Knowledge Without Wisdom by Paul Bond

   

     
 

Ch 9   The Cold War

   
 

 



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Chapter 9

The Cold War

We are much beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of that class, who openly and unfeignedly declare or describe what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove, except men be perfectly acquainted with the nature of evil itself; for without this, virtue is open and unfenced; nay, a virtuous and honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to correct and reclaim them, without first exploring all the depths and recesses of their malice.-Francis Bacon
 

Political treachery took on a new meaning in Western civilization as the Cold War took hold of our civilization. We need to look into the background of this confrontation to see clearly the problem it represented. We must remember that the horror of World War II together with the shadow of nuclear holocaust provided the ideal soil of fear and terror that spawns such a mindset as was required for the Cold War.

The opposing ideologies of communism/socialism and capitalism would ensure that the war would rage for more than four decades. On the one hand, we see the Marxist inspired-communist and socialist mindset; on the other hand we see the capitalist-inspired Industrial Military Complex of the West. Each side of this ideological war was determined to become victorious. The communists had an extra weapon — the socialists who were busy undermining Western democracy. This treachery, more than anything else, was responsible for the Cold War's protraction until the end of the 1980s.

Under the guise of "national security," both sides were able to introduce all manner of malice and deceit against unsuspecting and innocent citizens. The old adage "power corrupts and total power corrupts totally" would become internationally recognized. This period of political and social treachery will be recorded in our planet's history as the most idiotic and despicable. The irony is that the masses of our planet remained totally ignorant of the hijacking of long-held and treasured foundations of civilization —  liberty and virtues. The mind-controlling elements of the mass media set out and achieved a dumbing-down of the masses, using the newly acquired technologies of indoctrination through brainwashing. The electronic media played a major role in this mass brainwashing exercise.

In 1946, Sir Winston Churchill gave an address on foreign affairs at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. In it he uttered this ominous sentence: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent [of Europe].” This marked the beginning of the Cold War. The term refers to the strategic and political struggle that developed after World War II between the United States and its Western European allies, on one hand, and the USSR and Communist countries, on the other. The expression was coined by the American journalist Herbert Bayard Swope in a 1947 speech he wrote for financier Bernard Baruch. It may be defined as a condition of competition, tension, and conflict short of actual war.

Churchill’s words referred to the fact that the Soviet Union, from 1945 to 1948, strengthened its hold on Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. But the Cold War was marked by other effects: the policies surrounding the two superpowers' possession of nuclear weapons; the attempt to establish spheres of interest and alliances with other nations; the division of Europe into two military alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact; attempts to start or prevent revolution in smaller nations; and several less-than-total confrontations between the superpowers such as the Berlin Blockade of 1948 to 1949 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The most potent visible symbol of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War was the Berlin Wall, a barricade begun in 1961 to discourage defections from the East to West Germany.

The American response to the perceived Soviet threat of world domination has varied since 1946. In the beginning, U.S. policy was one of “containment,” first stated by U.S. diplomat and Soviet expert George F. Kennan in a 1947 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”

Under President John F. Kennedy, American policy began to shift toward negotiations on arms control and reduction of nuclear stockpiles. But great increases in military spending by the United States during the Ronald Reagan administration worked to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet economy in deep trouble, it was no longer possible to keep up with American defense expenditures.

The Cold War initially centered on the use of USSR military forces to install Communist governments in Eastern Europe. These Soviet actions ran counter to the U.S. government’s insistence upon the right of self-determination for the peoples of Eastern Europe and raised fears that the USSR, after gaining control of Eastern Europe, would try to communize Western Europe. The USSR had suffered enormous losses in the war against Nazi Germany and looked upon Eastern Europe as a bulwark against another invasion from the West. The Soviet leaders considered U.S. objections to Soviet actions in Poland, Hungary, and Romania as a betrayal of wartime understandings about spheres of influence in Europe. Thus, they placed Eastern Europe behind a military and political barrier known in the West as the Iron Curtain.

Political differences were exacerbated by ideological conflict. The Marxist-Leninist Soviet leaders believed that capitalism would inevitably seek the destruction of the Soviet system. In the United States, a long-standing suspicion and dislike of communism strengthened the view that the USSR was intent on expansion and world conquest.

Meanwhile, competition began for control of Germany and other strategic points such as the Dardanelles, the straits linking the Black Sea with the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Soviet pressures on Greece and Turkey led President Harry Truman to declare in March 1947 that the United States would give economic and military aid to those countries and would also “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” The announcement in June 1947 of the U.S. Marshall Plan to restore the faltering economies of Western Europe — including that of West Germany — prompted a series of ripostes from the Kremlin.

In February 1948, the democratic government of Czechoslovakia was overturned by a Communist coup. In May 1948, Soviet authorities severed all Western land-access routes to Berlin. Only the success of air cargo planes in supplying West Berlin, isolated within the Soviet zone of occupation that later became East Germany, permitted the United States to resist the Soviet pressure.

In 1949, the Western powers entered into a military agreement that led to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), designed to establish a military counterweight to the Soviet forces in Europe. Meanwhile, in China, a long civil war ended with the victory of Communist forces under Mao Tse-tung in 1949.

The first phase of the Cold War culminated in the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 26, 1950, resulting in U.S. involvement in a land war in Asia. The initial reverses of the Western forces, the subsequent introduction of Chinese troops into the conflict on the side of North Korea, and the inability of the Truman administration to bring the war to an end froze American public opinion in a state of hostility that made normal relations with any communist government impossible.

To meet these challenges, each side fashioned a strategy. As stated above, the U.S. strategy was called “containment,” a term coined by George Kennan. He argued that Soviet expansionism might be contained by a strategy of responding to Soviet pressures and probes wherever they occurred. Kennan’s thesis was strongly supported by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who called for increased military power for NATO. This policy appeared to the USSR as one more Western effort to isolate and undermine the Soviet system. The Kremlin adopted a strategy of retaliation against U.S. containment.

During the 1950s, Washington’s policy was shaped by the more militant John Foster Dulles. The United States sought to anticipate and prevent further Communist gains by maintaining overwhelming military superiority, by forming new alliances in Asia (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and in the Middle East (the Central Treaty Organization), and by extending economic and military assistance to any country thought to be in danger of attack or subversion by Communist forces.

Relations between the two powers improved somewhat following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. The wars in Korea and French Indochina were brought to an end, and the first postwar summit meeting of Soviet and Western leaders was held in Geneva in July 1955. But no more than a surface thaw was achieved.

After the consolidation of power by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, the USSR embarked on two new strategies. The first involved economic and military competition with the United States for influence with Arab and Third World countries such as Ghana, Egypt, India, and Indonesia. This strategy evolved into Soviet support for colonial revolutions, or “wars of national liberation,” and for left-wing governments in Guatemala and Cuba.

