Hugh Turley and I begin Chapter 19, “Pope Francis and Thomas Merton,” of our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, this way: On September 24, 2015, Pope Francis became the first pope to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. He singled out four Americans to mention as model citizens, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and Thomas Merton. Three of them were advocates for peace. Lincoln, by contrast, embarked upon a war of choice to bring the residents of seceding states back into the Union, a war that would become the nation’s deadliest. Lincoln’s contemporary, Pope Pius IX, hardly shared Pope Francis’ admiration for the unreligious president. Although the Vatican officially favored the Union…
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YouTube “Crucifies” COVID-19 “Savior”
On the morning of July 9, I received the following email from one of my contacts, with the subject, “Banned video hurry!” YouTube took this down earlier. Someone put it back up. Try to view before it vanishes again. https://youtu.be/hM5Xut5oUeY I quickly followed the advice, and what I saw was a very persuasive presentation by a medical doctor from Texas by the name of Brian Proctor on how he and a colleague had been 100% successful through the early treatment of COVID-19 patients with Hydroxychloroquine and other inexpensive, readily available drugs. Why on earth, I wondered, would YouTube take such valuable information as this down? Surely it must have just been some technical foul up that caused it to go…
FULL ARTICLELife in the Confederate Army
Not Fighting for Slavery There is no chain so heavy or yoke so oppressive as that which men will unwittingly place upon their own necks, or bend their necks to receive, while being beguiled and led along by liberty shriekers under their pretended banner of freedom. – William Watson On February 16, I sent the following email to the 14 members of the history faculty at my alma mater, Davidson College, as well as to one emeritus history faculty member. They were all open copied. At the same time, I blind copied 148 members of my class. At the closing of the email, I identified myself as a member of the graduating class of 1965: My freshman English professor…
FULL ARTICLEThe Balfour Declaration’s Bitter Fruit
Most people these days think of the state of Israel as a sort of payback to the Jewish people for the suffering visited upon them by Adolf Hitler and the awful Nazis during World War II; never mind that the people of Palestine had nothing to do with that. Hardly anyone realizes that the die had already been cast in 1937 for the sort of partition of Palestine that the United Nations approved in 1947, giving rise to today’s state of Israel. That was the year that Britain’s Peel Commission came up with its plan to resolve the problem of the growing turbulence resulting from its own policy of permitting ever growing numbers of Jewish Europeans to settle in the…
FULL ARTICLEThe Other British Forrestal?
Chapter Six of The Assassination of James Forrestal is entitled, “Britain’s Forrestal.” The title character is Ernest Bevin, who was Foreign Secretary in the British Labour government from 1945 to 1951. Bevin, like Forrestal, won the enmity of the Zionists by resisting their ambitions in Palestine. Zionist terrorists attempted to assassinate him with letter bombs in 1946 when Britain still held the Mandate for Palestine, governing control over the region that it had been granted by the League of Nations in 1920. Since Bevin was the leading opponent of the Zionists in the British government at the time, and since they attempted to kill him, the parallels between him and Forrestal would appear to be obvious. However, there are two…
FULL ARTICLEAn Enemy of the Thomas Merton Society
I still remember vividly my excitement a half century ago when I discovered Henrik Ibsen’s great play, An Enemy of the People, in a collection of Ibsen’s complete works that I had bought the year of my graduation from college. I had never before encountered such a great depiction of one of the major shortcomings of the human race, our tendency to reject the truth when strong vested interests are tied up in falsehood, and there it was, condensed into dramatic form that one could take in in a little more than an hour. In a nutshell, the principal protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, a medical doctor in a small Norwegian town, through his research has discovered that beyond a shadow of…
FULL ARTICLEBill Clinton, Hero
Just as most people don’t know that a small, relatively new Caribbean island nation has named the highest point to be found there, Mount Obama, I did not know until very recently that a small, even newer country in the Balkans had named a major street in its capital city, Pristina, after Bill Clinton. They have even erected a heroic-looking statue to the man on that boulevard, with a gigantic portrait of him identified as the 42nd president of the United States topping a large American flag, cut off to fit the blank wall of a building right behind the statue. Above the portrait is a large silhouette of the country honoring him. There is also a huge building-side photo…
FULL ARTICLEPearl Harbor vs. 9/11
(Piece originally written by Dave Martin in 2014) When asked the question, “What impresses you more about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their absence of intelligence or their absence of integrity,” a ready answer comes to mind, and it is clearly not the same for each. But in the case of Bush’s first Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, I think you will have to agree that it’s a tough call. That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw in the pages of The New York Times that Rumsfeld had essayed a comparison between the momentous events in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and in New York City, Arlington, VA, and Shanksville, PA, on September…
FULL ARTICLEIs Lt. Col. Vindman CIA?
