zaterdag 10 december 2016

Dutch Members of Parlement Who Support Zionist Fascism

KAMER TEGEN TEGEN ERKENNING PALESTIJNSE STAAT

In diverse EU-lidstaten hebben parlementen hun regeringen opgeroepen Palestina te erkennen: België, Groot-Brittannië, Ierland, Spanje, Frankrijk en Portugal. Het Europese Parlement heeft zich ook voor erkenning van Palestina uitgesproken.
Op 24 november 2016 heeft de SP, samen met D66 en DENK, een motie ingediend die de regering opriep om de Palestijnse staat te erkennen. Minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Koenders heeft die motie ontraden, omdat “het strategische moment” voor erkenning nog niet zou zijn aangebroken. “Dat komt heus wel”, zei Koenders. Maar wanneer? De Israëlische bezetting duurt in 2017 50 jaar. De Israëlische regering voert haar inspanningen op de bezetting permanent te maken en de twee-statenoplossing te ruineren.
Op 29 november 2016 stemde een Kamermeerderheid tegen die motie. Dat is bijzonder wrang – 29 november is door de VN uitgeroepen tot Internationale Dag van Solidariteit met de Palestijnen.
De 76 Kamerleden die in de hoofdelijke stemming tégen de erkenning van Palestina stemden, staan hieronder afgebeeld. Zij maken deel uit van negen fracties: VVD, PVV, CDA, ChristenUnie, SGP, VNL, Monasch, Houwers en Van Vliet. De fracties die vóór de erkenning van Palestina stemden, zijn: PvdA, SP, D66, GroenLinks, Partij voor de Dieren, 50PLUS, DENK en Klein.
Zie ook onze 10 redenen, waarom Nederland Palestina zou moeten erkennen.
Tegen stemden de leden Amhaouch, Van Ark, Azmani, Beertema, Berckmoes-Duindam, Bisschop, De Boer, Bontes, Martin Bosma, Remco Bosma, Bosman, Ten Broeke, Bruins, Bruins Slot, Van der Burg, De Caluwé, Tony van Dijck, Dijkgraaf, Remco Dijkstra, Dik-Faber, Duisenberg, Elias, Fritsma, Geurts, De Graaf, Graus, Harbers, Rudmer Heerema, Pieter Heerma, Helder, Van Helvert, Houwers, Keijzer, Van Klaveren, Klever, Knops, De Lange, Van der Linde, Lodders, Madlener, Van Miltenburg, Monasch en Moors, Agnes Mulder, Anne Mulder, Neppérus, Nijkerken-de Haan, Omtzigt, Van Oosten, Potters, Van der Ree, Rog, Ronnes, De Roon, Rutte, Schouten, Schut-Welkzijn, Segers, Van der Staaij, Straus, Taverne, Teeven, Tellegen, Van Toorenburg, Van Veen, Veldman, Visser, Van Vliet, Voordewind, Aukje de Vries, Vuijk, Van Wijngaarden, Wilders, Van 't Wout, Ziengs, Zijlstra.

Henry Giroux on Trump


Trump’s Second Gilded Age: Overcoming the Rule of Billionaires and Militarists

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During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that he liked the uneducated and that once he assumed the presidency, he would appoint a range of incompetent people to high ranking positions that would insure that many people remain poorly educated, illiterate, and impoverished. A few examples make the point.  Betsy DeVos, the nominee for Secretary of Education is a multi-millionaire, has no experience in higher education, supports for-profit charter schools, and is a strong advocate for private school vouchers. Without irony, she has described her role in education as one way to “advance God’s kingdom.”[1] She is anti-union, and her motto for education affirms Trump’s own educational philosophy to “defund, devalue, and privatize.”[2]
Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has never run a federal agency and has no experience in government, policy making, or in public housing and has described housing policy pejoratively as a form of social engineering and a socialist experiment. New York City council member and chair of the city’s Housing and Buildings Committee described Carson’s appointment as “ill-advised, irresponsible and hovers on absurdity.”[3] Carson will run a $48 billion agency that oversees public housing and ensures that low-income families have access to housing that is safe and affordable. He believes people can escape from poverty through hard work alone and has argued that government regulations resemble forms of totalitarian rule comparable to what existed in communist countries.[4]
Andrew F. Puzder, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Labor, has less experience in government “than any secretary since the early 1980s.”[5] He is a critic of worker protections, opposes raising the minimum wage, and appears to share Trump’s disparaging views of women. As the New York Times pointed out, the advertisements that Mr. Pusder’s companies run to “promote its restaurants frequently feature women wearing next to nothing while gesturing suggestively.”[6] When asked about the ads, Mr. Puzder replied “I like our ads. I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s is very American.”[7] I am sure Trump, the unchecked misogynist, agrees.
It is hard to believe that this gaggle of religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theory advocates, billionaires, and retrograde anti-communists, who uniformly lack the experience to take on the jobs for which they were nominated, could possibly be viewed as reasonable candidates for top government positions.  As Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) cited in The Hill observed “most of Trump’s appointees are “The greatest collection of stooges and cronies and misfits we have ever seen in a presidential administration….Some of these people’s only qualifications for the jobs they are being appointed for is that they have attempted to dismantle and undermine and destroy the very agencies they are now hoping to run.”[8]
What these appointments suggest is that one element of the new authoritarianism is a deep embrace of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, crony capitalism, and a disdain for the institutions that give legitimacy to the social contract and the welfare state. Most of Trump’s appointees to top cabinet positions are a mix of incompetent and mean spirited billionaires and generals. This alliance of powerful representatives of predatory financial capitalists and right-wing supporters of the immense military-industrial-surveillance complex makes clear Trump’s support of the worst elements of neoliberalism—a war on education, support for austerity policies, and  an attack on social provisions, the poor, workers, unions, and the most vulnerable. As Eric Sommer wrote in CounterPunch, “These ministerial level cabinet selections are a warning that far greater attacks on the social and economic rights of American workers, and greater militarism and military aggression abroad are being prepared.”[9] Trump’s affirmation of an updated version of the Gilded Age and his attempts to accelerate America’s slide into authoritarianism is an assault on reason, compassion, morality, and human dignity. Its underside is a political mix of militarism and rule by the financial elite, both of which are central features of a savage neoliberal assault on democracy. Trump’s government of billionaires and militarists makes clear that the next few years will be governed by ruthless financial elite who will give new meaning to a war culture that will impose forms of domestic terrorism across a wide swath of American society.
