Crapaganda.com

Wealthy industrialists, concerned with the failing US economy during the 30s, looked to Europe for guidance. Post World War I Europe was governed primarily by dictators. The success in Mussolini’s Italy was of particular interest. Mussolini’s reign was the product of corporate control of government, and under his leadership, the broken Italian economy leapt to its feet.

FDR, elected in the hopes of tackling Hoover’s Great Depression, was spending the US into obscene debt. The final straw was FDR’s retreat from the gold standard. Bankers and industrialists believed that a currency  not tied to real wealth would destroy the US economy.

Buoyed by the prospect of a corporate/government merger, some of the biggest corporate names in the US hatched a plot to overthrow the FDR government.

Watch The Plot to Overthrow FDR

Among documents recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library was the text of a talk given by Richard Nixon to attendees at the secret summer camp-out of the Bohemian Club. The tradition of a summer encampment was established six years after the Bohemian Club was formed in 1872.  The outing held at the, privately owned, Bohemian Grove is shrouded in secrecy.  Each year some of the worlds elite men get together to party and, as some will tell you, plan their takeover of the earth.

Richard Nixon, and newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan, at The Bohemian Grove (1967)

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For the ancient Greeks, fire was a potent symbol of purity.  In the modern world, where antique pagan symbols generally don’t have much staying power, the flame still has the ability to purify: Witness the Olympic torch relay, now making its patient, painstaking way from the ruined temples of ancient Greece to the stunning Winter Games facilities of Vancouver 2010.

The torch relay represents the Olympics’ human side, the part that retains faith in the uncorrupted virtues global sport is meant to bring together every two years.

Through the hand-to-hand transmission of the eternal flame between both ordinary and extraordinary people, Games organizers ask us to see peace and friendship, hope and understanding, personal contact with the Olympic movement’s universal values and an unbroken continuity with the sporting purity of the ancient Greeks.

So, please, don’t mention the Nazis.
The torch relay in all its elaborate rituals and feel-good sponsorship opportunities turns out to be a creation of the people who are the byword for modern evil. Without the propaganda artists who staged the 1936 Berlin Olympics in all its triumphant glory, lovingly recorded in Leni Riefenstahl’s mesmerizing documentary film Olympia, we wouldn’t have the government-supported cross-country relay that is bringing the flame to Vancouver.

“The torch relay is a total fabrication,” says Ira B. Nadel of the University of British Columbia, who has studied the techniques Riefenstahl used to aestheticize the Nazi cause. “The Germans invented it for the 1936 Olympics. There was nothing like it in the ancient Olympics.”

You don’t need to know the details of German history to be skeptical of the idealistic claims made for the modern torch relay. As recently as 2008, the organizers of the Beijing Games showed how easily the Olympic ceremonials could be used to bolster the aspirations of an autocratic state by controversially routing the relay through Tibet and taking the ever-burning flame to the summit of Mount Everest.

During the Bush Administration, the U.S. military had captured the number 3 man in Al-Qaeda.  The prisoner was “resistant to normal interrogation.”  So they approached  the CIA, The Justice Dept, and the White House  in order to see how much pressure could be exerted to obtain information.

John Yoo was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General.  He was tasked with writing the legal briefs that make it look like Constitutional law is flexible when it comes to the powers of the President.  He sends the interrogators away with exactly what they want to hear and now we have the President of the United States operating outside of the law.

They did get a fancy lawyer to write up a paper in Legaleeze before they shredded the Constitution, this time.

Watch the first of a three part interview with John Yoo on The Daily Show.

Part 2, Part 3

It has been argued that Yoo could potentially be indicted for crimes against the laws and customs of war, the crime of torture, and crimes against humanity. Criminal proceedings to this end have begun in Spain, in a move that could lead to an extradition request.

Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush by John Yoo

Report Faults 2 Authors of Bush Terror Memos (NY Times)

The Stanford prison experiment was designed to study the psychological effects of being either a prisoner or prison guard.  The 1971 experiment was conducted by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University.  Twenty-four students were selected to play the roles of both guards and prisoners.  They were to live in a mock prison created in the basement of the psychology building.  Their roles were assigned randomly.  The students adapted to their roles well beyond what was expected, leading the guards to display authoritarian and even draconian measures.  The experiment was scheduled to run for 2 weeks but was abruptly stopped after only six days.

“It became clear that we had to end the study.  We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation — a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically.”

Stanford Prison Experiment web site

Phillip Zimbardo’s web site

During  World War II the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) initiated a  PSYOP mission that ran from 1944 to 1945 which involved getting the German postal service to inadvertently deliver Allied propaganda to German citizens through the German mail.

The operation involved planes dropping bags of fake, but properly addressed mail near freshly bombed mail trains. When the mail was recovered during clean-up of the train wreck, the postal service would confuse the false mail for the real thing and then it would enter the postal stream and be delivered to the various addresses.