The second strategy, based upon Soviet development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, was to divide the Western powers by renewing Soviet pressure to eject the West from Berlin. In 1955, the Warsaw Treaty Organization was established as a response to the rearming of West Germany. A new round of Soviet-American confrontations ensued, all the riskier because now both sides possessed nuclear weapons. The risks were underscored by the Berlin crisis of 1961 and by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The conclusion of World War II had ended the drive by Germany, Italy, and Japan for world domination; but the seed of smaller conflicts had already been planted. Even as Japan was evacuating Southeast Asia, Vietnam, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, was planning to get rid of French colonialism for good. Vietnam’s effort resulted in a long war, a conflict that ended in 1975 with a communist victory. Instead of rebuilding the region, however, the victors went on to fight among themselves and to leave Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in desolation.

McCarthyism

Taking advantage of public frustration with reverses in the Cold War, U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) launched a campaign to expose alleged communists in the State Department in 1950. Early in his second term, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This gave him the platform he needed to conduct wide-ranging investigations into alleged communist influence in government.

McCarthy contributed to the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s with wide-ranging accusations and sensational tactics. He attacked alleged communist subversion within the administrations of Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. His activities gave rise to the term "McCarthyism," referring to the use of sensational and highly publicized personal attacks, usually based on unsubstantiated charges, as a means of discrediting people thought to be subversive. The term will probably long endure as a synonym for “witch-hunt,” for making serious but unsubstantiated charges against people in public life.

At first an undistinguished legislator, McCarthy captured national attention in February 1950 by arguing that the State Department was riddled with card-carrying members of the communist party. Shrewd at public relations and media manipulation, McCarthy moved from one charge to another, subjugating his opponents and evading demands for tangible proof as he developed a large and loyal following. Encouraged by many Republicans, he accused the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman administrations of "twenty years of treason."

Re-elected in 1952, McCarthy leveled similar charges at members of the Eisenhower administration from his new post as head of the Senate’s Government Operations Committee and its permanent investigations subcommittee.

McCarthy’s undoing began in 1954, when he conducted thirty-six days of nationally televised hearings investigating the U.S. Army. For the first time, the whole American public was able to watch him work. By this time he had already broken with many members of his own party. (He included President Dwight D. Eisenhower on his list of “traitors.”) In 1954, after the mid-term elections, he was removed as chairman of the subcommittee. On December 2,  he was censured by the Senate on a vote of 67 to 22, and his popularity rapidly declined.

In the late 1950s, a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago wanted to have a coffee-vending machine installed outside the Physics Department for the convenience of people who worked there late at night. They circulated a petition, but their colleagues refused to sign. They did not want to be associated with the allegedly radical students whose names were already on the document.

This incident is a prime example of the kind of timidity that came to be seen, even at the time, as the most damaging consequence of the anticommunist furor. Since political activities could get you in trouble, cautious people avoided them. Instead, disheartening as it was to intellectuals, middle-class Americans embraced social conformity. A silent generation of students populated the nation’s campuses, while their professors avoided teaching anything that might be construed as controversial. Meaningful political dissent had all but withered away.

Was McCarthyism at fault? Certainly the congressional hearings and blacklists impacted many lives, but beyond that, it is difficult to tell. The statistics are imprecise. As many as ten thousand people may have lost their jobs. Should this be seen as a lot or not that many? Earlier historians’ analyses of  sanctions point toward “the apparently low number of whippings administered under slavery," showing that it may not be necessary to whip many slaves to keep the rest of the plantation in line.

In addition to quantifying the situation, it may be helpful to look at the specific portions of American society affected by McCarthyism. This may afford some understanding of the extent of the damage and ways in which the anti-communist crusade influenced American society, politics, and culture. We should keep in mind, however, that the main impact may well be in what did not happen rather than in what did — the social reforms that were never implemented, the diplomatic initiatives that were never taken, the workers who were never organized into unions, the books that were never written, and the movies that were never made.

In the U.S., the Communist Party dwindled into insignificance and all the organizations associated with it disappeared. With their collapse, the nation lost the institutional network that had created a public space where serious alternatives to the status quo could be presented. Moreover, with the disappearance of a vigorous movement on the left, moderate reform groups were more exposed to right-wing attacks and thus were less effective.

In the realm of social policy, McCarthyism may have nullified much-needed reforms. As the nation’s politics swung to the right after World War II, the federal government cast aside the unfinished agenda of the New Deal. In many cases, popular social reform simply fell by the wayside. The left-liberal political coalition that might have supported health reforms and similar projects was torn apart by the anticommunist crusade. Moderates feared being identified with anything that seemed too radical, and people to the left of them were either unheard or under attack. McCarthyism further contributed to the attenuation of the reform impulse by diverting the attention of the labor movement, the strongest institution within the left-liberal coalition, from external organizing to internal politicking.

The impact of the McCarthy era was equally apparent in the realm of international affairs. Opposition to the Cold War had been so thoroughly identified with communism that it was no longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring suspicions of disloyalty. As a result, from the defeat of Henry Wallace in the fall of 1948 until the early 1960s, effective public criticism of America’s role in the world was essentially nonexistent.

The insecurities bred by McCarthyism afflicted the State Department for years, especially with regard to East Asia. Thus, for example, the campaign against the loss of China left such long-lasting scars that American policy-makers feared to acknowledge the official existence of the People’s Republic of China — until Richard Nixon, uniquely impervious to charges of being "soft on Reds,"  did so as president in 1971. And it was, in part, to avoid a replay of the loss-of-China scenario that Nixon’s Democratic predecessors Kennedy and Johnson dragged the United States so deeply into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

The nation’s cultural and intellectual life also suffered. Television offered little during the late 1950s but a bland menu of quiz shows and Westerns. McCarthy-era anxieties clearly played a role. Similarly, the blacklist contributed to the reluctance of the film industry to grapple with controversial social or political issues. In the intellectual world, Cold War liberals also avoided controversy. They celebrated the “end of ideology,” claiming that the United States’ uniquely pragmatic approach to politics made the problems that had once concerned left-wing ideologists irrelevant. Consensus historians pushed that formulation into the past and described a nation that had never experienced serious internal conflict.

Ironically, just as these social commentators were lauding the resilience of American democracy, the anticommunist crusade was undermining it. The political repression of the McCarthy period fostered the growth of the national security state and facilitated its expansion into the rest of civil society. In the name of protecting the nation from communist infiltration, federal agents attacked individual rights and extended state power into movie studios, universities, labor unions, and many other ostensibly independent institutions. The near universal deference to the federal government’s formulation of the communist threat abetted the process and suppressed opposition to what was going on. Moreover, even after the anticommunist campaign began to abate, the antidemocratic practices associated with it continued.

We can trace the legacy of McCarthyism in the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program of harassing political dissenters, the Watergate-related felonies of the Nixon White House, and Iran-Contra. The pervasiveness of such wrongdoing reveals how seriously the nation’s defenses against official illegalities had eroded in the face of claims that national security took precedence over ordinary law. During the McCarthy years, the collaboration of private institutions and public agencies in suppressing the alleged threat of domestic communism ate away at the political freedom of all Americans. It was never completely restored.