Thus far, Trump has appointed three generals to join his cabinet—James Mattis and Michael Flynn for Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor, along with Retired General John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly is infamous for defending the force-feeding of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and wants to expand the prison population there. Retired General Mattis, whose nickname is “Mad Dog,” stated in 2003, the year that Iraq was invaded, that “It’s fun to shoot some people, you know, it’s a hell of a hoot.”[10]  He once told marines under his command “Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”[11] As difficult as it is to imagine it gets worse. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security advisor considers Islam, with its population of 1.3 billion, a terrorist threat. He has also used the social media to spread fake news stories “linking Mrs. Clinton to underage sex rings and other serious crimes [while pushing] unsubstantiated claims about Islamic laws spreading in the United States.”[12]  At work here is an emerging political-social formation in which fake news becomes an accepted mode of shaping public discourse, inexperience and incompetence become revered criteria for holding public office, and social responsibility is removed from any vestige of politics. All of these appointments point to the emergence of a new political order in which the dystopian fears of George Orwell and Aldus Huxley are merged with the comic grotesquery of the tyrannical systems lampooned by the Marx brothers.
Under the reign of right-wing governments and social movements spreading throughout the world, thinking has become dangerous. Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America have waged a major assault on critical education and the public spheres in which they take place. For instance, public and higher education are being defunded, turned into accountability factories, and now largely serve as adjuncts of an instrumental logic that mimics the values of a business culture. But, of course, this is not only true for spaces in which formal schooling takes place, it is also the case for those public spheres and cultural apparatuses producing knowledge, values, subjectivities, and identities through a range of media and sites.  This applies to a range of creative spaces including art galleries, museums, diverse sites that make up screen culture, and various elements of mainstream media.[13]
Such sites have come under increasing fire since the 1970s and the war against dissident journalism, in particular, will intensify under a Trump presidency.  Attacking the media was a central feature of Trump’s presidential campaign speaks to a coming age of repression, posing a dire threat to freedom of speech. As, Christopher Hass, observes “But more importantly, he threatened to ‘open up’ libel laws so that he and others can more easily sue publications that are critical of them. Those kinds of attacks are designed to burn money and hours that independent publications don’t have-and sometimes they can be fatal.”[14]What the apostles of neoliberalism have learned is that alternative media outlets along with diverse forms of cultural production can change how people view the world, and that such forms of public pedagogy can be dangerous because they hold the potential for not only creating critically engaged students, intellectuals, and artists but can strengthen and expand the general publics’ imagination, give them critical tools to enable them to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, and  hold power accountable. Such thinking is also a prerequisite for developing social movements willing to rethink the vision and tactics necessary to fight against an authoritarian state.
In the face of Trump’s draconian assault on democracy, it is crucial to rethink mechanisms of a repressive politics not only by highlighting its multiple registers of economic power, but also through the ideological pedagogical mechanisms at work in creating modes of agency, identities, and values that both mimic and surrender to authoritarian ideologies and social practices. In this instance, education as it works through diverse institutions, cultural apparatuses, and sites is crucial to both understand and appropriate as part of the development of a radical politics. Reclaiming radical pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects but is primarily about matters of civic literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for liberatory change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[15] If young people, workers, educators, and others are to develop a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force, if not formative culture, that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible.
In this instance, pedagogy as a central element of politics needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed. It must also cultivate a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, stretching the imagination, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, a dead zone of the imagination, and a normalized space of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity.
A neoliberal and anti-democratic pedagogy of management and conformity not only undermines the critical knowledge and analytical skills necessary for students to learn the practice of freedom and assume the role of critical agents, it also reinforces deeply authoritarian practices while reproducing deep inequities in the educational opportunities that different students acquire. Pedagogies of repression and conformity impose punishing forms of discipline not just on students, but on the general public, deadening their ability to think critically; how else to explain the refusal of large segments of the public to think through and challenge the lies, misrepresentations, and contradictions that Trump used during his campaign.  Repressive forms of public pedagogy empty out politics of any substance and further a modern day pandemic of loneliness and alienation. Such pedagogies emphasize aggressive competition, unchecked individualism, and cancel out empathy for an exaggerated notion of self-interest. Solidarity and sharing are the enemy of these pedagogical practices, which are driven by a withdrawal from sustaining public values, trust, and goods and serve largely to cancel out a democratic future for young people. This type of pedagogical tyranny poses a particular challenge for progressives who are willing to acknowledge that the crisis of politics and economics has not been matched by a crisis of ideas, resulting in new age of authoritarianism.
A new age of monstrosities is emerging that necessitates that we rethink the connection between politics and democracy, on the one hand, and education and social change on the other.  More specifically, we might begin with the following questions:  What institutions, agents, and social movements can be developed capable of challenging the dark times ahead?  Moreover, what pedagogical conditions need to be exposed and overcome in order to create the formative culture that would make such a challenge successful?  Even thinking such questions becomes difficult in a time of growing pessimism and despair.
