Wikipedia

“[The Langoliers’] only form of sustenence would appear to be time. As time passes,
they devour the universe that is left behind.”

– Monster Wiki, describing the creatures in Stephen King’s titular Novella

Looking at Wikipedia’s entry on the Soviet-Afghan war I was again dismayed by a “controversy” arising over something I used for a post, arising after I had referenced the source for my blog. In an entry I had scheduled for June, 2022, I had linked to a February Counterpunch article regarding the US’s (and likely the Trilateral Commission’s) involvement in provoking this war to get the USSR into their own “Vietnam.”

I wrote the current post on the Wikipedia entry controversy in July 14, noting that I had…

recently included this war as an event in a brief history of classism, so I thought I should check my historical veracity. The Wiki entry listed five references that confirmed my country’s role in this provocation, then ultimately dismissed the claim based on four others. I made a list of the references, and compared...

I listed those who asserted the influence as:

• D. Robert Worley, senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies;
• Ali Riaz, Bangladeshi American political scientist;
• Andrew J. Bacevich Jr., Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University;
• Tyler A. Shipley, Professor of Society, Culture and Commerce in the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning; and
• Gilles Kepel: “Considered as one of the world’s leading authorities on Political Islam and the Middle East, he is Professor at Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure”

…and those who denied it:

• Steve Coll, professor of journalism, former CEO of the New America think tank, an organization funded by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller* Foundation, and United States Department of State;
• Zbigniew Brzezinski**, Trilateral Commission co-founder (with David Rockefeller);
• Conor Tobin, Postdoctorate Research Fellow in UCD School of History. The Wikipedia entry on our subject cites his first published document, which was published in the journal Diplomatic History in April 2020; and
• Elisabeth Leake, Professor in Diplomatic History and Associate Professor of History at the Fletcher School, which she joined in 2022. The Wiki article cites a book she published that year, a book which, according to her Fletcher page, “won the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations‘ [“SHAFR”] Robert H. Ferrell Prize in 2023.” The first entry on my Google search for reviews of this book is a lukewarm Johns Hopkins University critique. My Google search on SHAFR shows virtually no interest in the society outside the U.S.

I further pointed out that…

“SHAFR” is the same association that publishes Diplomatic History, which had printed the Tobin article. It is an interesting question whether our covert involvement in provoking the Soviets to invade Afghanistan is one of “Diplomatic History” – The topic seems very narrow, yet the credibility of the apparently most qualified person cited to deny significant US interference rests on the award from this specialized organization...

Since I wrote this post, four of the five references I had given to support my contention have been removed¹ from the Soviet-Afghan entry. Further, more has been written to prop up the idea that the US had very little to do with provoking this war. Since there is so much fervor (and probably money) behind maintaining this idea, I won’t try to disprove this idea on line, but encourage my readers to research these conflicting narratives. I also urge those researchers to remember how long the prosperity gospel illusions have been maintained – In a choice between egalitarian and elitist ideas, if there is a question of truth, I advise leaning toward the former.

I’ll end by quoting the rest of my planned entry, though it’s likely sources were corrupted to discredit this, also:

My verification experience reminded me of a claim I heard in a June 23 Chris Hedges interview with Matt Taibbi about a government task force that orchestrates filtering (and countering?) information that opposes the prosperity gospel narrative on Wikimedia as well as social media. Although I don’t blame Wikipedia’s (unlike Twitter’s) editors, I think I should remind my readers of various “red flags” I’ve found when using this resource. I found smearing of those who assert having recovered memories of abuse, especially abuse of a ritual nature, and of AA. More disturbing were “controversies” that arose in Wiki entries regarding things after I wrote about them. One of these was about Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, whom I had asserted, according to my earlier Wikipedia research, had suffered persecution by the Catholic Church for his magical practices. Returning to his entry, I noted a denial that this was the reason for his persecution. The most striking example of manufactured controversy was that, after I wrote mentioning the Thule Society’s influence on Hitler, a dispute appeared on his entry based on the work of a neo-Nazi who felt that Hitler was above this influence. I scheduled our current entry on July 14, in case further Wikipedia changes occur.