Kennedy and the Cold War

Throughout his pre-presidential career, Kennedy was an active “Cold Warrior.” As noted, his first Congressional campaign involved taking on the anti-Cold War faction of the Democratic party led by Henry Wallace, and as a congressman he aligned himself with those who said the Truman Administration wasn’t being tough enough, willingly attaching his name to the chorus demanding “Who Lost China?”

While in Congress, he supported all of America’s overseas activities in waging the Cold War. Even while running for president in 1960, Kennedy appealed to the “tough on the Soviets” contingent by consistently hammering at Eisenhower for America’s supposed lack of leadership, and America's “falling behind the Soviets.” It was Kennedy, promising more money for defense spending and American readiness, who charged Eisenhower with allowing a nonexistent “missile gap” to develop between the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. And it was Kennedy who, during the debates with Nixon, charged that Eisenhower's policy had resulted in the loss of Cuba.

As president, Kennedy, in order to credibly claim he had taken action against the “missile gap,” ordered an increase in spending on nuclear missiles, setting off an arms race that resulted in America's losing its nuclear superiority by the end of the decade. Those who point to the Limited Test Ban Treaty as proof of Kennedy wanting to begin the first step toward disarmament should remember that Kennedy wanted a ban chiefly for environmental reasons, and not because he envisioned the long-term elimination of nuclear weapons. Indeed, it was Kennedy's own Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who came up with the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) principle that was dependent entirely on the maintenance of a sizable nuclear arsenal.

Kennedy did make efforts to reduce direct tensions with the USSR following the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the installation of a teletype Hot Line was seen as essential to preventing the slow communications that had hampered talks during the crisis. But Kennedy's desire to reduce direct tensions with the USSR in no way meant backing away from the basic principle of containment first enunciated in the Truman Doctrine. Khrushchev had still publicly declared that the Soviets would support “wars of national liberation” wherever they occurred in the world, and since Kennedy firmly believed in the “Domino Theory” (as he said in a 1963 interview), the idea of backing away from containment was impractical from a national security standpoint as well as a political one.

The Vietnam War was only one of several conflicts that erupted out of the Cold War. Soviet and American power confronted each other in several places, especially in Europe and Korea. The settlement in Europe after World War II not only divided the continent into two hostile factions; it also divided Germany into two countries and Berlin into two cities. This was a source of strife in 1948, when the Soviets instituted a blockade of West Berlin, geographically in the heart of Soviet-occupied territory. West Berlin was rescued dramatically by an airlift of goods and services, and the failed blockade was abandoned in mid-1949. The hostilities, however, endured until 1989.

Numerous other Cold War trouble spots continued to disturb the peace of the world. One of the most notable was in Cuba, where forces led by Fidel Castro staged a successful revolution in the late 1950s. Cuba then became a Soviet dependency and hoped to engulf the whole of Latin America in revolution. In the early 1980s, much of Central America was torn by conflict, with guerrillas supplied by the Soviet Union and Cuba fighting soldiers armed and trained by the United States.

The Cuban threat was close-up and personal for the United States. In 1962, it was learned that the Soviet Union had placed guided missiles aimed at the United States in Cuba. This brought on a crisis that was resolved only when the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the removal of the missiles.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was a turning point in the Cold War. The treaty was accorded considerable symbolic significance on both sides and seemed to signify that U.S. and Soviet leaders wanted to end a costly and risky struggle that increased the danger of a real war.

Nevertheless, ideological rivalry, competition for influence, and the arms race continued between the two superpowers. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, for example, was at its height during the late 1960s. East and West were able, however, to negotiate in a spirit of detente. U.S. rapprochement with China occurred in the 1970s, and the arms race was slowed by the Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT) agreements of 1972 and 1974.

Relations between the United States and the USSR deteriorated during the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This revival of the Cold War continued in the early years of the Reagan administration, fueled by Soviet support for the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and by America’s declared intention to develop an antinuclear Strategic Defense Initiative.

Not all of the global trouble spots owed their origin to the Cold War, though most of them were affected by it. The most persistent area of conflict since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 has been the Middle East. There has been relentless hostility, and several wars were fought between the Arab states and Israel. The wars were all won by Israel, deepening Arab hostilities toward both Israel and its major ally, the United States. The Cold War injected itself into the Middle East when the Soviet Union started supplying some Arab states with weapons; Syria and Iraq were notable examples. Other Muslim nations, Saudi Arabia and Jordan among them, tried to maintain neutrality in the Cold War. In some cases, they openly welcomed aid from the United States and Western Europe.

With the rise to power of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, the situation began to change dramatically with
startling and rapid political changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Gorbachev’s policies of domestic reform and reconciliation with the West led to self-determination for the satellite countries of Eastern Europe and, in 1991— however inadvertently — the end of the Soviet system itself, finally bringing the Cold War to an end.

Gorbachev inaugurated a reversal of Cold War policies. With the cooperation of President Reagan, arms reduction agreements were signed, and both sides later pledged troop withdrawals. The Soviets also ended their ten-year war in Afghanistan. The new Soviet democratization spilled over into the rest of Eastern Europe dramatically. By the end of 1989, communist domination had ended or was seriously eroded in the former Eastern Bloc nations. On Nov. 9, 1989, East German authorities allowed the opening of the Berlin Wall. The subsequent destruction of large sections of the wall signaled the end of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact voted itself out of existence on July 1, 1991. And by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist, breaking apart into its constituent, and now independent, republics. There remained in the world only one superpower: the United States.

The most striking symbol of the end of the Cold War was the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and its subsequent destruction. This amazing event surprised the world, but it had been in the making for a long time. The process began on March 6, 1953, the day after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The totalitarian state he had ruled for about thirty years was suddenly in the hands of men who were relieved at his departure and unwilling to rule with his style of brutality. In addition, by the end of the decade, relations with China had worsened significantly. There was a genuine break between the two countries in the early 1960s. The myth of international communism was shattered. While maintaining a sure hold over Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union attempted to gain better relationships with the West, particularly the United States. Both superpowers realized the futility of edging toward nuclear war.

The internal condition of the communist societies worsened economically. The persistent shortages of consumer goods, even food, frustrated the citizens of these countries. By the early 1980s, it was apparent to the rulers of the Soviet Union that real reform was needed if their country was going to survive. Gorbachev recognized the serious economic situation and desired to reform it, while intending to perpetuate control by the Communist Party. His plan did not work. Once he allowed freedom of speech, a policy called glasnost, he suddenly watched the whole society reject communism and demand democracy.

Gorbachev also made it clear to the leaders of Eastern European communist states that Soviet troops would no longer be available to keep them in power. This policy triggered the rapid collapse of communist regimes in all of Eastern Europe. It began in Poland, spread to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, then spread to East Germany. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall, there was no turning back. The rest of the countries of Eastern Europe abandoned Communism within a few months. By October 1990, Germany was reunited.