Domination is at its most powerful when its mechanisms of control and subjugation hide in the discourse of common sense, and its elements of power are made to appear invisible. Yet, progressives in a wide variety of sites can take up the challenge of not only relating their specialties and modes of cultural production to the intricacies of everyday life but also to rethink how politics works, and how power is central to such a task. Bruce Robbins articulates the challenge well in both his defense of making the pedagogical more political and his defense of struggles waged on the educational front and his reference to how theorists such as Foucault provide a model for such work. He writes:
But I also thought that intellectuals should be trying, like Foucault, to relate our specialized knowledge to things in general. We could not just become activists focused on particular struggles or editors striving to help little magazines make ends meet. We also had a different kind of role to play: thinking hard, as Foucault did, about how best to understand the ways power worked in our time. Foucault, like Sartre and Sontag and Said, was an intellectual, even at some points despite himself. He helped us understand the world in newly critical and imaginative ways. He offered us new lines of reasoning while also engaging in activism and political position-taking.[16]
Power is fundamental to any discourse about education and raises critical questions about what role education should play in a democracy and what role academics, artists, and other cultural workers might assume in order to address important social issues, in part, through the liberatory functions of education. This would suggest not only a relentless critique of dominant discourses, social practices, and policies, but also the need to engage in collective attempts to invent a new way of doing politics. Those concerned about the future of democracy have to rethink how power informs, shapes, and can be resourceful in both understanding and challenging power under the reign of global neoliberalism. This is especially true at a time in which a full scale attack is being waged by the Trump administration and other neoliberal societies on the public good, social provisions, and the welfare state.
Educators and other cultural workers should consider being more forceful, if not committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just or just enough, and such a recognition means that a society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating and shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that bear down on their everyday lives. This is particularly important at a time when ignorance provides a sense of community; the brain has migrated to the dark pit of the spectacle and the only discourse that matters is about business. Trump has legitimated a spirit of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and corruption. Thought now chases after emotions that obliterate it and actions are no longer framed against any viable notion of social responsibility.
At stake here is the task, as Jacques Derrida insists, of viewing the project of democracy as a promise, a possibility rooted in an ongoing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[17] Democracy in this instance is not a sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and just democracy can take many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important normative dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization that never ends.  Such a project is based on the realization  that a democracy that is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism  never reaches the limits of justice.
Theorists such as Raymond Williams and Cornelius Castoriadis recognized that the crisis of democracy was not only about the crisis of culture but also the crisis agency, values, and education.  Progressives and others who refuse to equate capitalism and democracy would do well to take account of the profound transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central category of politics itself. Pierre Bourdieu was right when he stated that cultural workers have too often “underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”[18] He goes on to say in a later conversation with Gunter Grass that “left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion. Important to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination.”[19]These are important pedagogical interventions and imply rightly that pedagogy in the broadest sense is not just about understanding, however critical, but also provides the conditions, ideals, and practices necessary for assuming the responsibilities we have as citizens to expose human misery and to eliminate the conditions that produce it. Matters of responsibility, social action, and political intervention do not simply develop out of the practice of social criticism but also arise through forms of self-critique.  The relationship between knowledge and power, on the one hand, and education and politics, on the other, should always be self-reflexive about its effects, how it relates to the larger world, whether or not it is open to new understandings, and what it might mean pedagogically to take seriously matters of individual and social responsibility. Any viable understanding of the artist and educator as a public intellectual must begin with the recognition that democracy begins to fail and civic life becomes impoverished when power is relegated to the realm of common sense and critical thinking is no longer viewed as central to politics itself. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is a case study in how politics has been emptied of any substance and civic illiteracy has been normalized. Trump’s claim that he loves the uneducated appears to have paid off for him just as his victory makes clear that ignorance rather than reason, emotion rather than informed judgment, and the threat of violence rather than critical exchange appear to have more currency in the current historical moment.
This political tragedy ushered in with Trump’s election signifies the failure of the American public to recognize the educative nature of how agency is constructed, to address the necessity for moral witnessing, and the need to create a formative culture that produces critically engaged and socially responsible citizens. Realty-TV bombast and celebrity culture confers enormous authority in America and in doing so empties civil society and democracy of any meaning. Neoliberalism’s culture of consumerism, immediate satisfaction, and unchecked individualism both infantilizes and depoliticizes. The election of Donald Trump cannot simply be dismissed as an eccentric and dark moment in the history of American politics. His election proves that collective self-delusion can be dangerous when the spaces for critical learning, dissent, and informed judgment begin to whither or disappear altogether.
As Trump’s presidency gets underway, the neoliberalism’s hired intellectuals and celebrity pundits have already ushered in a discourse that will increasing normalize the regime of a dangerous demagogue, glossing over the ideological, economic, and religious fundamentalists he has chosen to fill top government positions.  Such actions represent more than a flight from political and social responsibility, they also represent a surrender to the dark forces of authoritarianism. Dierdre Fulton, a writer for The Nation, is right in arguing that the process of normalization has already begun since Trump election. She writes:
Oprah Winfrey, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, said Trump’s recent visit to the White House gave her ‘hope’ and suggested he has been ‘humbled’ by the experience,’ Johnson wrote.  ‘The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins told his readers to ‘calm down’ and that     Trump wasn’t the ‘worst thing.’ His colleague, Nouriel Roubini, insisted the Oval Office      will ‘tame’ Trump. People magazine ran a glowing profile of Trump and his wife Melania   (though a former People writer accused Trump of sexual assault). The New York Times’ Nick Kristof dubiously added that we should ‘Grit our teeth and give Trump a chance.’   The mainstays —Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN—while frequently critical, are covering Trump’s transition as they would any other.[20]
Democracy should be a way of thinking about education in a variety of spheres and practices, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of the public good.[21] The question regarding what role education should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are being normalized in the mainstream media.  Central to such a discourse are hidden structures of critique and power attempting to normalize a full-frontal attack on public values, trust, solidarities, and modes of liberatory education. As such, the discourses of hate, humiliation, rabid self-interest, and greed are exercising a poisonous influence in many Western societies. This is most evident at the present moment in the discourse of the right-wing extremists vying to consolidate their authority within a Trump presidency, all of whom sanction a war on immigrants, women, young people, poor Black youth, and so it goes.  One consequence is that democracy is on life support. This is all the more reason to take the late Edward Said’s call for modes of social criticism designed “to uncover and elucidate the contest, to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet  of unseen power, wherever and whenever possible.”  Yet, in spite of the dark forces now threatening many societies around the globe, it is crucial for intellectuals, artists and others to renounce any form of normalization of power, the toxic public pedagogies of neoliberalism, and to take on radical democracy as both a pedagogical project and unfinished ideal. Such a challenge will be all the easier if progressives and others can create the pedagogical conditions that can produce an individual and collective sense of moral and political outrage, a new understanding of politics, and the pedagogical and projects needed to allow democracy to breathe once again.
Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology. Trump’s administration will produce a great deal of violence in American society, particularly among the ranks of the most vulnerable: poor children, minorities of color, immigrants, women, climate change advocates, Muslims, and those protesting a Trump presidency.  What must be made clear is that Trump’s election and the damage he will do to American society will stay and fester in American society for quite some time because he is only symptomatic of the darker forces that have been smoldering in American politics for the last 40 years. What cannot be exaggerated or easily dismissed is that Trump is the end result of a long standing series of attacks on democracy and that his presence in the American political landscape has put democracy on trial. While mass civil demonstrations have and continue to erupt over Trump’s election, what is more crucial to understand is that something more serious needs to be addressed. We have to acknowledge that at this particular moment in American history the real issue is not simply about resisting Donald Trump’s insidious values and anti-democratic policies but whether a political system can be reclaimed in which a notion of radical democracy can be deepened, strengthened and sustained. Yet, under a Trump presidency, it will be more difficult to sustain, construct, and nurture those public spheres that sustain critique, informed dialogue, and a work to expand the radical imagination. If democracy is to prevail in and through the threat of “dark times,” it is crucial that the avenues of critique and possibility become central to any new understanding of politics. If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance.  That is, on the one hand, it must move towards developing analyses that address the existing state of authoritarianism through a totalizing lens that brings together the diverse registers of oppression and how they are both connected and mutually reinforce each other. On the other hand, such a politics must, as Robin D.G. Kelley has noted, “move beyond stopgap alliances”[22] and work to unite single issue movements into a more comprehensive and broad-based social movement that can make a viable claim to a resistance that is as integrated as it is powerful. For too long progressive cultural workers and activists have adhered to a narrative about domination that relies mostly on remaking economic structures and presenting to the public what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression. What they have ignored is that people also internalize oppression and that domination is about not only the crisis of economics, images that deaden the imagination, and the misrepresentation of reality, but also about the crisis of agency, identification, meaning, and desire.
The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics where the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in the bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth is a discourse that legitimates plundering the earths’ resources and exhibits a pathological disdain for community and public values that has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the dark side of politics under Donald Trump’s Presidency. The rule of the billionaires and militarists threaten not just democracy but the existence of the planet. The stakes for both justice, if not survival, are more important than ever.  There is no room for resignation, internecine squabbles, and despair. Resistance must take on the challenge of creating an informed public, the need to develop new forms of non-violent resistance, and mobilize a collective sense of outrage mixed with a need for disciplined and focus action.
Pressing the claim for social justice and economic equality means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good.  That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.
[1] Yesmin Villarreal, “Betsy DeVos: Education Reform Can ‘Advance God’s Kingdom’”, Advocate (December 3, 2016). Online: http://www.advocate.com/politics/2016/12/03/antigay-betsy-devos-education-reform-can-advance-gods-kingdom
[2] Catherine Brown, “Point: Trump’s Education Plan —Defund, Devalue and Privatize Our School System.” Inside Sources (December 5, 2016). Online: http://www.insidesources.com/point-trumps-education-plan-defund-devalue-privatize-school-system/
[3] Amy Goodman, “Housing Advocate: It’s Scary that Trump HUD Secretary Pick Ben Carson Thinks Poverty is a Choice,” Democracy Now (November 16, 2016). Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/7/housing_advocate_its_scary_that_trump
[4] Brendan Gauthier, “HUD secretary front-runner Ben Carson recently called fair housing ‘communist,’” Salon (November 28, 2016). http://www.salon.com/2016/11/28/hud-secretary-front-runner-ben-carson-recently-called-fair-housing-communist/
[5] Noam Scheiber and Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s Likely Labor Pick, Andrew Puzder, Is Critic of Minimum Wage Increases,” New York Times (December 8, 2017). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/politics/andrew-puzder-labor-secretary-trump.html
[6] Ibid., Scheiber and Haberman, “Trump’s Likely Labor Pick, Andrew Puzder, Is Critic of Minimum Wage Increases.”
[7] Ibid., Scheiber and Haberman, “Trump’s Likely Labor Pick, Andrew Puzder, Is Critic of Minimum Wage Increases.”
[8] Mike Lillis, “Liberal Dems: Trump filling Cabinet with ‘stooges’,” The Hill (December 8, 2016). Online: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/309455-liberal-dems-trump-filling-cabinet-with-stooges
[9] Eric Sommer, “Team Trump: a Government of Generals and Billionaires,” CounterPunch (December 7, 2016). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/07/team-trump-a-government-of-generals-and-billionaires
[10] Cited in Dahr Jamail, “Trump Nominee for Homeland Security John Kelly Favors Draconian Immigration Policy.” The Real News (December 8, 2016). Online: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17874
[11] Ibid., Dahr Jamail.