* The Rockefellers have shown up on this blog so often that I decided to create a tag for them.

** As quoted in his 1979 “Reflections.”

¹ I updated this post most recently on 10/14, 7:33am EST. My last update had said that all five were removed, but someone returned the fifth reference since then. I saved a pdf of today’s Wiki entry on the subject in case more changes are made before this post’s scheduled appearance. – Viola

I couldn’t find a better image for the above-quoted story than this one. It is a satirical take on the Miniseries based on the Langoliers novella, a miniseries the critic dislikes.
If the illustration gets pulled, you can find it at Channel Awesome.

Essential Concepts, Pt. 2

Higher education should be related “to economic and political goals,” and if it is offered to the masses, “a program is then necessary to lower the job expectations of those who receive a college education.” No challenge to capitalist institutions can be considered, but measures should be taken to improve working conditions and work organization so that workers will not resort to “irresponsible blackmailing tactics.” - Noam Chomsky, summarizing a portion of the Trilateral Commission's “Crisis of Democracy”

I recently listened to an interview with Chris Hedges entitled, “The Decline of Morality Amidst the Celebration of the Self,” an interview that reminded me of a concept I haven’t yet covered in this series, perhaps due to its very centrality to this blog:

Interdependence. Despite this concept being common to most religions, in our era neoliberal forces (according to the directive of the above-quoted document) have been constantly undermining our capacity to see its importance – never mind live it. Hedges points out the connection around 9:22 – corporate ideology holds even the study of humanities (let alone philosophy or theology) as anathema. Such undermining takes many forms. Some of them are blatant, such as in the Objectivists’ book on ethics, The Virtue of Selfishness as well as in the prosperity gospel teachings I’ve described in my three series on the topic. Others are very subtle, such as in postmodernist works like Seinfeld and South Park, works of disavowal that pretend to “make fun” of selfishness while in fact celebrating it.

Such undermining requires that we hold Interdependence as an essential concept. I have given a menu on this blog to an intimately related topic. For those who want to go deeper, I’ll link it here.

To illustrate another example of a postmodern celebration of selfishness…

Exposing False Dialogue

[Newly freed slaves] were good laborers and they might be better. They could become a strong labor force and properly guided they would restrain the unbridled demands of white labor, born of the Northern labor unions and now spreading to the South.

– W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn*

I want to turn my readers’ attention to a book that came out late last year (Well, for this blog it constitutes a current event) – Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!. I recently heard about it from the prescient Chris Hedges. At the time, I had been discussing with my spouse the need to expose the complicity between the only two parties that have had a chance of winning a U.S. election since the “Bull Moose Party” of 1912.

I then found a good analysis of it in Common Dreams. Both these sources can make a good case for the False Dialogue we’ve covered here, but I want to discuss parts that stood out for me.

I had already thought the 2016 primaries were handled unfairly, but watching the the 2020 primary reports, I was often outraged by the way the news downplayed Bernie Sanders’ candidacy. “He’s only the frontrunner!” I would sneer at the unresponsive TV set. Chris Wright, the Common Dreams reviewer, analyzes how outrageous this unfairness was:

Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation: they tried to "cancel" Sanders for his being a "privileged white male" with a supposed blind-spot on race. His "economic reductionism," according to Angela Davis, prevented him from "developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence." As Finkelstein says, "When the 'hour of serious danger' to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders' class-struggle insurgency, the 'true nature' of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile 'radicals' enlisted under the banner to stop him." Woke cancel culture cooperated with the establishment media's cancel culture to stop the Sanders juggernaut.

Finkelstein contrasts the “left’s” treatment of this candidate, one who clearly and thoughtfully discussed the dire problems this country was facing, with that of Barack Obama. the author says in the Hedges interview, Obama was “marketed” as a “litmus test” for voters: “are you a good person or are you a bad person?” However, by Obama’s admission – in his own memoir – he stood for nothing. Further, from the choices for his cabinet, “it was clear there wasn’t going to be any change” apart from his being a black man. Yet, as Hedges paraphrased Finkelstein, the woke culture who destroyed Bernie’s campaign “anointed” Obama.