The title question would seem to be just about the most obvious one that a person could raise, considering Alexander Vindman’s background, his associations, and his most recent behavior. The fact that hardly anyone seems to be making it is just one more reason, I believe, that he very likely is working for the CIA and has been throughout his military career. Actually, very much to his credit, Rush Limbaugh has observed that Vindman appears to be employed by people other than those in his chain of command. He just stops short of speculating as to who, exactly, that might be, like, say, the CIA. We’re talking about the Jewish Ukrainian American military officer in the middle of the ginned-up…
FULL ARTICLEJFK, Mass Media, and the Origins of ‘Conspiracy Theory’
By James F. Tracy (Originally posted at MemoryHoleBlog on November 22, 2018) Prefatory Note on Censorship in Academe This study was written in 2013-14 as part of my academic research as Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. I have had numerous papers addressing news coverage of historical events published in academic journals over the past two decades. However, this was the first attempt to offer a scholarly treatment of a research object related to a conspiracy–how the news media “framed” New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination inquiry. When I presented the paper at the Association For Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Montreal Conference in 2014 the panel respondent congratulated me on what he deemed…
FULL ARTICLE9/11, the Discreet Charm of the Japanese, and the Alchemy of Narrative
A year and a half ago, I wrote a little piece about 9/11 flight attendant Betty Ong. While I have been certain for some time that Betty Ong never existed, and also reasoned that if one found one such fake, there were bound to be some others, I still assumed that most of the nearly 3,000 victims were real people who really did die that day. It is only recently that I have come to the conclusion that there was, in fact, nothing particularly special about Betty Ong, and if I had chosen any other random victim of that day, I would have almost certainly come to the same conclusions as I did about Betty Ong. This conjecture was put to the test…
FULL ARTICLENPRavda Features Double Agent Ruddy
The late Wesley Pruden, when editor of the conservative Washington Times, once observed that, “At NPR all the guys sound like girls and all the girls sound like guys.” He was right on the money, I thought, but, curiously, that’s about the harshest thing I think I’ve ever heard said about National Public Radio from a right-wing commentator, or by any commentator, for that matter. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the rest of them regularly rip into CNN, MSNBC, the three major TV networks, and The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I don’t recall ever hearing any of them say anything at all about this very influential organization that is partially funded by taxpayer dollars. You have to wonder…
FULL ARTICLEThe Carolinas, Jews, and China
Sidney Rittenberg died on August 24 of this year, ten days after his 98th birthday. He was probably the most famous American collaborator with the Chinese Communist regime of Mao Zedong (We are not counting Chinese government official, Israel Epstein, as American, although he had his book, The Unfinished Revolution in China, published during the crucial five years in which he lived in the United States). Like Epstein, Rittenberg got long obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post. They might not have been as glowing as Epstein’s, but they were far from being as negative as they might have been for this long-term leading turncoat and propagandist for the murderous Mao regime. Although the Times seemed to treat him with some approval by headlining…
FULL ARTICLEThe Illustrated 9/11 Commission Report: It’s not a comic book! It’s a graphic adaptation!