[12] Mathew Rosenberg, “Trump Adviser Has Pushed Clinton Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times (December 5, 2016). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flynn-trump-fake-news-clinton.html?_r=0
[13] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
[14] Christopher Hass, “This is Serious,” In These Times (December 7, 2016). Online:
[15] On this issue, see Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2014);  Susan Searls Giroux, “On the Civic Function of Intellectuals Today,” in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds. Education as Civic Engagement: Toward a More Democratic Society (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), pp. ix-xvii.
[16] Bruce Robbins, “A Starting Point for Politics,” The Nation, (October 22, 2016). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-radical-life-of-stuart-hall
[17]. Jacques Derrida, “Intellectual Courage: An Interview,” trans. Peter Krapp, Culture Machine, Volume 2 (2000), pp. 1-15.
[18] Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 11.
[19] Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (March-April, 2002), P. 2
[20] Deirdre Fulton, “There’s No Normalizing President-Elect Trump,” The Nation (November 14, 2016). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/14/theres-no-normalizing-president-elect-trump-or-least-there-shouldnt-be
[21] Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015).
[22] Robin D. G. Kelley, “After Trump,” Boston Review (November 15, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

Zionist Lobby Supports Fascism





Adelson delivered! Now it’s Trump’s turn

US Politics 
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However dubious big Republican supporters of Israel felt about Donald Trump, in the last weeks of the election campaign many of them gave a lot of money to the Republican Party; and Sheldon Adelson and his wife gave $10 million to a pro-Trump PAC.
In September, Adelson and his wife Miriam gave $10 million to Future45, a pac led by the founder of TD Ameritrade that directly helped Trump during the campaign. The Adelson contribution was the lion’s share of Future45’s revenues of $13 million.
Sheldon and Miriam Adelson gave another $15 million to a Republican Senate campaign superpac on October 24, its largest donation. An “astonishing” surge of funding to the Senate Leadership superpac in the weeks before the election included many contributions from Israel supporters:
Israel is the only issue for the casino magnate Adelson and his wife. In 2013, he called on President Obama to nuke Iran. The last time he gave a lot of money to a winning horse, the horse in question, George W. Bush, stocked his administration with neoconservatives, and we all remember how that turned out.
Two other Israel supporters also contributed to the 2016 Senate leadership superpac:
Billionaire Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman contributed $2.2 million on Oct. 25, while hedge fund manager Paul Singer of Elliott Management chipped in $2 million a day later.
Schwarzman, who has been less active as a donor than Adelson or Singer, will head a forum that will advise Trump on business policy.
Schwarzman is a supporter of the American Jewish Committee, a pro-Israel group; and took part in an Israeli presidential conference in 2013.
Singer is a big supporter of the neoconservative Israel Project, as well as of gay rights groups. CNBC points out that Singer has now flipflopped on Trump:
Singer, who once said Trump’s policies would lead to a global depression, has warmed to him more since his election. He attended a fundraising breakfast for Trump this week and plans to donate to his inauguration.
Sam Fox of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a big backer of Israel, gave a total of $500,000 to the Senate superpac.
It’s often noted that pro-Israel groups like to support candidates across the spectrum so that no one in national office doesn’t feel obligated to them. Tom Friedman has said that the Congress is “bought and paid for” by the Israel lobby. That pattern held this year.
As for the Future45 presidential superpac, other leading rightwing Jewish supporters of Israel gave to it too, but in 2015, according to federal filings, evidently before it had aligned with Trump. Singer gave $250,000; Roger Hertog of the neoconservative Manhattan Institute gave $50,000; Ron Weiser, who is on the board of the pro-Israel Republican Jewish Coalition, gave $100,000.
A month after Adelson’s gift to the superpac, Trump had a rally at a Las Vegas Adelson hotel on October 30, in which he praised Adelson. Fox:
“I’d like to thank the owner of this great hotel, and his incredible wife – she’s an incredible woman – Sheldon Adelson,” Trump said to cheers. “Really incredible people and they’ve been so supportive and we appreciate it.”
Trump has many rightwing supporters of Israel in his circle, including strategist and Islamophobe Steve Bannon, son-in-law Jared Kushner (who fired me over this blog at the New York Observer in 2007), and foreign policy adviser David Friedman.
This election has divided Jews publicly. Many Israeli Jews are embracing Trump. But about 75 percent of American Jews voted for Hillary Clinton in November. “They aren’t just against Trump, they are adamantly opposed to this man, the way he ran his campaign and the values he ran on,” Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street said last week.
A symptom of the division is Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, who is feverishly pro-Israel and anti-Trump. She has called on evangelical Christians to “atone” for supporting Donald Trump. What would she tell his Jewish supporters to do?
Thanks to Yakov Hirsch and James North. 
About Philip Weiss
Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
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Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying

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The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying

Digging deeper into the PropOrNot controversy.
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Photo Credit: Max Borge, Flickr 
Last month, the Washington Post gave a glowing front-page boost to an anonymous online blacklist of hundreds of American websites, from marginal conspiracy sites to flagship libertarian and progressive publications. As Max Blumenthal reported for AlterNet, the anonymous website argued that all of them should be investigated by the federal government and potentially prosecuted under the Espionage Act as Russian spies, for wittingly or unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda.
My own satirical newspaper was raided and closed down by the Kremlin in 2008, on charges of “extremism”—akin to terrorism—which I took seriously enough to leave for home for good. What the Washington Post did in boosting an anonymous blacklist of American journalists accused of criminal treason is one of the sleaziest, and most disturbing (in a very familiar Kremlin way) things I’ve seen in this country since I fled for home. The WaPo is essentially an arm of the American deep state; its owner, Jeff Bezos, is one of the three richest Americans, worth $67 billion, and his cash cow, Amazon, is a major contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. In other words, this is as close to an official US government blacklist of journalists as we’ve seen—a dark ominous warning before they take the next steps.
It’s now been a few days, and the shock and disgust is turning to questions about how to fight back—and who we should be fighting against. Who were the Washington Post’s sources for their journalism blacklist?