Back to Wright’s article, I like his explanation of the phenomenon of wokeness itself. It is…

...what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the "left" adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.

Lastly, Wright brings up an anecdote deeply relevant to this blog. When Finkelstein’s work was first getting noticed, his friend, New York Review of Books‘ editor Arthur Hertzberg, asked him if he was in “Noam Chomsky’s stable.”

Despite knowing the probable consequences of giving the wrong answer, he unhesitatingly said he deeply admired Chomsky and was grateful for his support—which, of course, was the wrong answer. He never heard from the men again. Even so, "I was proud of myself," he writes, "not to be tempted, at all, by the lure of fame and fortune, and I was grateful for this test of my fidelity to Truth (and Chomsky), so that I could prove in my own person dead wrong the cynics who imagine, or console themselves, that everyone has a price."

* Dusk of Dawn on line here.

Education, Pt. 2

“Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.” – Arthur Miller, The Crucible, 1953

Chris Hedges, in the link from my last entry, interviewed scholar Ellen Schrecker, best known for her books on the second red scare, such as, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Her work fills in a part of my “Prosperity Gospel and the Culture Wars” series, in which I barely touch on the 1950’s* and 60’s before delving into the 1970’s and beyond.

Hedges and Schrecker discuss the repression of academia during the red scare. California had gone so far as to pass a law making university faculty sign “loyalty oaths.” In the words of this Civil Liberties History website, “The insidious aspect of the University of California loyalty oath, and of all loyalty oaths during the Cold War, was that it did not penalize people for any specific criminal or unprofessional conduct on the part of individuals required to sign it. The oath addressed only political beliefs and associations.” The interview covers how the bullying tactic failed, crediting the better funding of our educational system at the time.

The interview correctly cites the US’s need at this time for college-educated people to prevail against rising communist nations as the reason for this generosity. Perhaps, though, seeing the history we have covered about the failure of such tactics and the Jamesian ideas that had developed to maintain and renew the prosperity gospel, there is more to this story. After all, the Germans we had again defeated were, in both world wars, supposed to have been “the brutes,” and the USSR had too recently proven to be a brave and effective ally against them. Think also of how soon communism rose in this country after the first red scare. Lastly, Europe, even Britain, did not join the hysteria as they had done before WWII (the Axis powers had obviously risen as part of the anti-communist hysteria.) Did the prosperity gospel adherents actually expect heavy-handed methods like California’s law to work?

Reviewing the above-linked essay on World War I propaganda, I looked again at William James’ “Sentiment of Rationality” essay, with its prescriptions for handling people inclined to focus on “brute fact” – These were the people who were needed to defeat the Soviets, opponents who had atomic weapon capability by 1949 and had a space program by 1955. Winning some victories against authoritarian, puritanical targets in the American government would embolden those of the “materialistic temper” to prepare themselves for fields that gave more power to our seemingly moderate government. These victories, coupled with all the government money now spent on all levels of education, led to the “golden age” of which Schrecker speaks.

I thought my readers might like a scene from a film that came out when movies showed greater realism due to this golden age, even as authoritarianism and corporations had started to mobilize against the education that had led to this realism.

*I did write a bit on McCarthyism in my “False Dialogue” series, though.

Education

Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance

A discussion with my husband and a book I’ve been reading got me to turn my attention to education. The book is It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, by Bernie Sanders, in which he devotes a chapter to prescriptions for educational reform. Although forceful and well-written, the book suffers from lack of an index or citations.

This being a big subject, it might take some time. While I research for this series, my readers might like to watch a recent interview of the sagacious Chris Hedges on the current state of higher education…

… and listen to a podcast that probably gave rise to the above interview.

Third April Apparition Day

Thinking about whose work could best use peer review for this holiday, I realized that Chris Hedges, who had inspired the first of my three Prosperity Gospel series, deserved a review.