But the end of the Cold War and of communism did not signal the end of international strife. Old problems remained, but they no longer flourished under cover of East-West competition. In the Middle East, for example, the weakness of the Soviet Union after 1989 meant that such warlike states as Iraq and Syria could no longer rely on it for weapons and support. Thus, when Iraq invaded tiny Kuwait in August 1990, it found itself opposed by a whole United Nations (UN) coalition of armed forces including those of Syria. The end of the Cold War had given the United Nations a new lease on life. For the first time in decades, the UN was able to take concerted action against a common foe, and win.

The success of the offensive against Iraq rearranged conditions in the Middle East. The United States found itself with new allies and few enemies. This prestige enabled President George Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, to persuade Israel and its Arab enemies to sit down at the negotiating table to work out a means of living together. The peace talks began in September 1991.

In Southern Europe, the collapse of communism had bred civil war in Yugoslavia. The small nation had been ruled by Tito from 1943 until 1980. His death weakened the bonds that held the six provinces together. Old ethnic hatreds resurfaced. When Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence in mid-1990, the mostly Serbian Yugoslav army invaded, plunging the country into civil war. The war worsened when Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded in 1991. Although the independence of these republics was recognized by the European Communities (now European Union) and the United States, the fighting continued.

In the Far East, the Chinese government rejected democracy in June 1989, when it crushed the youth demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a rebellion that was seen worldwide on television. Yet, in spite of the regime’s harshness toward the rebels, it permitted economic reforms to continue. By 1993, the southern sector of China had one of the fastest growing and most prosperous economies in the world. Outsiders, mainly in the United States, complained about China's human-rights violations, but they were unwilling to break off relationships or impose sanctions on the world’s most populous nation.

How the Cold War Worked

Both the U.S. and USSR would have preferred that the other simply disappear. But since this would obviously have involved mutual annihilation, a system of global management called the Cold War was established. According to the conventional view, the Cold War was a conflict between two superpowers, caused by Soviet aggression, in which "we" tried to contain the Soviet Union and protect the world from it. If this view is a doctrine of theology, there's no need to discuss it. If it is intended to shed some light on history, we can easily put it to the test, bearing in mind a very simple point: if you want to understand the Cold War, you should look at the events of the Cold War. If you do so, a very different picture emerges.

On the Soviet side, the events of the Cold War were repeated interventions in Eastern Europe: tanks in East Berlin and Budapest and Prague. These interventions took place along the route that was used to attack and virtually destroy Russia three times in this century alone. The invasion of Afghanistan is the one example of an intervention outside that route, though also on the Soviet border.

On the U.S. side, intervention was worldwide, reflecting the status attained by the U.S. as the first truly global power in history.

On the domestic front, the Cold War helped the Soviet Union entrench its military-bureaucratic ruling class in power, and it gave the U.S. a way to compel its population to subsidize high-tech industry. It isn't easy to sell all that to the domestic populations, but fear of a great enemy is an old and powerful technique.

The Cold War provided that, too. Each superpower controlled its primary enemy — its own population — by terrifying it with the (quite real) crimes of the other.

In crucial respects, then, the Cold War was a kind of tacit arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States under which the United States conducted its wars against the Third World and controlled its allies in Europe, while the Soviet rulers kept an iron grip on their own internal empire and their satellites in Eastern Europe. Each side used the other to justify repression and violence in its own domains.

So why did the Cold War end, and how did its end change things?

By the 1970s, Soviet military expenditures were leveling off and internal problems were mounting, with economic stagnation and increasing pressures for an end to tyrannical rule. Soviet power internationally had, in fact, been declining for some thirty years, as a study by the Center for Defense Information showed in 1980. A few years later, the Soviet system had collapsed. The Cold War ended with the victory of what had always been the far richer and more powerful contestant. The Soviet collapse was part of the more general economic catastrophe of the 1980s, more severe in most of the Third World domains of the West than in the Soviet empire.

The Cold War had significant elements of North-South conflict (to use the contemporary euphemism for the European conquest of the world). Much of the Soviet empire had formerly been quasi-colonial dependencies of the West. The Soviet Union took an independent course, providing assistance to targets of Western attack and deterring the worst of Western violence. With the collapse of Soviet tyranny, much of the region can be expected to return to its traditional status, with the former higher echelons of the bureaucracy playing the role of the Third World elites that enrich themselves while serving the interests of foreign investors.

But while this particular phase has ended, North-South conflicts continue. One side may have called off the game, but the United States is proceeding as before, more freely, in fact, with Soviet deterrence a thing of the past. It should have surprised no one that former President George Bush celebrated the symbolic end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, by immediately invading Panama and announcing loud and clear that the United States would subvert Nicaragua's election by maintaining its economic stranglehold and military attack unless "our side" won.

Nor did it take great insight for Elliott Abrams to observe that the U.S. invasion of Panama was unusual because it could be conducted without fear of a Soviet reaction anywhere, or for numerous commentators during the Gulf crisis to add that the United States and Britain were now free to use unlimited force against its Third World enemy, since they were no longer inhibited by the Soviet deterrent.

Of course, the end of the Cold War brought its problems, too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has had to shift, a problem recognized through the 1980s, as we've already seen in previous chapters. New enemies have to be invented. It becomes harder to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been "the poor who seek to plunder the rich," in particular, Third World miscreants who seek to break out of the service role. As the Cold War hit its stride in the 1970s and 1980s, all of the elements for a "new world order" were being assembled. The first requisite for such a universal hijacking of the masses was obedience to centralist government. Of course, in the communist regimes this was automatic, with dissidents being shipped off to gulags for brainwashing and extermination. In the West, the job was made more difficult by the introduction of constitutional rights in past centuries. The political genius of the manipulators found ways and means of subverting these rights and over the four decades gradually achieved a totalitarian mentality that was predicated on big government, big business, and big unions. Together with a rolling taxation regime which became more tyrannical with each amendment, all Western democracies succumbed to the ideal of centralist government.

With the group of seven central banks firmly in place, the stage was set for a suicidal borrow, tax, and spend period over several decades that resulted in a complete bankrupting of each Western society that had succumbed to the "party on" mentality. Debt simply accumulated through misguided and idiotic socialist programs that lawyers and politicians dreamt up. By the late 1980s, with both sides of the Cold War financially and morally bankrupted, a truce was brokered. What insanity was behind this suicidal plunge by Cold War opponents? To explain, we need to revisit the 1947 Roswell incident.

After fifty years of denial and cover-up by the U.S. government and its military commands, the truth was finally exposed. In 1997, just before the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell crash, a former Pentagon official by the name of Colonel (Ret.) Philip J. Corso broke the deadlock. His book "The Day After Roswell" provides  "a landmark exposé firmly grounded in fact."

