by William Skink
I haven’t written anything this past week because I’ve been too engrossed in David Talbot’s new book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. It’s enlightening, to say the least.
I haven’t gotten to the juicy parts about the Kennedy assassination yet, but Talbot does an exhaustive job showing how the Dulles Brothers established a Nazi-friendly, communist-obsessed post-WWII environment in America where foreign leaders were deposed to benefit corporate interests under a rigid, paranoid ideological umbrella singularly focused on countering Soviet communism across the globe.
Reading about this critical time period puts everything that comes after in disturbing context. The opportunity to move past Cold War paranoia died with Kennedy, perpetuating the consequences (and, for the Military/Industrial complext, benefits) into a 21st century that America is still trying desperately to dominate.
Reading reactions to the armed standoff in Oregon, one of the valid criticisms is that the Bundy clan was emboldened after the Feds failed to deal with their lawlessness in Nevada.
I apply that same criticism to the seditious actions of operators like Allen Dulles. This country failed to hold those within America’s government accountable for enacting a coup on American soil, and that failure has continued to metastasize.
Politics in America is now totally captured by the plutocrats, which is one reason why party identification is near historic lows:
In 2015, for the fifth consecutive year, at least four in 10 U.S. adults identified as political independents. The 42% identifying as independents in 2015 was down slightly from the record 43% in 2014. This elevated percentage of political independents leaves Democratic (29%) and Republican (26%) identification at or near recent low points, with the modest Democratic advantage roughly where it has been over the past five years.
Those who continue to labor under the illusion that America is a democracy need to wake the fuck up.