I first want to post what I found searching for Hedge’s own history of that gospel and compare it to my own research. Watching a video that has since (ostensibly due to the anti-Russia hysteria) been removed*, I noticed, as I had written in the first entry of my series, that he thinks this history began much later than I do — He claims that it was a reaction to the movement started in the early 20^th century, developed by theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch with his 1917 book, A Theology for the Social Gospel.

I had covered his other references in my aforementioned series, so I searched Rauschenbusch’s name along with Hedges’ and found this link. Although the website is old, so it has annoying visible coding, the criticism of Hedges’ book, Death of the Liberal Class, provides some fascinating insights. I’ll leave the article to my readers to explore.

*I recently found some of the information to which the video had referred in this interview in Scheer Post. Although the interview is interesting, it is fairly long. To get to the relevant info, do a “find on page” for “prosperity gospel.” Here, though, the causal link is not presented as strongly, and his thought is thus more in line with my own, as he correctly brings up Rockefeller as a primary influence.

Superstructure, Revisited

“The function of news is to signalize an event,
the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”

– Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

My last entry linked to an article by one of my favorite contemporary essayists. I recently saw this from another – Chris Hedges. The article eloquently discusses the “Manufacturing Consent” principle I wrote of a while ago.

Since I had originally attributed this principle to Noam Chomsky, and Hedges’ article referenced the above-quoted earlier source, I thought the article and source merited their own post (or series?).

From QuoteFancy

The Prosperity Gospel

“Wealth was God” – W. E. B. Du Bois

Chapter 3 of Dusk of Dawn (quoted above) reminded me of an interview in which Chris Hedges had contrasted the Social Gospel with the Prosperity Gospel. Searching Google, I found a relevant article by this author. Since Hedges had inspired the “Our Class” series of which the Du Bois series is a part, I thought it appropriate to transition to this subject.

Hedges’ article suggests that the prosperity gospel had started in the 30’s, as a reaction to the New Deal. Having read Acres of Diamonds as a teen, however, I suspected the heresy’s roots were planted earlier. I am coming to believe that the works of William James – whom we had discussed previously  – had started this movement even earlier than I had suspected, so I think now would be a good time to put aside the Du Bois project until next Imbolc.

From Raw Story

Our Class

In song I heard my mother’s voice cry:

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?”

The Reverend Duke Braswell stretched wide his arms against the white canvas of the tent. In the yellow light his body made a cross-like shadow on the canvas.

“Oh, it makes me to tremble, tremble!
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

“Let’s go,” said the white woman in the car behind us. “This is too much for me!” They started the motor and drove noisily away in a swirl of dust.

“Don’t go,” I cried where I was sitting at the root of the tree. “Don’t go,” I shouted, jumping up. “They’re about to call for sinners to come to the mourners’ bench. Don’t go!” But their car was already out of earshot.

I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted my tears in my mouth.

“Big Meeting” – Langston Hughes

The above is from Something in Common, a collection of short stories that I’m currently reading.

Meanwhile, I came across a Chris Hedges speech on a class in which his students had written a play about their experiences with the New Jersey prison system. The video brings up a number of African American thinkers and writers. I thought this would be a good time to list these thinkers. Along with some I had mentioned earlier on this blog, two that Hedges brings up are James H. Cone and August Wilson. I hope to expand this list and explore it on this blog at some point.

For now, here is the video of the speech:

Alternatives to “Cancel Culture,” Part 1

I had developed the term, “context culture” to oppose to the phrase with which I titled this entry; then I found a Kim Domenico article that uses the term, “in-common culture.” I like this phrase very much, and decided to work out these alternatives in this series.

For now, I’ll leave a Chris Hedges article on the phrase that calls for alternatives.

The Last Judgment (Michaelangelo) – uncensored version; detail of Saint Catherine at the bottom left and Saint Blaise above

Daniele da Volterra‘s repainted versions of Saint Catherine and Saint Blaise