Five Part Series: 15th anniversary of 9/11, 2016
The End of the Game
The inspiration behind Winston Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech of 1946 and its warning of the growing Communist threat to "Christian civilization" was the American child of British immigrants, James Burnham. As the "first neoconservative," Burnham would work his way from acting as an assistant to Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. His much critiqued landmark 1940 The Managerial Revolution would be read and admired by Hitler's general staff and viewed as the blueprint for George Orwell's 1984 in which a new class of business executives, technicians, government bureaucrats and soldiers would destroy the old capitalist order, crush the working class and seize all of society's wealth for themselves.
In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled "Lenin's Heir" Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland. Defined as "the magnetic core" of Soviet power, he compared it to the mystical "reality of the One of Neo-Platonism," whose inexorable and unstoppable "emanative progression" descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter" towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through "Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States)." Burnham was a keen advocate of dirty tricks. He would play an important role in the overthrow of Iran's Mohammed Mosaddeq and the installation of the Shah. His book The Machiavellians would become a handbook for CIA planners.
As an "anti-Communist ideology" Burnham's apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia's magnetic core, ring like a medieval incantation throughout Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech. George Orwell even makes clear in his 1946 "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" that Burnham's words read like a mystical invocation and were most likely intended to hypnotize.
Twenty six years later, Senator J. William Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness at all to reexamine the basic assumptions of American postwar policy toward the Soviet Union and what had brought the United States to such a sorry state. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SALT would spring from this realization, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ABM and eventually SALT II, until in January of 1980 President Jimmy Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the Treaty on the Senate floor because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That treaty would never be passed. At the time few understood that Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had masterminded the campaign to bait the Soviets into invading Afghanistan and then used the invasion as a pretext for moving an extremist neoconservative agenda into the mainstream of American politics.
Our involvement in the Afghanistan story started in the summer of 1979 when we began production of a documentary titled Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. During the next months numerous experts including economist John Kenneth Galbraith lent their experience to our understanding of the unseen damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and investment capital would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War -- as the neoconservative right was demanding at that critical moment -- would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.
But by the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The December 27, 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine, to Churchill and Burnham's mystical, medieval enchantment and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life was about to begin.
J. William Fulbright's 1972 "Reflections: In Thrall To Fear" represented an awakening from the deep hypnotic trance imposed upon Americans by Cold War ideology. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought about its re-emersion, but this time to a deeper and totally detached level of unreality.
With the election of Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980, the United States rejected Fulbright's concerns for the intellectual dishonesty represented by the Cold War and America's disgust with the Vietnam war and committed itself to taking it one step further.
The U.S. crossed through a mirror in 1947 with the creation of President Harry Truman's second and covert national-security-government. Few if any would fully understood at the time that the creation of this Double Government would soon lead to the transfer of power from the Congress, the courts and the Presidency to a concealed "Trumanite network" of military managers, diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The 1980 election would renew this shadow government's power through a two dimensional Hollywood invention named Ronald Reagan and America would never be the same.
The Reagan campaign's militaristic motto of Peace through Strength was sold to Americans as the Reagan Revolution. It was in fact a counter-revolution engineered by a reactionary group of insiders headed by former Research Industry of America employee, OSS veteran and Wall Street lawyer William J. Casey with the intention of burying the Vietnam legacy and restoring the power of America's hidden Cold War masters. Casey's mandate for control of the American mind was simple and clear. As he told the President of the United States in 1981 "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
As a top level intelligence professional since 1939, Casey had built key access to the concentric circles of international power necessary to carry off the tectonic shift of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street that the Reagan Revolution really represented. And as Director of Central Intelligence he was perfectly positioned to put James Burnham's dirty tricks and Machiavellian philosophy to work in the heartland of Eurasia.
Casey's passion for the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union was messianic. As an ultra-conservative Catholic, he saw little difference in the antimodernism of the House of Saud and the anti-enlightenment views of the newly installed Polish Pope, John Paul II. Disguised as a war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet aggression, Casey's campaign picked up where Zbigniew Brzezinski's left off by expanding the infiltration of an extremist terror network beyond Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Muslim provinces to provoke an insurrection.
Backed by neoconservatives, the Saudis and secretive organizations like the Safari Club, Le Cercle, the Bilderberg Group and the 6I, the secret plan would ultimately play out in American propaganda from Rambo to Charlie Wilson's War as the greatest American victory of the Cold War.
In the end, Casey's team would so tear down the wall between fact and fiction, legal and illegal, truth and the lie; it would open the door for chaos from South America to South Central Asia.
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