Smearing a progressive journalism icon
The WaPo smear was authored by tech reporter Craig Timberg, a former national security editor who displayed embarrassing deference to the head of the world’s largest private surveillance operation, billionaire Eric Schmidt—in contrast to his treatment of his journalism colleagues. There’s little in Timberg’s history to suggest he’d lead one of the ugliest public smears of his colleagues in decades. Timberg’s father, a successful mainstream journalist who recently died, wrote hagiographies on his Naval Academy comrades including John McCain, the Senate’s leading Russophobic hawk, and three Iran-Contra conspirators—Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Robert McFarlane, whose crimes Timberg blameson their love of country and sacrifices in Vietnam.
WaPo’s key source was an anonymous online group calling itself PropOrNot (i.e., “Propaganda Or Not”). It was here that the blacklist of American journalists allegedly working with the Kremlin was posted. The Washington Post cited PropOrNot as a credible source, and granted them the right to anonymously accuse major American news outlets of treason, recommending that the government investigate and prosecute them under the Espionage Act for spreading Russian propaganda.
Featured alongside those anonymously accused of treason by PropOrNot, among a long list of marginal conspiracy sites and major news hubs, is Truthdig. This news and opinion site was co-founded by Zuade Kaufman and the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, who is a professor of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former columnist for the LA Times. It would not be the first time Scheer has come under attack from dark forces. In the mid-late 1960s, Scheer made his fame as editor and reporter for Ramparts, the fearless investigative magazine that changed American journalism. One of the biggest bombshell stories that Scheer’s magazine exposed was the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association, then America’s largest college student organization, which had chapters on 400 campuses and a major presence internationally.
The CIA was not pleased with Scheer’s magazine’s work, and shortly afterwards launched a top-secret and illegal domestic spying campaign against Scheer and Ramparts, believing that they must be a Russian Communist front. A secret team of CIA operatives—kept secret even from the rest of Langley, the operation was so blatantly illegal—spied on Scheer and his Ramparts colleagues, dug through Ramparts’ funders lives and harassed some of them into ditching the magazine, but in all of that they couldn’t find a single piece of evidence linking Scheer’s magazine to Kremlin agents. This secret illegal CIA investigation into Scheer’s magazine expanded its domestic spying project, code-named MH-CHAOS, that grew into a monster targeting hundreds of thousands of Americans, only to be exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974, leading to the creation of the Church Committee hearings and calls by Congress for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.
It’s one of the dark ugly ironies that 50 years later, Scheer has been anonymously accused of working for Russian spies, only this time the accusers have the full cooperation of the Washington Post’s front page.
PropOrNot’s Ukrainian fascist salute
Still the question lingers: Who is behind PropOrNot? Who are they? We may have to await the defamation lawsuits that are almost certainly coming from those smeared by the Post and by PropOrNot. Their description sounds like the “About” tab on any number of Washington front groups that journalists and researchers are used to coming across:
“PropOrNot is an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.”
The only specific clues given were an admission that at least one of its members with access to its Twitter handle is “Ukrainian-American”. They had given this away in a handful of early Ukrainian-language tweets, parroting Ukrainian ultranationalist slogans, before the group was known.
One PropOrNot tweet, dated November 17, invokes a 1940s Ukrainian fascist salute “Heroiam Slava!!” to cheer a news item on Ukrainian hackers fighting Russians. The phrase means “Glory to the heroes” and it was formally introduced by the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at their March-April 1941 congress in Nazi occupied Cracow, as they prepared to serve as Nazi auxiliaries in Operation Barbarossa. As historian Grzgorz Rossoliński-Liebe, author of the definitive biography on Ukraine’s wartime fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, explained:
“the OUN-B introduced another Ukrainian fascist salute at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Cracow in March and April 1941. This was the most popular Ukrainian fascist salute and had to be performed according to the instructions of the OUN-B leadership by raising the right arm ‘slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head’ while calling ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ (Slava Ukraїni!) and responding ‘Glory to the Heroes!’ (Heroiam Slava!).”
Two months after formalizing this salute, Nazi forces allowed Bandera’s Ukrainian fascists to briefly take control of Lvov, at the time a predominantly Jewish and Polish city—whereupon the Ukrainian “patriots” murdered, tortured and raped thousands of Jews, in one of the most barbaric and bloodiest pogroms ever.
Since the 2014 Maidan Revolution brought Ukrainian neo-fascists back into the highest rungs of power, Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators and wartime fascists have been rehabilitated as heroes, with major highways and roads named after them, and public commemorations. The speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, Andriy Parubiy, founded Ukraine’s neo-Nazi “Social-National Party of Ukraine” and published a white supremacist manifesto, “View From the Right” featuring the parliament speaker in full neo-Nazi uniform in front of fascist flags with the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol. Ukraine’s powerful Interior Minister, Arsen Avakov, sponsorsseveral ultranationalist and neo-Nazi militia groups like the Azov Battalion, and last month he helped appoint another neo-NaziVadym Troyan, as head of Ukraine’s National Police. (Earlier this year, when Troyan was still police chief of the capital Kiev, he was widely accused of having ordered an illegal surveillance operation on investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet just before his assassination by car bomb.)
A Ukrainian intelligence service blacklist as PropOrNot’s model
Since coming to power in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Ukraine’s US-backed regime has waged an increasingly surreal war on journalists who don’t toe the Ukrainian ultranationalist line, and against treacherous Kremlin propagandists, real and imagined. Two years ago, Ukraine established a “Ministry of Truth”. This year the war has gone from surreal paranoia to an increasingly deadly kind of “terror.”
One of the more frightening policies enacted by the current oligarch-nationalist regime in Kiev is an online blacklist of journalists accused of collaborating with pro-Russian “terrorists.”  The website, “Myrotvorets” or “Peacemaker”—was set up by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence and police, all of which tend to share the same ultranationalist ideologies as Parubiy and the newly-appointed neo-Nazi chief of the National Police.
Condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists and numerous news organizations in the West and in Ukraine, the online blacklist includes the names and personal private information on some 4,500 journalists, including several western journalists and Ukrainians working for western media. The website is designed to frighten and muzzle journalists from reporting anything but the pro-nationalist party line, and it has the backing of government officials, spies and police—including the SBU (Ukraine’s successor to the KGB), the powerful Interior Minister Avakov and his notorious far-right deputy, Anton Geraschenko.
Ukraine’s journalist blacklist website—operated by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed journalists, whose email addresses, phone numbers and other private information was posted anonymously to the website. Many of these threats came with the wartime Ukrainian fascist salute: “Slava Ukraini!” [Glory to Ukraine!] So when PropOrNot’s anonymous “researchers” reveal only their Ukrainian(s) identity, it’s hard not to think about the spy-linked hackers who posted the deadly “Myrotvorets” blacklist of “treasonous” journalists.
The DNC’s Ukrainian ultra-nationalist researcher cries treason
Because the PropOrNot blacklist of American journalist “traitors” is anonymous, and the Washington Post front-page article protects their anonymity, we can only speculate on their identity with what little information they’ve given us. And that little bit of information reveals only a Ukrainian ultranationalist thread—the salute, the same obsessively violent paranoia towards Russia, and towards journalists, who in the eyes of Ukrainian nationalists have always been dupes and stooges, if not outright collaborators, of Russian evil.
One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.
In October of this year, Yahoo News named Chalupa one of “16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election” for her role in pinning the DNC leaks on Russian hackers, and for making the case that the Trump campaign was under Kremlin control. “As a Democratic Party consultant and proud Ukrainian-American, Alexandra Chalupa was outraged last spring when Donald Trump named Paul Manafort as his campaign manager,” the Yahoo profile began. “As she saw it, Manafort was a key figure in advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda inside her ancestral homeland — and she was determined to expose it.”
Chalupa worked with veteran reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to publicize her opposition research on Trump, Russia and Paul Manafort, as well as her many Ukrainian sources. In one leaked DNC email earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited “to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source “proving” that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers.
(In 2008, when I broke the story about the Manafort-Kremlin ties in The Nation with Ari Berman, I did not go on to to accuse him or John McCain, whose campaign was being run by Manafort’s partner, of being Manchurian Candidates under the spell of Vladimir Putin. Because they weren’t; instead, they were sleazy, corrupt, hypocritical politicians who followed money and power rather than principle. A media hack feeding frenzy turned Manafort from what he was—a sleazy scumbag—into a fantastical Kremlin mole, forcing Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign, thanks in part to kompromat material leaked by the Ukrainian SBU, successor to the KGB.)
Meanwhile, Chalupa’s Twitter feed went wild accusing Trump of treason—a crime that carries the death penalty. Along with well over 100 tweets hashtagged #TreasonousTrump Chalupa repeatedly asked powerful government officials and bodies like the Department of Justice to investigate Trump for the capital crime of treason. In the weeks since the election, Chalupa has repeatedly accused both the Trump campaign and Russia of rigging the elections, demanding further investigations. According to The Guardian, Chalupa recently sent a report to Congress proving Russian hacked into the vote count, hoping to initiate a Congressional investigation. In an interview with Gothamist, Chalupa described alleged Russian interference in the election result as “an act of war.”
To be clear, I am not arguing that Chalupa is behind PropOrNot. But it is important to provide context to the boasts by PropOrNot about its Ukrainian nationalist links—within the larger context of the Clinton campaign’s anti-Kremlin hysteria, which crossed the line into Cold War xenophobia time and time again, an anti-Russian xenophobia shared by Clinton’s Ukrainian nationalist allies. To me, it looks like a classic case of blowback: A hyper-nationalist group whose extremism happens to be useful to American geopolitical ambitions, and is therefore nurtured to create problems for our competitor. Indeed, the US has cultivated extreme Ukrainian nationalists as proxies for decades, since the Cold War began.
As investigative journalist Russ Bellant documented in his classic exposé, “Old Nazis, New Right,” Ukrainian Nazi collaborators were brought into the United States and weaponized for use against Russia during the Cold War, despite whatever role they may have played in the Holocaust and in the mass slaughter of Ukraine’s ethnic Poles. After spending so many years encouraging extreme Ukrainian nationalism, it’s no surprise that the whole policy is beginning to blow back.
WaPo’s other source: A loony, far-right eugenicist think tank
Besides PropOrNot, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg relied on only one other source to demonstrate the influence of Russian propaganda: the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), whose “fellow” Clint Watts is cited by name, along with a report he co-authored, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.”
Somehow, in the pushback and outrage over the WaPo blacklist story, the FPRI has managed to fly under the radar. So much so that when Fortune’s Matthew Ingram correctly described the FPRI as “proponents of the Cold War” he was compelled to issue a clarification, changing the description to “a conservative think tank known for its hawkish stance on relations between the US and Russia.”
In fact, historically the Foreign Policy Research Institute has been one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War days, promoting “winnable” nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable. One of the key brains behind the FPRI’s extreme-right Cold War views also happened to be a former Austrian fascist official who, upon emigrating to America, became one of this country’s leading proponents of racial eugenics and white supremacy.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute was founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé and set up on the University of Pennsylvania campus, with backing from the Vick’s chemical company, funder of numerous reactionary rightwing causes since the New Deal began. And, as the New York Times reported, the FPRI also was covertly funded by the CIA, a revelation that would lead to student protests and the FPRI removing itself from Penn’s campus in 1970.
