cj#1113> An Australian view; Quigley; the torture trade

2000-08-03

Richard Moore

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Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 15:02:32 +1000
To: •••@••.•••
From: <name withheld>
Subject: hello

Dear Richard,

I read your 'escaping the matrix' article with much
interest. I saw through the farce that passes for democracy
after the Australian government and media conspired to crush
Pauline Hanson in a blatant and brutal show of force. For
nigh on 20 years Australians saw their country sold off to
foreigners without so much as a by-your-leave. Changing
governments achieved nothing, but so brainwashed are people
they still didn't twig to what the problem was: namely that
both 'sides' of politics pursued the same policies of what
we here call 'economic rationalism'. This is the familar
policy of privatisations, pursuit of 'flexibility' in the
labour force (ie reducing wages and conditions), selling off
public assets, exporting manufacturing jobs and replacing
them with dead-end part-time work in the services 'industry'
(ie minding the children and cleaning the toilets of the
'winners') - - I'm sure you get the picture.

Anyway. purely by accident, an outspoken, uneducated woman
who derided PC was elected as an independent in a landslide
victory in what had been a safe Labor seat. Her victory
overjoyed the people, and set the elites into action to
discredit her. This they did by accusing her of 'racism'. It
worked, and she's been politically neutralised BUT the genie
is out of the bottle. The Australian electorate is now very
volatile seeing as one million people have left the major
party fold. It is terrifying the elites, and they've even
slowed down the pace of 'reform' as they know they'll get
savaged. Interesting times. But unfortunately, not many
people have woken up to the game, though I do my best to
enlighten them.

A friend of mine who lectures around the place has come to
the same conclusions as you that the US deliberately
promotes trouble spots around the world to justify
intervention, which invariably ended up with globalist
(particularly American big business) control of national
assets. He included it in his talk in Osaka recently. So
it's good that some of us are awake.


Regards
A.

Ps. I thought you might like to read the following.

****************

Professor Quigley and the Democratic Sham

Antonia Feitz, 22/10/99

The virtues of democracy are constantly preached to the
nations of the world. Yet the elites who actually run the
show have made no secret of their contempt for democracy
itself, and especially for the people who believe in it.  
Far-fetched? Not at all. Consider what US Professor Caroll
Quigley thought about political parties way back in 1966.

He wrote: "The argument that the two parties should
represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the
Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea
acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.
Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that
the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any
election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts
in policy....  [E]ither party in office becomes in time
corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it
should be possible to replace it, every four years if
necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these
things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately
the same policies". [1]

In other words, only simpletons believe that changing the
government will change government policies.  Under the party
political system, democracy is a total sham. It has been so
for many years, and the sham is intentional. But anybody who
draws attention to that fact is labelled a conspiracy
theorist by the media. Journalists in the mainstream media
are either unutterably stupid, or else unutterably
hypocritical. Take your pick.

Actually, mainstream journalists are now being exposed for
the fools and/or hypocrites they really are. After all,
Quigley's anti-democratic system of government is now out in
the open. It's chic. It's even got a name: they call it the
Third Way. All the sophisticated people of the world think
the Third Way is oh so progressive. It's nothing of the
sort. It's an unholy marriage between socialism and
capitalism and combines the worst features of both. The two
sides have divvyed up the spoils. Under the Third Way, the
socialists have been licensed to exercise tyranny over
people's thoughts and actions, and the  capitalists have
been given free rein to be as rapacious as they like with no
moral or social obligations.

Consider Australia.  Australia has compulsory voting. Yep,
you even get fined if you don't vote without a good reason,
such as dying.  But Australia's electoral system has been so
corrupted by the major parties that election results no
longer even vaguely represent the will of the people.  For
instance, in the last federal election in 1998, with 8.4% of
the primary vote, the One Nation Party failed to win a seat
in the House of Representatives. But with 5.3% of the vote,
the National Party won 14 seats. True. It's that bad.

This travesty only happened because the  government rushed
through legislation specifically designed to achieve that
result. Why?  Fear of the One Nation Party, which was a
genuine grassroots alternative party. So faced with a rising
tide of voter dissatisfaction with the major parties, the
Australian  parliament actually legislated to deny people
their legitimate  political voice. That's democratic?