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby! Over recent days, as yet another 9/11 anniversary has come and gone, I have been trying to trace back how my thinking has evolved since that murky event. Two decades is quite a big chunk of anybody’s life and one’s thinking is bound to evolve. Mine certainly did. Not just about 9/11, mind you, but making sense of that event definitely played a huge role. Eighteen years ago, my thinking about politics and history was really quite conventional. That is surely why it took me so long to question what we were told. Well, to be clear, I did question things, in particular the so-called “War on Terror”, right from the very start. I…
FULL ARTICLEIsrael’s Murder, Inc.
(This article is adapted from the concluding chapter of The Assassination of James Forrestal. ) Occupied Country Like the Germans we now know how it feelsTo be by foreigners bossed.It’s like we’d fought a big war with Israel,And we had, unfortunately, lost. Who is strong enough to remove the gun ever-pointed at the White House by the combined hands of supine politicians, the controlled media and the Zionist lobby? – Alfred Lilienthal From its inception, political Zionism has made great use of terrorism. The following observation is from the biography of General Patrick J. Hurley, who was President Roosevelt’s special envoy to the Middle East in 1943: While throughout the world Zionism was represented as a religious movement “based on humanitarian concern for a persecuted people,”…
FULL ARTICLEJames Forrestal and Palestine
As we relate in the newly published book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, the starting place for our examination of the fatal fall of the recently resigned first American Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, was the latter pages of the widely acclaimed 1992 biography, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley. We quickly discovered that their account of Forrestal’s death is replete with very obvious shortcomings, which for some strange reason no one else seemed to have picked up on. Apart from what appears to be Soviet-like obligatory adherence to the completely unsupportable notion that Forrestal took his own life, the biography is largely deserving of the accolades that it received at the time.…
FULL ARTICLEA Letter to Professor Paul Craig Roberts
(I wrote this email to Professor Paul Craig Roberts on 7/17/2019 and received no reply. Below is the exact text of the letter except for a small amount of line editing. Anybody who feels broadly the same way I do about this issue is more than welcome to mirror this letter on their website.) Professor Roberts: I have followed your work for close to a decade and I feel that I have learned a lot from you over the years. However, over the last few years or so, I feel that your writing has become increasingly tendentious, and principally for that reason, I do not follow it as closely as I used to. A few days ago, I was looking…
FULL ARTICLEJames Forrestal’s “Anti-Semitism”
(This article is adapted from Chapter 2 of my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal. Terms of Opprobrium “Anti-Semitic”, “conspiracy theorist” Throw in “isolationist,” too. We don’t need laws to limit out thoughts When labeling language will do. The year was around 2004, as I recall, and I was attending an in-house lunchtime lecture by a professor from Georgetown University at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington on the subject of President Harry Truman’s racial integration of the United States military. I beg the indulgence of the readers, but I have completely forgotten the professor’s name. I do recall, though, that he was quite obviously Jewish. During the question and answer period after his lecture I suggested that…
FULL ARTICLEJames Forrestal’s “Breakdown”
Chapter 32 of Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley’s widely acclaimed 1992 biography of America’s first Secretary of Defense, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, is entitled “Breakdown.” It begins like this: Forrestal was present at Louis Johnson’s swearing-in ceremony at the Pentagon on the morning of March 28 [1949]. Shortly thereafter, in accordance with custom, he drove to the White House for a final good-bye to the President. To his surprise, Truman had assembled the entire Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other government dignitaries, and there followed a second ceremony, this one honoring the retiring Secretary of Defense for “meritorious and distinguished service.” The President, beaming and ebullient, added his personal congratulations in effusive terms, and the audience warmly applauded the…
FULL ARTICLEJames Forrestal, the Great Patriot
(Note to readers: The following article is the introduction to my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, with hyperlinks added.) Fear Factor The truth may be there to see. But it won’t, like magic, appear. You must seek it diligently, And not be restrained by fear. James Vincent Forrestal was born on February 15, 1892, in the town of Matteawan, New York, on the Hudson River in Dutchess County between West Point and Poughkeepsie. In 1913, the town merged with adjacent Fishkill Landing and adopted the name, “Beacon,” after Beacon Mountain, the most notable landmark in the small urban area. His father, also named James, had emigrated from County Cork in Ireland to the town in 1857 at the age of…
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