The articles on Blairism and contamination in Lobster 33 are tremendously useful in understanding the recent political changes in the UK, and also in understanding ‘fusion paranoia’ as a cross-contamination argument. Maybe it’s not a conspiracy, but it’s surely not a coincidence that the fusion idea was first put forth by New Yorker, a champion of the U.S. mall culture. The U.S. militia ‘right’ certainly would recognize the whole process of Tony Blair abandoning British self-interest to dimly understood international investment banking conspirators. I wonder, however, if the militias or their ‘left’ counterparts really see the rather old assumptions of power elites that the masses are both the underemployed-labor and the limitless-want market for the New World Order. JFK was shot on his way to the International Trade Mart for a speech attempting to convince voters that public life tied to his political future might have more meaning than one of mere shopping and credit debt.
Deviance from these middle class, mid-brow values is the crime that unites the destruction of the Philadelphia MOVE group-that-wouldn’t-move with crazy Christian Koreshis at Waco, and many other ‘cults’ besides. Spotlight self-evidently fits its critique of global power elites into a ‘nationalist’ perspective. The daily newspapers and corporate media remove any such critique for obvious reasons but, as editor Ramsay points out, the ‘left’ really has no excuse. I recently came across these remarks from 1975 by Charlene Mitchell, speaking to a group called National Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression:
‘It is suggested that since Watergate we need no longer have fear. Congress is on the alert and will protect us…The fact of the matter of course is that the dossiers continue to be compiled, the surveillance and the snooping and the wiretaps and the agents coming onto folks’ jobs and the provocations and the infiltrations and the assassinations and the chemical-biological warfare testing and the human experimentation and all the rest of the government’s crimes against us continue, in full force, and are on the increase. Moreover, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration [LEAA], under the guidance of ‘ex’-CIA agents, is funding thousands of projects to experiment and establish a police-state apparatus with all those techniques the CIA has perfected against other countries. Virtually all the national police agencies are involved in this contingency plan, not the least of all the nearly invisible Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Bureau of the Treasury Department [BATF] which set up the Charlotte 3 and the Wilmington 10 prosecutions and for whom Sara Jane Moore was a paid informer…’
Sounds like a militia meeting! Moreover, in addition to attacking a militia bugaboo like the BATF, it very specifically identifies the federal agency, LEAA, that developed the PROMIS software from its origins in the Operation Phoenix assassination programme in Vietnam. PROMIS’ notorious tracking capabilities and its possible role in the October Surprise entanglement became the focus of Danny Casolaro’s investigation and led to his mysterious death.(1) Twenty-two years later readers find more reference to PROMIS and Casolaro in Spotlight, in Rodney Stich’s books (his Defrauding America includes a chapter of suspicious deaths related to the case)(2) and in the channelled messages (sic) of Hatton in Phoenix Liberator.
Such gaps in the ‘left’ press make Matthew Kalman’s attempt to hold Nexus up to a ‘leftist’ purity test appear lame. The guilt-by-association tactics against Nexus editor Duncan Roads veil a distaste for propositions imagined to be found in the magazine, somewhere between the wacky alternative health stuff and the conspiracy theories, that such purists would rather not ponder: where in the left is the condemnation for Clinton’s multiple bombings of Iraq — one under the pretext of a conspiracy theory plot against George Bush — and the subsequent strangling of its oil sales and starvation of its children? What are the connections between the recent provocations in Cuba and the anti-Castro Cubans (one of those groups, Brothers for Peace, has actually been characterised as pro-democratic, despite the fact that its leader, Jose Basulto, confesses to having strafed a hotel with machine gunfire in JFK days in an attack very similar to another in Cuba last April)?; and the most heinous question of all, might Libya be more the progressive-Islamic-republic-among- fundamentalists that it would like the world to believe?
These are not questions the left should avoid, but Open Eye flashes the avoidance sign when some of Nexus‘ footnotes refer to Willis Carto and Adolf Hitler. In proper measure, such references are the hammers and tongs of paradigm reconstruction. But again, even if these paradigms shift along a fascistic line, can the idea of a fascist anti-power allying Libya, Iraq and Cuba and maybe East Timor, that only maybe leaks through some footnotes and ads in Nexus, be taken seriously as a paradigm or a far-right agenda? Can anyone even imagine that this is an accurate description or an actual possibility?
When Nexus editor Duncan Roads finally denied Open Eye’s charges in print, he did it in an issue that for the first time advertised copies of Qadhafi’s Green Book. That should be enough to have Mr. Roads register as a Libyan agent, even though in other instances Nexus has, for instance, reviewed books which explicitly condemn CIA nation-building involvement in the creation of Qaddafy’s state.
Best,
Kenn Thomas
Steamshovel Press
POB 23715
St. Louis, MO 63121
http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma
Notes
- See The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, Feral House, POB 3466, Portland OR 97208, $19.95.
- See Books, below.