Showing posts with label church committee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label church committee. Show all posts

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Sam Harris vs. Obama & Harriet Beecher Stowe on slavery

Sam Harris, an atheist who has written several excellent books on atheism and destructive power of religion, has written one of the few legitimate criticisms of Obama's historic race speech, saying Obama could NOT walk away from his church because it would call his Christianity into question, a guaranteed lethal political wound that would make the effects of Wright's comments look like a stubbed toe. The sad part was Harris' accurate closing statement:
But Obama’s candidacy is also depressing, for it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence must still claim to believe the unbelievable in order to have a political career in this country. We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?

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Sam Harris is dead on as usual with one exception: he treats religion as a cause rather than effect or tool of an even deeper cause, greed.
He mentioned Southerners giving their lives for slavery because their churches told them to:
The Confederate soldiers who eagerly laid down their lives at three times the rate of Union men, for the pleasure of keeping blacks in bondage and using them as farm equipment, did so with the conscious understanding that they were doing the Lord’s work.

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But he has it backwards. The churches were telling them what they wanted to hear, that their sociopathic behavior that made them a lot of money was morally acceptable.
Harriet Beecher Stowe put these words in the mouth of a guilt-ridden slave owner in chapter 16 of Uncle Tom's Cabin:
"suppose that something should bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don't you think we should soon have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What a flood of light would pour into the church, all at once, and how immediately it would be discovered that everything in the Bible and reason went the other way!"
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I sometimes wonder if this isn't exactly what happened. Slaves were replaced by sharecroppers who instead of getting a subsistence living from their masters ended up owing them money, and today, we have illegal immigrants who rather than being fed and clothed year round as slaves were can be dismissed to starve on their own dime after the harvest or even removed by a call to la migra (now ICE).

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

BBC VIDEO: when intel faked terror attacks in Europe

Operation Gladio was far right partisans recruited to be the nucleus of resistance if the Soviets invaded Western Europe, but evolved into doing false flag terrorist actions pretending to be leftists to put stink on the communists, like assassinating the prime minister of Italy.

The first clip on youtube includes an interview with former CIA director William Colby, but the second to last clip is amazing.

It starts with the infiltration of the Red Brigade, and as soon as they were about to do something intel didn't like, they swooped in, and arrested the leaders, then put this assassination plot in motion.




You might recall that the FBI had an informant living with two of the 9/11 hijackers and two of the hijackers were supported by Saudi intelligence agents according to Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11.They also had an informant in the 1993 WTC bombing ring. According to the New York Times, that guy started taping his FBI handlers, when they told him to give the bombers real explosives instead of harmless powder. So are our intel services incompetent, or following the same model of setting up patsies to do terrorist attacks?

The concluding segment is chilling. It includes Michael Ledeen, the far right American fixer, who apparently had a role in promoting the forged Niger letter about uranium in the run up to the Iraq War.

The Italian intelligence operative who ran the whole program referred to the true believers, those who thought they were really in a communist underground group as robots, lifeless things he brought to life, and then as adorable cute puppets, and winds up a music box with a little moving figure on top to illustrate.



All the segments:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

The Italians could do this well enough to kill their prime minister. Any chance our intel people have figured out their own creative uses for this tactic?

This isn't conspiracy theory stuff, it's how you guarantee public support for policies that aren't in the public interest.

The Brits were caught doing this in Iraq, and Israel has carried out these kind of operations against us in the Lavon Affair, and it was probably the intent of the USS Liberty incident as well.

There was a variation of this proposed to President Kennedy, to bomb American cities, hijack planes, and blame it on the Cubans as a pre-text for war, Operation Northwoods. I wouldn't have believed that one if I hadn't seen the declassified docs on it at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

If you don't want the war on terror to last the rest of our lives, we need to eventually get this piece in the debate, and force Congress to investigate it, just as the did COINTELPRO, MK-ULTRA, and the like with the Church committee in the 70s.