"The Day After Roswell"  attempted to put a 50-year-old controversy to rest. Since 1947, the mysterious crash of an unidentified aircraft at Roswell, New Mexico, has fueled a firestorm of speculation and controversy with no conclusive evidence of its extraterrestrial origin - until 1997. Corso, a member of President Eisenhower's National Security Council and former head of the foreign technology desk at the U.S. Army's Research and Development Department, came forward to tell the whole explosive story. Backed by documents newly declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, Corso revealed for the first time his personal stewardship of alien artifacts from the crash and disclosed the US government's astonishing role in the Roswell incident. What was found, and the ensuing cover-up, changed the course of twentieth-century history.

If Colonel Corso's book “The Day After Roswell”  is creditable and stands up to rigorous scrutiny, then we have the possibility of the truth being finally revealed. If, however, the rigorous scrutiny reveals a fraud, then the search for truth concerning the UFO-extraterrestrial phenomenon will be set back by many years. The peer review is decidedly divided.

According to Corso, then a Lieutenant Colonel, in 1961 he was given command of one of the Pentagon's highly classified weapons development budgets and was made privy to the U.S. government's greatest secret: the U.S. Army's dismantling and appropriation of the Roswell extraterrestrial spacecraft. Identifying all those involved, Colonel Corso revealed how a deep-cover council officially discounted all UFO reports to the American public and cleared the path for his research and development team at the Pentagon to analyze and integrate the Roswell artifacts into the military arsenal and the private business sector. The extent of the operation is startling.

With unprecedented detail, Corso divulged how he spearheaded the Army's reverse-engineering project that "seeded" alien technology at American companies such as IBM, Hughes Aircraft, Bell Labs, and Dow Corning - without their knowledge. He described the devices found aboard the Roswell craft and how they were the precursors for today's integrated circuit chips, fiber optics, lasers, and super-tenacity fibers. He also discusses the role alien technology played in shaping geopolitical policy and events — how it helped the United States surpass the Russians in space; spurred elaborate Army initiatives such as SDI, Horizon and HAARP; and ultimately brought about the end of the Cold War.

Laying bare some of the government's most closely guarded secrets, “The Day After Roswell” not only forces us to reconsider the past but also our role in the universe.

Corso was a key Army intelligence officer who served on General MacArthur's staff in Korea, and later on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's National Security Council as a Lieutenant Colonel. During his twenty-one-year military career, he was honored with 19 medals, decorations, and ribbons for meritorious service. He retired from the army in 1963 and went on to serve Senators James Eastland and Strom Thurmond as a staff member specializing in national security. Since then, he worked for various private-sector business entities as a consultant and contracts administrator. Before his death, he appeared on Prime Time Live  as an expert commentator on Cold War U2 flights over Russia and testified before the House National Security Committee about American POWs held in North Korea.

If Colonel Corso, perhaps motivated by his age and then-failing health, is to be believed, and there is every indication that his story is authentic, we as a people deserve an explanation from the superpower authorities. With this revelation, it becomes obvious that the reptilian mindset of the Military Industrial Complex in both the East and the West, having been exposed to the reality of extraterrestrial life, simply made a decision on behalf of mankind to cover up this earth-shattering news. Having done so, which is nothing short of treason and a flagrant breach of Constitutional rights, they went on to treat the whole issue of extraterrestrial contact in their normal military style. The national governments recognized the danger to their control mechanisms if the masses were to be suddenly exposed to the reality of inhabited planets elsewhere in the cosmos. Religious, political, and social implications considered, the superpower mindset simply acted out of self-interest.

With this creditable revelation of Corso's, it's evident that the whole concept of human freewill had been hijacked by the powerful and greedy mindset of the Industrial Military Complex and its supporters. Constitutional rights and even human rights were simply relegated to the scrap heap in the race to satisfy the power-lust of the militarists. Democracy and any semblance of a free society were treacherously and blatantly ignored.

The truth has a way of always getting out, and although successive government and military leaders have continued the lies and deceit over the ensuing 50 years, with Corso's revelation, the game is over. We can now see how the Industrial Military Complex exploited the opportunity in a secret and deceitful way — using back-engineering techniques on the artifacts captured at Roswell.  At the same time, they denied our civilization the opportunity for interacting with and benefiting from extraterrestrial visitation. How barbaric and uncivilized must we have appeared to our cosmic visitors!

There have been numerous books written on this subject by various authors who meticulously and professionally weeded out the evidence that clearly showed something not of this planet had crashed at Roswell in 1947. The media and supporters of the Industrial Military Complex simply branded these courageous patriots as either conspiratorial or paranoid and deluded individuals. How unconscionable that these traitors would perpetuate this "cosmic Watergate" for five decades.

Corso explains how various so-called new technologies came from back-engineering artifacts from the downed craft:

"Among the Roswell artifacts and the questions and issues that arose from the Roswell crash, on my preliminary list that needed resolution for development scheduling or simple inquiries to our military scientific community were:

Image intensifiers, which ultimately became "night vision"
Fiber optics
Supertenacity fibers
Lasers
Molecular alignment metallic alloys
Integrated circuits and microminiaturization of logic boards
HARP (High Altitude Research Project)
Project Horizon (moon base)
Portable atomic generators (ion propulsion drive)
Irradiated food
"Third brain" guidance systems (EBE headbands)
Particle beams ("Star Wars" antimissile energy weapons)
Electromagnetic propulsion systems
Depleted uranium projectiles

For each of the items on my list, General Trudeau went into his human resources file and found the names of scientists working on government defense projects or in allied research projects at universities where I could turn for advice and some consultation. I wasn't surprised to see Wernher von Braun turn up under every rocket-propulsion issue. Von Braun had gone on record in 1959 by announcing that the U.S. military had acquired a new technology as a result of top-secret research in unidentified flying objects. Nor was I surprised to see John von Neumann's name next to the mention of the strange-looking silver-imprinted silicon wafers that I thought looked like elliptical-shaped crackers. 'If these are what I think they might be,' General Trudeau said, 'printed circuitry, there's only one person we can talk to.'" (pages 115-116, The Day After Roswell)

With the benefit of Corso's 1997 exposé, it's obvious that the world and its inhabitants have been treated with contempt by powerful, greedy, self-serving individuals ...

Let us now back-track to the "Cold War" era and see how Corso's information helps to unravel the jigsaw puzzle of insanity that prevailed:

"Those were hard times, made even harder because the U.S.  military also knew that not just the free world but the whole world was under a military threat from a power far greater than the combined forces of the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. We didn't know what the EBEs wanted at first, but we knew that between the cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapons installations, reports of strange abductions of human beings, and their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, the EBEs weren't just friendly visitors looking for a polite was to say "Hello, we mean you no harm." They meant us harm, and we knew it. The problem was we couldn't do anything about it at first, and anything we did try to do had to be done in complete secrecy or it would set off a worldwide panic, we believed." (page 122, The Day After Roswell)

This is an interesting paragraph in Colonel Corso's book,  insofar as he reports no evidence of aggression from EBE craft. The interesting point is that there was absolutely no attempt by the military-minded of the U.S. authorities either to evaluate or to seek American or world opinion on this subject. The authorities assumed that the EBE incursion was hostile and reacted accordingly. Let us look at the facts upon which the authorities based such a conclusion.