Yes, according to elite opinion.  Britain's Tony Blair is so
impressed with Australia's anti-democratic preferential
voting system, he's thinking of introducing it into Britain.
 If Blair succeeds, he won't have to put up with those
irritating independents and minor party representatives that
his own country's first-past-the-post system presently
delivers.  The Murdoch media empire is firmly behind the
push. That's surely contempt for democracy.  Now let's look
at the contempt for democrats themselves.

Unsurprisingly, the anti-democratic Professor Quigley
admired people he called aristocrats - Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt
was the example he gave - and those he called semi
aristocrats - such as the Rockefellers and the Kennedys.
Extolling the virtues of the aristocracy, this American
scholar seriously claimed that they "placed no emphasis on
display of material affluence" and were "more sincere ... 
and less hypocritical than the middle class." [2]

Dear reader, it might even come in handy to remember that
according to Dr Quigley, you can always tell people's class
from the way they treat their servants. Yep, "... the lower
classes treat these as equals, the middle classes treat them
as inferiors, while aristocrats treat them as equals or even
superiors". [3]. But of course!  Everybody knows how the
lower classes treat their servants!  And no doubt the
Rockefellers and Kennedys treat their servants as their
superiors. Why, I for one wouldn't be in the least surprised
to learn that David Rockefeller brings his chauffeur
breakfast in bed!

In the light of this self-deluded foolishness, one can only
wonder what planet Quigley was beamed down from.

In contrast to the noblesse oblige of the American
aristocrats, Quigley defines the middle class by their
"decisiveness, selfishness, impersonality, ruthless energy,
and insatiable ambition".  How odd then, that those
qualities more aptly describe the semi aristocratic 
Kennedys and Rockefellers than the likes of your local
butcher, baker or candlestick-maker. But the majority  of
the middle class are what Quigley called the petty
bourgeoisie. Note the Marxist language. He loathed them.
Eerily, he described them in terms that are reminiscent of
the media's abuse of One Nation supporters thirty years
later, even down to the parallel with the Nazis.

According to Quigley, the petty bourgeoisie - "clerks,
shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers" - are "very
insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally
the chief recruits for any Radical Right, Fascist or hate
campaigns against any group that is different or which
refuses to conform to middle class values". They "live in an
atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration.
They form the  major portion of the Republican Party's
supporters in the towns of America, as they did for the
Nazis in Germany thirty years ago". [4].

From this diatribe, it's easy to see why the elites fear and
loathe ordinary people. For a start, through bitter
experience too many of them see through the political
charade, and consequently will often support a genuine
grassroots opposition party if one arises.  They don't play
the game.  For that, they are a constant threat.
Interestingly, Quigley's loathing is a classic case of
psychological projection because it is the likes of him who
hate, not the shop-keepers and the office workers.  Far from
hating people who don't "conform to middle class values",
they simply want to be left alone to live their lives with
as little government interference as possible.

It's the likes of Quigley and his intellectual heirs who
insist people conform to their politically correct
worldview. They are the ones who intrude into everybody's
lives, telling them what to think, and even how to rear
their children. They are the ones who cannot live and let
live, who are incapable of minding their own business. Why?
because they see themselves as superior beings whose mission
in life is to guide us lesser mortals to accept their
enlightened views. And if we resist, we will be forced. The
plethora of anti-discrimination tribunals and human rights
commissions attests to the truth of that.

After the One Nation Party's experience, Australians don't
need dry academic tomes to know about the elites' hatred of
ordinary people. According to the mainstream media, the
Party's supporters were 'whingers', 'ugly', 'troglodytes',
'racist', 'hard-core bigots', 'losers', 'village idiots'.
And 'a disorganised, ratbag, white supremacist, unarticulate
and dumb mob of populists and opportunists'. [5].  This
venomous bile emanated from some of Australia's media
elites. So much for the much-vaunted virtue of tolerance,
let alone the possibility of genuine democracy.

By now, the media worldwide is well-practised in this
demonization of out-siders. It's a tried-and-true technique
which works like a charm. In 1964, Republican Senator Barry
Goldwater's campaign for the US presidency looked very
strong. Goldwater's  patriotic appeal to the Republican
grassroots made him a threat to the Establishment. When his
political opponents failed to stop him, the Establishment
sooled the media onto him in exactly the same way they did
to One Nation's leader, Pauline Hanson, thirty odd years
later.

