by Oui
Fri Sep 6th, 2024 at 09:42:36 AM EST
A journey going unintended places ... Joe Biden has more in common with J. Edgar Hoover than I would have thought before today. Touches upon what is culturally wrong in the United States of America.
From my ten teen years in St. Louis and covert racism, my education at a leading Jesuit university and the ugly experience of the Vietnam War and the murderous spree in the America's by dictators supported by Washington DC as we speak and write today. Beyond the banana republic and the interventions on behalf of corporate America.
The two split worlds of America and a vision of contenders are not that different ... unfortunately. America is not a beacon of light to the world as this would define the rest into darkness and evil. I very much consider such talk irresponsible and part of colonial, patriarchal culture imbedded in America of the 18th and 19th century. The Enlightenment is part of change in Europe, the U.S. Constitution is a writing of the 1770s and like biblical scriptures a dead scroll. The new Trump nine black robes proves my point ... political, not judicial.
Trump vs. Biden Would Be a Battle of Two Words | NY Times |
If it's a rematch between the incumbent and the former president, their dueling visions for America come down to a specific lexicon.
Politicians' language can tell you a lot about the way they think, sometimes unintentionally.
In this audio essay, Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada breaks down the significance behind Joe Biden's favorite word for talking about America and how it contrasts with Donald Trump's word of choice.
Definition of "weird" in 34,000 entries 😂
Believe in America and honesty of the President? Don't be a damn fool ... it ended for me after 1968, the Vietnam War and finally with the decision to impeach "Tricky" Dick Nixon. His paranoia and FBI fascist J. Edgar Hoover ended his journey in disgrace with the cover-up of the Watergate break-in a d his CIA henchmen of the JFK assassination ... the "plumbers."
Hoover's legacy has aged about as well as Gone With the Wind's. He was notorious for strong-arm tactics, political manipulation and disregard for civil liberties. He used the FBI's extensive intelligence-gathering capabilities to monitor political dissidents, civil rights leaders and other groups he deemed a threat to national security.
President Harry Truman, alarmed by Hoover nosing into Americans' sex lives, warned: "We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction." Biographer Beverly Gage has called him "the 20th century's single most effective foe of the American left".
Martin now delivers a fresh perspective. In an elegantly written book, The Gospel of J Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, he makes a persuasive case that Hoover was a white Christian nationalist and convenient ally for evangelicals, embedding race and religion in the foundations of the national security state - and allowing white supremacy to fester to this day.
Patron Saint of Hoover's FBI was St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits Order
The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism | UC Santa Barbara |
Historians trying to explain the Watergate break-in usually point to an earlier break-in at the Beverly Hills office of a psychiatrist who had treated Daniel Ellsberg, the man who gave The New York Times the Top Secret Defense Department history of Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Both break-ins had the same "masterminds," former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. Both break-in crews included CIA assets recruited from Florida's Cuban-American community. Both were carried out on Richard Nixon's behalf, but it remains uncertain whether the President knew of plans for either crime before it was committed. The break-in at the psychiatrist's helps explain Watergate, but what explains the break-in at the psychiatrist's? Below is an attempt to explain the conspiracy theories that Richard Nixon formed--and acted on--in the aftermath of the Pentagon Papers' publication.
JFK Assassination Records - Warren Commission was kept in the dark of key findings by both the FBI and CIA
When the FBI Feared the
Catholic Left | Commonweal Magazine |
J. Edgar Hoover, Henry Kissinger, and the Berrigans
On November 27, 1970, in front of a sparsely attended subcommittee hearing of the all-important Senate Committee on Appropriations, J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI, testified in support of his request for an extra $14.5 million in funding. Buried within his twenty-seven-minute statement, which painted a grim picture of an agency overwhelmed by domestic terrorist plots, was a key revelation that would send the press into a frenzy within hours.
One of the most pressing threats, Hoover warned, came from a "militant group" of "Catholic priests and nuns, teachers, students, and former students" opposed to the war in Vietnam. He claimed they were committing "acts of violence" in protest. "The principal leaders of this group," he continued, "are Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Catholic priests who are currently incarcerated...for their participation in the destruction of Selective Service Records in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1968." According to Hoover, the Berrigans' group was planning "to blow up electrical conduits and steam pipes serving the Washington, D.C. area," and was also "concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed Government official."
After he concluded his testimony, Hoover's aides distributed dozens of printed copies of his statement to congressional reporters. By then, he'd reigned over the FBI for nearly half a century, building it up from a nondescript, toothless government agency into a mammoth shadow institution, one that had infiltrated virtually every realm of civil society.
Many religious social workers in Central- and South America were targeted by government armed forces trained in the infamous School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Georgia.
On November 16, 1989, the US-trained and funded Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion entered the grounds of El Salvador's Central American University (UCA) and brutally murdered six Jesuit priests, sixteen-year-old Celina Ramos, and her mother, Elba Ramos. Nineteen of the twenty-five Atlacatl Battalion soldiers were graduates of the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) -- a combat training institution with the ostensible aim of instructing Latin American militaries in control tactics over armed counterinsurgent groups.
U.S. Constitution protects state censorship
Symbiotic Security of Free Speech
The marketplace of ideas exists today within a public square occupied mainly
by social media platforms. Sheltered by the state action doctrine, which
prohibits speech abridgment only by the government, and the government
speech doctrine, which insulates the government's speech from constitutional
constraints, the platforms and the government's security apparatus have
joined together symbiotically to employ new tools of soft censorship,
suppressing the free exchange of unwanted information and opinions on a
variety of topics. These include vital issues of public health and electoral
politics.
Shielding the marketplace of ideas from this cartel requires retracting
the reach of those doctrines to protect more fully the speech freedom of all
participants within it, not merely the platforms' and government's speech that
now floods the marketplace. The free speech interests of social media users
cannot count for naught, nor can the general public's free speech interest in
hearing the speech of others. The machinery of democracy depends upon
keeping open these crucial channels of political communication; when those
channels are blocked, it is the duty of the courts to re-open them, a task the
courts can undertake by invigorating principles already present within existing
case law.
In short ... erasing dissent as red vs blue confront one another. The "Left" as representative of social justice, workers' rights, women's rights and gender equality has been furiously attacked in the media and eliminated. A hard right turn towards fascism has escalated ever since the opportunity given by 9/11. Similarly in a worse case scenario the western world stays silent post 10/7 and the genocide of Palestinians by the Jewish State of Israel. Horror is contagious.
Related topic, see my recent diaries ...