First, there is mention of cattle mutilations. Did anyone consider that the precision-like laser incisions were the result of a monitoring process of our own radioactive proliferation? After all, we had just exploded several nuclear devices into the atmosphere! Did anyone consider that the organs and cattle parts harvested from the mutilations could have something to do with the EBE's food source? After all, we slaughter millions of cattle each day as a food source. We also conduct scientific experiments on animals on a daily basis.

Second, as regards surveillance of secret weapons, if these EBEs were from a neighboring planet, perhaps even within our solar system, would it not follow that they would be interested in monitoring our nuclear weapons of mass destruction, based on the law of cause-and-effect?

Third, as regards reports of strange abductions of human beings, could it be that they were similarly monitoring our DNA degradation, resulting from the polluting effect of our atmosphere by nuclear and other poisonous fallout?

Fourth, as regards their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, could they simply have been monitoring our unwise quest into outer space, given that we are now aware of the debilitating effect on the human body that results from long periods of weightlessness in space? Corso, during his years of research and development work for the army, discovered (along with the scientists he worked with) that the space suits worn by the retrieved aliens from the Roswell crash sight were designed specifically for long space journeys. This revelation helped later to explain why our astronauts were so debilitated after long periods in space.  Without the effect of gravity, the human body simply atrophies. That is to say that the major organs, without the accustomed effect of gravity, operate on a different level, which causes a gradual breakdown in their functioning ability. Very much the same way that a human muscle, if left unexercized for a long period, will simply shrink in size, durability, and elasticity. This was clearly shown on television footage viewed by the Russian public when the cosmonauts returned from an extended assignment on the space station Mir. They could hardly walk and had to be physically carried to the waiting transport vehicles. This problem is one of the main reasons that NASA and the Russian space campaigns suddenly changed direction from manned to unmanned space flight.

Surely, the global authorities who secretly and treasonously reacted to this so-called problem could have at least consulted with we the people. Governments all over the world, arrogant and drunk with power, simply made decisions that would affect future generations without consultation or concern for true democracy. This breach of trust is unforgivable, and deserves the strongest rebuke we can muster. Should it continue, civilization is doomed. As Corso explains:

"This was where the Cold War turned out to be a tremendous opportunity for us, because it allowed us to upgrade our military preparedness in public to fight the Communists while secretly creating an arsenal and strategy to defend ourselves against the extraterrestrials. In short, the Cold War, while real enough and dangerous enough, was also a cover for us to develop a planetary tracking and defense system that looked into space as well as into the Soviets' backyard. And the Soviets were doing the exact same thing we were, looking up at the same time they were looking down." (page 122)

If Colonel Corso is to be believed, this is the most despicable revelation of government conspiracy we could ever imagine. What suddenly happened to constitutional rights and human rights? The arrogant siege mentality of the global authorities, particularly the U.S. political and military authority, is beyond comprehension. This revealing statement by a former Pentagon Official reveals the treachery of the then executive office and government, continuing on to the present day. We ask again, what of the Constitution and human rights? Of course, the obvious self-serving answer is "we acted according to a situation of 'National Security'." The reaction by global powers to this world-shattering event was predicated on the motive of control, fueled by greed and power-lust. The self-interest of political, religious, and social institutions were simply placed above the best interests of the human population. According to Corso:

"In an only tacitly acknowledged cooperative endeavor, the Soviets and the Americans, while each one was explicitly using the Cold War to gain an advantage over the other, both sought to develop a military capability to defend ourselves against extraterrestrials. There were very subtle indications of this policy in the types of weapons both countries developed as well as in our behavior toward one another every time one side came close to pushing the button. I can tell you definitively because I was there when we avoided nuclear war because both military commands were able to pull back when they stared over the cliff into the flaming volcano of war that threatened to engulf all of us at least four times between 1945 and 1975 - the Berlin airlift, the Chinese invasion of Korea, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Yom Kippur War-and probably many more.

By the time President Nixon returned from China, having agreed to turn over Vietnam to the Communists, he had effectively turned the Soviets' flank in the Cold War. For the next decade, the Soviets felt caught between the Chinese, with whom they'd fought border wars in the past, and the United States. When President Ronald Reagan demonstrated to Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States was capable of deploying an effective antimissile missile defense and sought Soviet cooperation in turning it against the extraterrestrials, all pretext of the Cold War ended and the great Soviet monolith in Eastern Europe began to crumble.

But the Cold War worked its magic for both superpowers by allowing them to prepare defenses against the extraterrestrials without ever having to disclose to the public what they were really doing. When you examine it, the record itself should have showed that another agenda was present throughout the Cold War. After all, why did each side really have ten or more times the number of warheads needed to completely destroy the other side's nuclear missile arsenal as well as their major populations centers? The real story behind the vast missile arsenals, the huge fleets of bombers, and the ICBM submarine platforms that both sides deployed was the threat to the aliens that if they occupied a portion of our planet, we had the firepower to obliterate them. If they attacked either the United States or the Soviet Union so as to render one of the arsenals inoperable, we had enough missiles to spare to make them pay so heavy a price for starting a war, it wasn't even worth trying."

In this startling revelation, the reader cannot help but recognize the courage and spiritual insight that Colonel Corso has demonstrated in his exposure of the authorities' mindset regarding the Cold War and the hidden agenda behind it. As a people, we must recognize and honor people like Colonel Corso for their courage in exposing these issues.

As we saw in Bloom's theory of the triune-brained hominid from a previous chapter in this book, what Corso has exposed is the savage and barbarous nature of the reptilian inheritance of the human brain. Of course, those who participated in these treasonous acts would fully justify themselves based on the chain of command and their misguided interpretation of that much-abused term, "National Security." Too bad about constitutional and human rights, they simply were relegated to the periphery. The main game was the Cold War and the commercial enterprise of the Industrial Military Complex.

As we peruse the history of the Cold War, not just from Corso's vantage point, we see a gradual usurpation of citizens' rights, as successive national governments worldwide realized there were basically no limits to their powers or their ability to control. Every piece of legislation that usurped constitutional, human, and social rights was fully "justified," authored by lawyers adept at manipulating words, and enacted by politicians who had succumbed to the theory of big centralist government.

It began with the two breaches of public trust that the U.S. government perpetrated on the American people and the world at large. The first was the Philadelphia experiment in 1943, whereby the U.S. Navy and its scientists, using the latest technology, attempted to move material matter through time and space. This experiment, covertly undertaken under the "national security" pretext (widely abused during the tenure of World War II), was a flagrant breach of public trust and global responsibility. Any attempt to experiment with the intricate fabric between the dimensions of the time-space continuum is inhumane, fraught with extreme danger, and a prime example of insane atheistic science.