The FPRI’s founder, Strausz-Hupe, emigrated to the US from Austria in the 1920s. In the early Cold War years, he became known as an advocate of aggressive confrontation with the Soviet Union, openly advocating total nuclear war rather than anything like surrender or cohabitation. In a 1961 treatise “A Forward Strategy for America” that Strausz-Hupe co-authored with his frequent FPRI collaborator, the former Austrian fascist official and racial eugenics advocate Stefan Possony, they wrote:
“Even at a moment when the United States faces defeat because, for example, Europe, Asia and Africa have fallen to communist domination, a sudden nuclear attack against the Soviet Union could at least avenge the disaster and deprive the opponent of the ultimate triumph. While such a reversal at the last moment almost certainly would result in severe American casualties, it might still nullify all previous Soviet conquests.”
But it was Russian propaganda that most concerned Strausz-Hupe and his FPRI. In 1959, for example, he published a three-page spread in the New York Times, headlined “Why Russia Is Ahead in Propaganda,” that has odd echoes of last month’s paranoid Washington Post article alleging a vast conspiracy of American journalists secretly poisoning the public’s mind with Russian propaganda. The article argued, as many do today, that America and the West were dangerously behind the Russians in the propaganda arms race—and dangerously disadvantaged by our open and free society, where propaganda is allegedly sniffed out by our ever-vigilant and fearless media.
The only way for America to protect itself from Russian propaganda, he wrote, was to massively increase its propaganda warfare budgets, and close the alleged “propaganda gap”—echoing again the same solutions being peddled today in Washington and London:
“[W]ithin the limitations of our society, we can take steps to expand and improve our existing programs.
“These programs have been far from generous. It has been estimated, for example, that the Communists in one single propaganda offensive—the germ-warfare campaign during the Korean conflict—spent nearly as much as the entire annual allocation to the United States Information Agency. We should increase the austere budget of the U.S.I.A. We should give our information specialists a greater voice in policy-making councils. We should attempt to coordinate more fully and effectively the propaganda programs of the Western alliance.”
A few years later, the FPRI’s Strausz-Hupe published a deranged attack in the New York Times against Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, calling it “the most vicious attack to date launched by way of our mass media against the American military profession”. The FPRI’s founding director went further, accusing Kubrick of being, if not a conscious Russian agent of propaganda, then a Soviet dupe undermining American democracy and stability—the same sort of paranoid accusations that FPRI is leveling again today. As Strausz-Hupe wrote:
“Anyone who cares to scan the Soviet press and the Communist press in other lands will note that it is one of the principal Communist objectives to drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders. Mr. Kubrick’s creation certainly serves this purpose.”
Reading that then, knowing how the Soviet Union eventually collapsed on itself without firing a shot—and seeing the same paranoid, sleazy lies being peddled again today, one is dumbstruck by just how stagnant our intellectual culture is. We’ve never thawed ourselves out from our Cold War pathologies; we’re still trapped in the same structures that nurture these pathologies. Too many careers and salaries depend on it...
But Strausz-Hupe was the voice of reason compared to his chief collaborator and co-author at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Stefan Possony. He too was an Austrian emigre, although Possony didn’t leave his homeland until 1938. Before then he served in the Austrofascist governments of both Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, but left after the Nazi Anschluss deposed the native fascists and installed Hitler’s puppets in their place.  
Possony was a director and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and according to historian Robert Vitalis’ recent book “White World Power” [Cornell University Press], Possony co-authored nearly all of the FPRI’s policy research material until he moved to Stanford’s Hoover Institute in 1961, where he helped align the two institutions. Possony continued publishing in the FPRI’s journal Orbis throughout the 1960s and beyond. He was also throughout this time one of the most prolific contributors to Mankind Quarterly, the leading race eugenics journal in the days before The Bell Curve—and co-author race eugenics books with white supremacist Nathaniel Weyl.
So even as he was publishing aggressive Cold War propaganda for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Possony wrote elsewhere that the “average African Negro functions as does the European after a leucotomy [prefrontal lobotomy] operation” In other articles, Possony described the people of “the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia” as “genetically unpromising“ because they “lack the innate brain power required for mastery and operation of the tools of modern civilization[.] . . .” For this reason he and Strausz-Hupe opposed the early Cold War policy of de-colonization: “The accretion of lethal power in the hands of nation states dominated by populations incapable of rational thought could be a harbinger of total disaster.” Instead, they argued that white colonialism benefited the natives and raised them up; western critics of colonialism, they argued, were merely “fashionable” dupes who would be responsible for a “genocide” of local whites.
As late as a 1974 article in Mankind Quarterly, Possony was defending race eugenics loon William Shockley’s theories on the inferiority of dark skinned races, which he argued could prove that spending money on welfare was in fact a “waste” since there was no way to improve genetically inferior races. Around the same time, Possony emerged as the earliest and most effective advocate of the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system adopted by President Reagan. The way Possony saw it, the Star Wars weapon was entirely offensive, and would give the United States sufficient first strike capability to win a nuclear war with Russia.
It was this history, and a 1967 New York Times exposé on how the Foreign Policy Research Institute had been covertly funded by the CIA, that led US Senator Fulbright in 1969 to reject Nixon’s nomination of Strausz-Hupe as ambassador to Morocco. Fulbright denounced Strausz-Hupe as a Cold War extremist and a threat to world peace: ''the very epitome of a hard-line, no compromise.” However, he gave in a couple of years later when Nixon named him to the post of ambassador in Sri Lanka.
Today, the Foreign Policy Research Institute proudly honors its founder Strausz-Hupe, and honors his legacy with blacklists of allegedly treasonous journalists and allegedly all-powerful Russian propaganda threatening our freedoms.
This is the world the Washington Post is bringing back to its front pages. And the timing is incredible—as if Bezos’ rag has taken upon itself to soften up the American media before Trump moves in for the kill. And it’s all being done in the name of fighting “fake news” ...and fascism.