His views on the issues of the day were lost in a barrage of
hysterical media accusations that he was 'extremist',
'racist', etc. It's all so depressingly familiar: "... the
press was so violently antagonistic to Goldwater that even
if they had wanted to be honest about it, it was impossible
for them to be honest because they were so busy looking for
weaknesses... [T]he press ... performed the function of the
opposition." [6]. And it's still happening. All over the
world, grassroots parties get the same treatment, smeared as
'populist', 'racist', extremist' etc.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. While using -
no, abusing - democracy for their own advantage in securing
lap-dog governments at their beck and call, the elites
privately despise it.  The likes of David Rockefeller,
Rupert Murdoch, and Henry Kissinger are not democrats any
more than Professor Carroll Quigley was. The only reason he
was so frank about his opinions was because he never
expected his door-stop of a book would ever be picked-up by
any member of the despised petty bourgeoisie.  Silly him.
Like all the elites, he suffered from hubris.

********************************

1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: a History of the World in our Time
(New York : Macmillan, 1966), p.1248.
2. Ibid., p.1241
3. Ibid., p.1243
4. Ibid., p.1243-4
5. Scott Balson, Murder By Media: Death of Democracy in Australia
(Queensland : Interactive Presentations, 1999), p.3
6. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Capitalist (Salt Lake City, The Author,
1970), p.101

*************

 Propaganda, Hypocrisy and the Torture Trade


Antonia Feitz
23/6/99


Together with its international stablemates, the Australian
newspaper has been relentless in churning out NATO
propaganda. A recent gem was an article about a Serbian
'torture chamber' by a London Times' reporter, reprinted in
the Weekend Australian  (19-20/6/99). The alleged torture
chamber had been an accommodation centre for students until
the Serbian Police took it over after NATO bombed their
previous headquarters. That was one of very few facts in the
article.

I am not disputing that torture may have been employed in
this Balkans war. Or even that it was employed in one
particular building.  But if it has, I would hazard a guess
that the KLA is as guilty as the Serbian police. These
people have a long history of ferocious and merciless
conflict with one another as shown in the reprisals and acts
of revenge currently taking place in Kosovo. But the Times'
article was classic propaganda because it failed the first
duty of journalism: to report verified facts. The article
was big on atmosphere and impression, but very light on
facts.

For example, about a seatless chair the journalist wrote:
"It may be innocent; but nothing is innocent here".  Of
course. A broken chair cannot simply be a broken chair. It
must be made to hint at something sinister. Spotting a baby
shoe in a pile of 'sodden clothing' he asked: "Is it
possible that they tortured babies, too, in this hole?"
Torturing babies? Why? - they can't supply information about
KLA movements. Even if - as horrible as it is to even think
such a thing - the Serbs tortured babies to extract
information from their parents, the writer had no proof nor
even any allegation that such barbarism ever happened.
Instead he asked a rhetorical question to thoroughly
demonise the Serbs. In doing so, he has prostituted
responsible journalism to crude propaganda.

Because of the presence of 'pornographic' magazines and
packets of condoms in one room, he surmised that this was
the scene of the 'mass rapes'. Such thoughtfulness on the
part of the Serbian 'rapists' seems quite out of character
if not completely bizarre. Safe sex rapists? After all, in
the previous mass rape allegations in Bosnia - never proven,
and never retracted by the Western press - the Bosnian women
claimed to have been deliberately made pregnant so that
Serbian blood would pollute their race.

With no hard facts at hand he made do with fantasy: "The
whole building has been trashed.  But even ordinary office
rooms tell a tale. In one room there is a chainsaw. It looks
as if it has been used." On hapless Albanians is the
implication, suggesting the Serbs were into chainsaw
massacres.

This is not journalism because the first rule of journalism,
as it is in academic writing, is to verify and source your
facts. This article  is creative writing and a pretty poor
example at that. If people were tortured in that building,
that is terrible and must be condemned. But when a critical
reader is still none the wiser about the alleged torture
after reading the article, it's clear that it was
propaganda, not responsible journalism.

Torture is never a pretty subject. But the Balkans war has
highlighted the hypocrisy of the governments of the NATO
countries with regard to it. On the one hand they condemn
it, and on the other, they profit from it.

Europe and the US are the major manufacturers and exporters
of torture equipment.  The US particularly enjoys a brisk
trade in torture technology. A chilling report for the
European Parliament titled "An Appraisal of Technologies of
Political Control" (1998), lists the police torture exports
licensed by the US Commerce Department 1991-1993.
Interestingly Yugoslavia was one of the very few countries
of the world that did not appear as a customer on the list
of 110 countries.