Two years later, as a result of the Manhattan Project's culminating atomic weapons development, the U.S. government again breached global trust when it attacked Nagasaki and Hiroshima with atomic weapons. Of course, historians seeking to justify these actions by well-meaning militarists would first ignore the Philadelphia experiment and then go on to record the twin atomic blasts as fully justified, based on the need to end the war quickly and thus save American and Allied lives. However, this self-serving justification, spoon-fed to compliant historians, does little to cover up the gross injustice and acts of iniquity involved in these transgressions. With the culmination and ending of World War II, one would have expected virtuous world leaders to recognize the folly of such a breach of trust. One would have expected them to learn their lesson and, using "virtue" as their guide, never to allow such flagrant breaches of trust to occur again.

The criminal mind, having succeeded both in committing the crime and avoiding detection, will go on to commit crimes indefinitely — unless public scrutiny intensely focuses on the criminal activity, exposes it, prosecutes the criminals and punishes the crimes. As we see in recent history, the Roswell crash cover-up and subsequent criminal activity, all under the guise of "national security" and Cold War imperatives, are nothing more than a natural extension of the criminal mind spawned during World War II. Had the U.S. and Western leadership actually succumbed to the same criminal mindset of its arch-enemy, Adolf Hitler?

Of course, history now records that these earlier episodes are dwarfed by the heinous crimes against humanity that political and military leaders, in league with science and the emerging technologies, perpetrated against the global population over the ensuing years. Weapons of mass destruction such as thermonuclear devices, viral and bacterial weapons, HAARP, MK-Ultra, depleted uranium and other classified weapons in the vast arsenal of the modern military-industrial complex are now slowly but surely being uncovered. The criminal mind knows no bounds once the original crime has been committed and goes undetected. It is human nature that such minds become totally corrupted and perverted in their attempt to challenge decency and virtues.

At this point we need to explain to the reader that not all politicians, military leaders, and scientists are criminally minded. It is not so much the individual mind that is at fault here; it is more the mindset. One of the greatest tragedies of the latter twentieth century has been the emergence of the term "national security" spawned during the tension-filled days of World War II, morphed into a sophisticated cover during the Cold War and exploited to the maximum in the post-Cold War era of terrorism and the so-called "drug war."  Psychology elegantly portrays human nature as having inherent in its evolutionary pathway the ability to create a contextual pattern of justification and rationalization once criminal-mindedness has been activated. The only true defense against criminal-mindedness is the combination of what many describe as the three Ds: discipline, dedication, and determination  augmented by common virtues — principles, ethics, morals, and values — the hallmark of a true civilization.

In order to finance the enormous cost of waging the Cold War for forty years, Western democratic governments were forced into tax, borrow and spend policies. By the late 1980s, with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the damage had been done. All communist regimes in Europe and Asia were bankrupted both morally and financially. In the West, the so-called social democracies in Europe and the Americas had similarly succumbed to moral and financial bankruptcy. Was this eventual bankrupting of both the communist/socialist and capitalist systems the agenda of some other powerful secret society? By the late 1990s, there were many who claimed this was so.

Conspiracy theorists, who posited a well-hidden secret agenda had been controlling the global economy, abounded. Many were of the opinion that a global elite had formed during the dark ages of the second millennium, and had put in place a master plan for the global domination of all people. That the communist/socialist and capitalist confrontation culminating in the Cold War scenario would bring about their plans to dominate the world. Many believed that Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati Manifesto  is the blueprint for this world domination plan. There are supposedly twelve or thirteen elite families worldwide who positioned the pawns on the chess board. In review of the horrendous revelations of Corso's story, it would be quite easy to accept such a view. We shall have to dig deeper in order to expose any such plan to enslave the world population. During the research for this book, several excellent, well-documented, well-researched publications were accessed. There have been a plethora of these superb works published, videos produced, and tape recordings made. Yet the mainstream media worldwide ignores the facts and the overwhelming evidence.

Let us take a look at the history, using the work of Bloom's "Lucifer Principle"  as the foundation for our search. We see that secret societies have existed since history was on clay tablets, animal skins, parchments, and finally paper and modern printing. They are nothing new in evolving societies and civilization as a whole. The barnyard pecking order of the strong needing to overcome the week through natural selection has existed from the beginning of man's emergence on this planet. And so it is that we discover this elitist and fanatical need for a small cadre of financially strong, albeit weak-minded family groups to believe that they, through divine right, possess the ability to enslave the world.

Sometime in the dim past history, approximately four thousand years ago, there appeared the foundation of the secret societies. Robert Morning Sky in his "Guardians of the Grail-TheWorld's Oldest Religion"  reveals that the Templar Knights are the culprit. Without going into the long and blood-thirsty history of this covert group, in 1776 one Adam Weishaupt  (sponsored by Mayer Rothschild) authored "The Illuminati Manifesto." This document proved to be Weishaupt's undoing within the secret societies; however, it did expose the horrible truth of what had been, what was, and what was yet to come. It gave rise to the Illuminati "New World Order." The agenda had an elegant and indisputable symmetry to it, whereby over the next two centuries, three world wars would be required to achieve global control and dominance over this planet's people and its resources. This plan and the ensuing agenda has been followed to the letter by succeeding generations of aspirants to The Illuminati Manifesto's  goals. The number of subservient secret societies, such as The Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilaterists, The Bilderbergers ad nauseum, have all played their part in the manipulation of global affairs toward the stated objective of global domination by an elite cadre of international banksters.

The reader at this point is fully justified in expressing indignation, horror, and disbelief when presented with such a heinous and evil plan to possess this world. It must be remembered that the prince of darkness, commonly known as the devil, is still free to prosecute his nefarious designs on this planet since Pentecost. This prince of darkness is a fallen son of God and is variously known within the confines of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions as Satan. His name is immaterial, as his evil and iniquitous plans have been playing throughout all recorded history, punctuated by two events that the Christian Bible evidently glosses over.

The prince of darkness was shorn of all power by the incarnated Son of God, Yeshua (Jesus of Nazareth). However, we are now being exposed to the divine mind of God who decided that during the twentieth century, as technology exploded, mankind on this planet would be forced to face the great decision. During his two-thousand-year-ago incarnation, this Son of God terminated the Lucifer rebellion, defeating Lucifer and his fallen cohorts ("Get ye behind me, Satan,") then went on to publicly teach the greatest gospel of religious living ever known on this planet, and indeed all of the planets of His sovereignty.

The great travesty now confronting our modern civilization is that the prince of darkness has been successful in corrupting and perverting the minds of successive generations into believing that such a perversion as a New World Order and world domination could exist. It is imperative that every mortal on this planet investigate, uncover, and determine the veracity, or otherwise, of The Illuminati Manifesto  and its execution to date of the New World Order... Laziness and a laissez faire attitude are no excuse when the fact is that every mortal individual on this planet will soon be faced with the final enactment of this evil plan and its dire consequences. Secrecy has been the main weapon used by the various factions of The IlluminatiManifesto. They have succeeded to date as the result of their secret societies, a lazy and disbelieving public, and apathy in general.

