peace in Afghanistan was more than a possibility, it was a desired option. But the story that President Carter called, "the greatest threat to peace since the second World War" had already been written by America's policy makers and America's pundits were not about to change the script.

As the first American journalists to get deeply inside the story they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the U.S. defined itself against the rest of the world under the veil of superpower confrontation. Once the Soviets had crossed the border into Afghanistan, the fate of both nations was sealed. But as Paul and Liz pursued the reasons behind the wall of propaganda that shielded the truth, they found themselves drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions. Big things were brewing in Afghanistan. Old empires were being undone and new ones, hatched. America had launched a Crusade and the ten year war against the Soviet Union was only the first chapter.

It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when Paul and Liz were working on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that they began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay many of the documents preceding the Afghan crisis were declassified. Over the next decade they trailed a labyrinth of clues only to find a profound likeness in Washington's official policy towards Afghanistan - in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark - whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It is a likeness that has grown visible as America's entanglement in Afghanistan threatens to backfire once again.

Afghanistan's civil war followed America's Cold War while Washington walked away. A new strain of religious holy warrior called the Taliban arose but at the time few in America cared to look. As the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines in 1998 Paul and Liz started collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. Along with Wali, they contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project published by Palgrave Macmillan (2002). In 2002 they filmed Wali's first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The film they produced about Wali's journey home, The Woman in Exile Returns, gives audiences the chance to discover the message of one of Afghanistan's most articulate voices and her hopes for her people.

In the years since, much has happened to bring Paul and Liz's story into sharp focus. Their efforts at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism are a model for restoring a necessary dialogue to American democracy. Their book, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, published by City Lights (2009), lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American empire. Their book, Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, published by City Lights (2011), lays out the paralyzing contradictions of America’s AfPak strategy. It clarifies the complex web of interests and individuals surrounding the war and focuses on the little understood importance of the line of demarcation between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand line. Their novel The Voice is the esoteric side of their Afghan experience. Gould and Fitzgerald’s articles and blogs have been published in numerous online and print journals and newspapers such as The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, Huffington Post, The New York Times, GlobalPost World News, Middle East Institute’s Viewpoints, CounterPunch, Sputnik News and OpEdNews. They have been interviewed by major media outlets such as MSNBC, RealNews TV, Democracy Now and numerous commercial and PBS radio stations from Boston to LA. They have also made presentations that have aired across the country on C-Span Book TV and the Cambridge Forum (WGBH Forum Network). Their presentation-Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy is viewable here. For more information visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk.

(Source: truthdig.com; April 25, 2017; http://tinyurl.com/m5bd8kg)
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