Every tin-pot dictatorship in Latin America, Africa, the
Middle East and Europe was on the list, along with most of
the more 'respectable' nations, including Australia. So much
for humanitarian principles. US companies freely advertise
thumbcuffs, thumbscrews, leg irons and shackles, whips,
electroshock devices, suspension equipment, immobilisation
guns, shock batons and even 'specially designed implements
of torture'. And as noted, they don't care where they go.
Business is business.

But that's old fashioned stuff. Research in torture
technology and crowd control is booming in US nuclear
laboratories such as Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore and Los
Alamos. Thanks to their research, the world's police forces
already have available for 'crowd control' such devices as
ultra-sound generators which cause disorientation, vomiting,
involuntary defecation, and disturbance of the ear thus
causing loss of balance. Apparently the system which uses
two speakers can target individuals in a crowd. Handy to nab
the ring-leaders.

And that's just for starters. Among the exciting new toys
for the world's police are human capture nets which can be
laced with chemical irritants, or even electrified to pack
an extra punch. There's a foam-spreading gun with the fun
name of 'lick 'em and stick 'em technology' which glues
people's hand and feet to the footpath. There are foams with
pepper spray; there are blinding laser weapons; there are
microwave and acoustic disabling systems.

R & D in the US and Europe is directed towards developing
more efficient 'mark-free' interrogation and torture
techniques and technologies. These 'technologies' have been
developed for crowd control, but Amnesty International is
not alone in claiming they are being used for torture. In
any case, nothing better illustrates the tyrannical nature
of most governments than the fact they plan to use such
crowd control systems on their own citizens.

And they do. Under the guise of prison discipline, the US
tortures its own citizens according to the previously
mentioned report which documented the use of the Remote
Electronically Activated Control Technology (REACT) stunbelt
on US prisoners. The belt can be activated from 300 feet
away and inflicts a 50,000 volt shock for 8 seconds. The
high-pulsed current enters the prisoner's left kidney and
travels along the blood channels and nerve pathways. As
targeted prisoners lose control of bladder and bowel
functions, the makers proudly promote the belt for its
"total psychological supremacy" of prisoners. Indeed. The
prospect of being made to involuntarily defecate and urinate
in public is not something most people would risk. There can
be no doubt these US 'researchers' are the moral equivalents
the Nazi scientists in WW2.

As of 1996, sixteen US state correctional agencies had
obtained these appalling and degrading devices. Stun Tech of
Cleveland Ohio wants the belts introduced into the chain
gangs of Alabama, Florida and Louisiana. Yes, Virginia, the
'humanitarian' US has re-introduced chain gangs too. There's
not much in the mainstream media about that either.

Because of its massive incarceration rate, the US
increasingly 'warehouses' its prisoners in huge complexes. 
With the privatisation of prisons, cost constraints are
paramount and simple control has increasingly replaced any
idea of rehabilitation. Judge Thelton E. Henderson reported
that prison officers at the huge Pelican Bay prison in
California - with a population of 3,000 inmates  - 
routinely assaulted prisoners in their cells with batons and
high voltage taser guns. As well, they chained them in
'fetal restraints' - wrists bound to ankles - for 22 hours a
day. This happened as recently as 1995. This brutality was
even encouraged by the prison management as effective in
maintaining discipline.

US prisons also use drugs for immobilising inmates - and for
testing.  In the trade this is called 'liquid cosh'. The
drugs range from tranquillisers and anti-depressants to
powerful hypnotics and drugs which produce fear and pain
which are used in 'aversion therapy' to induce behaviour
modification. The report noted that US prisons are the "new
laboratories for developing the next generation of drugs for
social reprogramming".  The pharmacology labs of the
universities and the military produce "scores of new
psychoactive drugs each year".

The EU parliament has expressed concerns that with the
increasing privatisation of prisons in Britain and Europe,
such alien 'management' techniques will replace the
Europeans' more benign approach. They fear that big US
consortiums will take over the running of prisons worldwide,
and that subsequently there will be very little government
scrutiny of their operations.

It's obvious that all the media talk about Serbian savagery
is sanctimonious cant. Though no excuse, at least the Serbs
fought, and maybe tortured in hot blood for a cause they
believed in: the independence of their country. The
merchants of torture are far greater savages, dealing as
they do in the infliction of pain on unknown human beings
for nothing more than profit. It's clear that the
'humanitarian' leaders of NATO and the dutiful mainstream
media are absolute hypocrites.

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Richard K Moore
Wexford, Ireland
Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance 
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