There can be no doubt that the emerging totalitarian states in the East and West were planned and brought into existence by a mindset that was not only well-camouflaged but also well-financed. Is this to be the "Armageddon" of John's Revelation in the Bible? If so, we are all in for a rough ride and we had better know our history well.

As Niccolo Machiavelli so eloquently posits, the great problem with choosing a "Prince" is that no matter what promises are made, hindsight is the only true litmus test. This has always been the problem in choosing political leaders; promises are easy to make but very rarely acted upon. And so as we finalize our review of the Cold War, we see clearly that no "Princes" of real worth have been elected or emerged during this century.

In the background all the way through this century was the Marxist Communist Manifesto. Democratic government and human free-will both simply became a dim memory as the confused and frightened masses willingly handed over all power to centralist governments.

The criminal goes on to repeat the deceit until caught. And this is certainly the behavior displayed by successive governments and their agencies worldwide after Roswell. Of course, every lie involved in the cover-up is fully justified and enshrined in self-serving legislation to cover the politician's tracks. Nevertheless, all who participated through whatever motivation, in the final analysis must be judged as traitors to humanity.

In generations to come, as a result of the coming paradigm shift of human consciousness, citizens will look back on the latter part of this century with amazement at the blind faith that citizens exhibited in placing their trust in charismatic, slick, grossly dishonest political figures. They will also marvel at the worldwide apathy and laissez faire attitude of the
brainwashed citizens of this era. Not to mention the idiocy of becoming ensnared in a philosophical net which serves no purpose other than to aggravate confrontation between classes, which is always divisive and bloody. That review — generations from now — will not be helpful in solving our present problems.

The solutions to our present mindset become clear and focused once the history of events is recorded and understood. It is the mission of this work to bring about such circumstances that will enable readers to discern that even though we view the world as a black background of evil, with white patches of good, the opposite is the fact. The electronic media continually bombards the psyche of the masses, brainwashing us with bad news, desperation, blood-thirsty behavior, and depression. The only respite to this mind-numbing parade of negativity is celebrity worship via entertainment and sporting heroes. Not often do we see political or public-serving heroes.

In "The Prince,"  Niccolo Machiavelli eloquently and succinctly points out that the true "Prince" - and this is still relevant in the modern era - is the political leader who sets an agenda based on his or her view of what is right for the citizens. Then without fear or favor, with single-mindedness, carries out the agenda in full. Ask yourselves how many political leaders you can name this century who have set an agenda based on love and goodwill towards the citizens, then gone on to carry out that agenda for their benefit?

If you are honest, you will quickly reply "none." Machiavelli tries to explain that such political leaders are few and far between. They must be idealists of the highest order, possessing courage and determination, not easily found in an un-virtuous society.

For centuries, The Prince was notorious as the expression of a cynical, moral political opportunism. More recently, it has been seen as the work of an Italian patriot writing a prescription for a strong leader who could unite his countrymen and throw out the foreign invaders. Whatever Machiavelli's intentions in writing it, the book itself has had a massive influence on the whole modern development of political science. Machiavelli's book reflects a startlingly pessimistic view of human nature. It offers one of the most caustic appraisals of man ever to be accorded a book deemed a classic.

This is Machiavelli's verdict on the human race, stated in his book:

"For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble
dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as
you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood,
their goods, their life, and their children . . . when the necessity is
remote; but when it approaches, they revolt.

A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be
against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself
no longer exist. If men were all good, the precept would not be a good
one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so
you are not bound to keep faith with them. . . "

And again:

"...men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessities,
that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be
deceived."
 

Thus, Machiavelli's judgment on the majority of mortals seems to be that they are both wicked and stupid, and he warns the would-be ruler to remember that "men will always be false to you unless they are compelled by necessity to be true."

Of course, unlike Hitler in "Mein Kampf," Machiavelli was addressing his remarks not to the general public but to one in a position to command, to the potentially successful ruler or "Prince."

Nevertheless, he grounded his teachings on what he conceived to be the essential facts of human character and behavior as demonstrated by experience. In order to cope with the fickleness, avarice, and short-sighted egoism of the multitude, the ruler, in Machiavelli's view, must be not only intelligent and forceful but also a master of the arts of deceit.

Understanding what men are really like, the Prince "must know well how to use both the beast and the man." He "must imitate the fox and the lion." While carefully presenting the appearance of all virtues, he must "learn how not to be good," because a prince is "often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion."

Machiavelli concludes that if a choice is necessary between being loved and being feared, it is better for the Prince to be feared by his subjects, because though the chain of love is easily broken, "fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails." He does add the significant point that the ruler should avoid being hated, but he believes this can easily be managed without any particular tender-heartedness on the ruler's part. Most of the people, he says, will be relatively contented under an efficient despot as long as neither their own persons, their women, nor their property are molested: "for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony."

Machiavelli's comments are cruel and cut very deep; they seem to be so anti-humanistic. Yet, what Machiavelli is after is the unification of Italy; and he thinks man has the ability to do this and to rule effectively, which, I suppose, is to rule well. Thus, in a final sort of way, Machiavelli is on the side of the humanists.

We can at least say that Machiavelli freed his readers to view politics as practical and based on power. Politics always was practical and based on power, but Machiavelli seems to have been the first to publicly say so and let it be a natural conclusion. Not what government ought to do, but what it can do. Machiavelli also believed that people did not control their entire environment or lives or circumstances. Yet there were parts of their lives that they could control. He believed that instead of working for so-called good in life, people needed to take whatever control they had over life to reduce the catastrophes of chance and fortune (or of God).

Of course, in the 15th century, Machiavelli was drawing on the history up to that time, which clearly demonstrated that the great majority of political and monarchical leaders had lacked the virtues he aspired to. Tyranny and treachery were more the norm — and nothing has basically changed in the interim five centuries. So in the twentieth century, particularly in the latter half, it should come as no surprise to any reader that the traitorous pattern has continued. Human nature, unless modified by religion and virtue, simply continues in the evolutionary pattern encoded genetically into our beings.

The reptile brain, once aroused and set free, produces the political spoils of each age — aspiring to populist IDEAS rather than IDEALS. It is worth remembering that the ideals enshrined in the consitutional rights of most western democracies are founded on virtue — principles, ethics, morals, and values.

When a breach of trust occurs, as we have witnessed, the result must always be despair, which we are presently experiencing. The key is to find the solution based on a thoroughgoing knowledge of the past — the getting of wisdom.

 

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Said the Master

 Jesus Christ

   
 

     

   
 

 

 Part IV: The Life and Teachings of Jesus: Papers 120-196