The impostor mail often included copies of Das Neue Deutschland, the Allies’ German language propaganda news sheet.  The postage stamps used were also fake.   Designed to resemble the standard stamp with Adolf Hitler’s face, a close examination would reveal that his face is made to look like an exposed skull or similarly unflattering imagery. Also, the country identifier ‘Deutsches Reich’ (German Empire) read ‘Futsches Reich’ (Collapsed Empire).

The first Operation Cornflakes mission took place on 5 February 1945, when a  train to Linz was bombed. Bags containing a total of about 3800 propaganda letters were dropped at the site of the wreck, were recovered and delivered to Germans homes.

The Story of Cornflakes, Pig Iron and Sheet Iron at psywarrior.com

Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II’s OSS

A gurney on which prisoners are restrained for execution by lethal injection.

Execution of criminals and political opponents has been used by nearly all societies—both to punish crime and to suppress political dissent. In most of the 55 countries where it is still practiced capital punishment is reserved for only the most heinous crimes, like murder, espionage or treason. In a few countries sexual crimes, such as rape, adultery, incest and sodomy, carry the death penalty and in Islamic nations religious crimes such as apostasy warrant a punishment of death.  In many countries that use the death penalty, drug trafficking is also a capital offense.

• Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s fury as Beijing executes Brit over drugs (Mirror.co.uk)

Methods of Execution
The list of methods of capital punishment used throughout history long and gory.  Some means like crucifixion and guillotine are well known other hideous methods such  as scaphism, boiling alive and Catherine wheel are not.  Most executions are now by hanging, firing squad, electrocution or lethal injection.

The Movement Towards a Humane Execution
Trends in most of the world have long been to move to humane techniques. France developed the guillotine for just this reason. Britain banned drawing and quartering in the early 19th century.  Hanging by turning the victim off a ladder or by kicking out a standing block, which causes death by suffocation, was replaced with hanging where the victim is dropped from a longer distance so as to break the neck and sever the spinal cord. In the U.S., the electric chair and the gas chamber were introduced as more humane alternatives to hanging, but have been replaced almost entirely by lethal injection.

• There Is No ‘Humane’ Execution (NYTimes)

How Kill a Human Being (BBC) Part 1of 5

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

• Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work (NY Times)

Cannibalism is characterized by the eating of human flesh of other human beings.

Cannibalism has been used as an aspect of propaganda against an enemy by accusing them of acts of cannibalism to separate them from their humanity. During the period of European expansion, cannibalism was linked to evil and savagery. During the 16th century, Pope Innocent IV declared cannibalism a sin deserving to be punished by Christians through force of arms, and Queen Isabella of Spain decreed that Spanish colonists could only legally enslave natives who were cannibals, giving the colonists an economic interest in making such allegations. This became a  justification for using violence to subjugate native peoples.

In a case of what is known as mortuary cannibalism, among the Fore tribe in New Guinea, the result was the spread of the prion disease Kuru.

Evolution via Cannibalism: The Case of Kuru

Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern

Some now challenge research that was the source of a lot of press attention when experts made the suggestion that early humans practiced cannibalism. When data was analyzed again, serious problems were found with this hypothesis.  Initial research suggested that genetic markers found among modern humans imply that many carry a gene that evolved as protection against  the brain disease, Kuru.  Kuru can be spread by consuming human brains. Reanalysis seems to show a data collection bias which led to an erroneous conclusion.

It is thought that the only population still engaging in cannibalism is the Korowai tribe on the island of New Guinea.  Authorities believe that the practice was common when humans lived in small tribal groups, but after the evolution of the city state most cannibalism disappeared.

Watch Last of the Cannibals at Youtube.com

At a labor convention held in October 1884,  unions unanimously set May 1, 1886, as the date by which the eight-hour work day would become standard.  When May 1, 1886 approached, U.S. labor unions prepared for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day.

Rallies were held throughout the United States.  It has been estimated that the total number of striking U.S. workers was somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000.  The movement was centered in Chicago where an estimated 40,000 workers went on strike.  The founder of the International Working People’s Association was Albert Parsons.  He, along with his wife and children, led a march of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue.

On May 3, striking workers in Chicago rallied at McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant where union molders had been locked out since early February.  When the bell rang marking the end of the workday a group of striking workers surged to the gates to confront strikebreakers. Despite calls for the workers to remain calm, gunfire erupted as police fired on the crowd.  In the end, two McCormick workers were killed

Outraged by the police violence, local anarchists quickly printed and distributed fliers calling for a rally the next day at Haymarket Square.  These fliers alleged that police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests.  Some of the fliers said, “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!”

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In the early 1950′s the US Army hired researchers at Duke University to research the possibility that dogs and other animals had “Extra sensory perception.” The final report for the research was completed on July 10, 1953 but not made available to the public until many decades later.

Read the report