[05#35] 2.4=5=12.26=#56: 1.US "Imperial"/"Propaganda" Presidency" / "anti-Americanism". 2.US "Techno-Social" Neocons/"Liberalism". 3.911"Conspiracy".

Nice weather. Emails and mails and documents all day long. Still about 30 emails but too late, 8:45pm. Going to o.h. soon. 1) US "Imperial"/"Propaganda" Presidency / "anti-Americanism": (1) US "Imperial" Presidency: "Imperial Presidency", By Noam Chomsky, [Uncle Ernie's] Issues & Alibis, Vol 5 # 5, (c) 02/04/2005 , "Home To The World's Best Liberal Thought And Humor": http://www.issuesandalibis.org/ It goes without saying that what happens in the US has an enormous impact on the rest of the world - and conversely:what happens in the rest of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the US, in several ways. First, it sets constraints on what even the most powerful state can do. And second, it influences the domestic US component of "the second superpower," as the New York Times ruefully described world public opinion after the huge protests before the Iraq invasion. Those protests were a critically important historical event, not only because of their unprecedented scale, but also because it was the first time in hundreds of years of the history of Europe and its North American offshoots that a war was massively protested even before it was officially launched. We may recall, by comparison, the war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size" - particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the US assault. And when protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina - hideous crimes, but lesser ones. It's quite important to remember how much the world has changed since then - as almost always, not as a result of gifts from benevolent leaders, but through deeply committed popular struggle, far too late in developing, but ultimately effective. One consequence was that the US government could not declare a national emergency, which should have been healthy for the economy, as during World War II when public support was very high. Johnson had to fight a "guns-and-butter" war, buying off an unwilling population, harming the economy, ultimately leading the business classes to turn against the war as too costly, after the Tet Offensive of January 1968 showed that it would go on a long time. The memoirs of Hitler's economic Czar Albert Speer describe a similar problem. The Nazis could not trust their population, and therefore could not fight as disciplined a war as their democratic enemies, possibly affecting the outcome seriously, given their technological lead. There were also concerns among US elites about rising social and political consciousness stimulated by the activism of the '60s, much of it reaction to the miserable crimes in Indochina, then at last arousing popular indignation. We learn from the last sections of the Pentagon Papers that after the Tet offensive, the military command was reluctant to agree to the President's call for further troop deployments, wanting to be sure that "sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control" in the US, and fearing that escalation might run the risk of "provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions." (2) US "Propaganda" Presidency: "The Propaganda President George W. Bush does his best Kim Jong-il", By Jack Shafer, Posted Thursday, Feb. 3, 2005, at 5:58 PM PT: http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2113052&MSID=1A28451F647045D997B0E05FA24A59C6 "" If "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il of North Korea and George W. Bush ever meet, I suspect the two will bond like long-lost brothers. Both men are first-born sons of powerful fathers who partied like adolescents well into their adult lives, after which they submitted to their dynastic fates as heads of state. "" (3) "anti-Americanism", etc. "Fashionable anti-Americanism", Dominic Hilton, 1 - 2 - 2005: "" The United States is burdened with the pains, frustrations, and hatreds of the rest of the world. Ignorant and unfair, says Dominic Hilton, in a scathing and witty critique of a disabling obsession. "": http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-2325.jsp "Mumbo-jumbo’s survival instinct", Colin MacCabe, 1 - 2 - 2005: "" In his recent book scholar-journalist Francis Wheen hilariously exposes the madness and irrationality of today's world and asks: whatever happened to the Enlightenment? But one of those he reproaches now says that Wheen himself has not gone far enough. "": http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-1-66-2324.jsp 2) US "Techno-Social" Neocons/"Liberalism": (1) US "Techno-Social" Neocons: "Neoconservativism: The Cult of Techno-Socialism", by Paul and Phillip Collins, © Feb. 1st, 2005: http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Commentary/Technocrats.htm "" They are a cult of techno-socialists and the outgrowth of an older conspiratorial traditional. The post-September 11 world is swiftly becoming the tangible enactment of their Utopian doctrine: Technocracy. "" (2) US "Liberalism": "THE LIBERAL MIND: The Endless Party. What do Democrats stand for? The real question is, what do they stand against?" BY WILLIAM VOEGELI, Thursday, February 3, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006240 ""Mr. Voegeli is a research fellow at the Claremont Institute. This article appears in the Winter issue of the Claremont Review of Books."" WSJ.com: OpinonJournal, from The Wall Street Journal editorial page. 3) 911 "Conspiracy" Books: "Four forthcoming releases for Summer/Fall 2004", Progressive Press: "Progressive Press and Banned Books USA are imprints of Tree of Life Publications, PO Box 126, Joshua Tree, CA 92252, on the web at www.progressivepress.com: http://www.waronfreedom.org/newrels.html