Fear Mongers Past - Martin Dies - 1939
(Martin Dies, 1939 - managed to take the lunatic fringe to the lunatic edge)
A few months ago I ran a piece on Martin Dies, and his infamous Dies Committee for Un-American Activities. An earlier incarnation of Joe McCarthy, Dies also managed to slide off the rails with vicious accusations and wild innuendos about people in and around power. Famously fabricating lists of "known communists", many of whom did not exist.
But just before World War 2, paranoia was rife. We were dangling on the precipice of getting involved. The war had already started by the time this address was given on October 27, 1939 and fear of being overtaken by some evil foreign entity was running rampant in the newspapers on the radio and on Capitol Hill.
So Dies took up the crusade, cloaking himself in Americanism and preaching the gospel of fear, whipping people into a state of frenzy.
Martin Dies: “These enemies within our country are not easily exposed, it is most difficult to expose fearlessly and without partisanship the termites who have ceaselessly gnawed at the pillars of this republic, because there are those who would like for us to be partisan when the question is involved. I said in the beginning of this investigation that I was determined it would be conducted without fear and without favor and that I would not hesitate to expose any man, whether he’s a Democrat or he’s a Republican. Whether he’s a New Dealer or an anti-New Dealer. Whether he works in the government or whether he’s working in industry. Only on that basis can I reconcile my attitude with my conscience. If the time has come when in the interest of political expediency and in behest to demands of party leadership I must qualify my conscience, I’ll surrender my commission and go back to private life. At least with my honor unimpaired.”
Clearly, fear and paranoia haven't gone out of fashion. And the practitioners of that fear will probably never go broke perpetuating it. The times change, the situations change, the enemies change. But the fear hate and mistrust, then as now, are all the same.
Comforting, isn't it?
One of the most insidious, destructive, and ironically named inventions of American Politicians in our history. Though its "peak" pre-dated my arrival, its horrors and destruction were well-publicized enough to be indelibly etched into my consciousness. So it was to my great personal distress and with a sense of hopelessness that I watched after 9/11 as the nation repeated in rapid succession the Warren Report, HUAC writ large, and the Gulf of Tonkin/Vietnam mistakes in stereo.
To this day I am puzzled and discouraged to see the parallels going largely unnoticed, despite rather unsubtle efforts from bloggers and a few of the more sentient Hollywood personalities.
many yrs have we been without war .
Great post BTW
every time you throw a little mud , you lose a little ground .
I wonder what he'd a thunka Gen. Smedley Butler?
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
I'm never read about him. So he testifies to a presursor of the House Un-Ameerican Activities Committee about a fascist plot, which is dismissed by the media, confirmed in part by the committee, yet nothing is overtly done to the plotters. Yet when it reasserts itself and goes after Communists (aka leftists) later on, all hell breaks lose and people's lives are destroyed, and it turns out it was just the paranoia of the times. This country will NEVER learn will it?
I heard he did a wonderful job.
Is it a 1950's "photoshop"? Not to divert from the article, but it looks like the head was attached... with a halo of sulfurous smoke?
He could fight off Godzilla and Megalon with those.
That was going to be my point, too. Glad someone else saw the same thing. Back in the day, they would have done a cut and paste job, maybe with some judicious airbrushing (maybe that's what's causing the "smoke" effect.) The lighting looks completely unnatural and the head and hands look too large. It's weird.
If the guy's head was as big as it looks in the pic he would have needed a rigid neck brace just to keep it upright.
They are always around the corner: those who will, with good intentions or otherwise, set out to profit from fear. They have been, are, and will be forever there waiting for their opportunity. During times of economic hardship, political/social upheaval, or terror – they will assert themselves. They will always gain a following.
It’s when people like William Mandel throw up their hands, shrug, and walk away that we truly have something to fear.
From 1954 (full transcript McCarthy/Mandel Hearing):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irIdED94b_I&fe...
From 1960:
“Honorable beaters of children, sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguished Dixiecrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with which we must live at peace in order for us and all our children to survive. My boy of fifteen left this room a few minutes ago in sound health and not jailed, solely because I asked him to be in here to learn something about the procedures of the United States government and one of its committees. Had he been outside where a son of a friend of mine had his head split by these goons operating under your orders, my boy today might have paid the penalty of permanent injury or a police record for desiring to come here and hear how this committee operates. If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!" – William Mandel
is new again. I wonder why people bother to write books - history books, in particular. Seems no one reads them or is able to connect the dots. We (human beings)just keep doing the same thing over and over again...and expecting a different result.
I think that's one definition of insanity.
"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of Stupidity" - Frank Leahy
...that would be too "Pagan". But doesn't this guy look a lot like Fred Thompson? And Bill O'Reilly a bit like Joseph McCarthy?
It's like some kind of mutation that pops up every 20 years or so.
Kinda creepy.
“ In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. ” ¹
This particular conspiracy theory is one that I buy into. I think where Dwight either missed the boat, or failed to notice, was that corporations in general were going to purchase, through these lobbyists and campaign donations/bribes, an "acquisition of unwarranted influence". And as a result, our country has become a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation. Unfortunately, we seem to be short on an "alert and knowledgeable citizenry". This does require an access to news so that the result is "an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will prevail". Truth doesn't seem to be prevailing. Needless to say, our corporate media isn't going to facilitate that. Exhibit "A" would be the health care debate, where the cost comparisons of single payer versus the other options was taken "off the table" by the corporate media.
And given that we spend more than the rest of the world on defense, before spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, one should give sobering consideration to Eisenhower's widely radical "conspiracy" theory, and whether it may be applicable to other sectors than the military industrial complex, such as banking, insurance and health.
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¹ President Dwight D Eisenhower - January 17, 1961
hire people like these, then while we're distracted, pick our collective pockets.
God, Guns, Gays, Communists, Muslims, Taxes...Fear. Rinse and repeat.
One member in particular, Maurice Parmelee, was, according to Dies, doubly suspect for advocating nudism.
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Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), American scholar of mythology. Believed all religions and deities are "masks" of the same transcendent, "unknowable" truth, and have a common ancestry. Read for nine hours a day for five straight years during the Great Depression, which in fact was named for the state of mind he thus achieved. His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces was inspired by JAMES JOYCE'S ► Finnegans Wake and in turn inspired the insufferable cartoon mythology of George Lucas' Star Wars. (See BBC ONLINE)
Study the symptoms not the virus...
American religious looniness faces growing foreign competition.
August 2002: "Jedi 'religion' grows in Australia—More than 70,000 people in Australia have declared that they are followers of the Jedi faith, the religion created by the Star Wars films. A recent census found that one in 270 respondents—or 0.37% of the population—say they believe in 'the force,' an energy field that gives Jedi Knights like Luke Skywalker their power in the films."
Study the symptoms not the virus...
It's been that way for some years in England.
And in the aftermath of these lame movies, Witches explained magick as a force, essentially morally neutral, just how it's used gives it a moral dimension. The only problem is they called it Vril, which clearly points to an earlier prototype of the farce, and is taken from the German Occultism, that helped pave the way for Naziism (mixed with Christian looking rites, rallies and parades, and the cult of the personality, although Hitler outlawed most occultic societies after gaining power).
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Here's probably the key one, although I have faint memories of others, but perhaps they were just names of newsletters.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Thule...
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Here's another:
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Vril_Soc...
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Because the United States was founded in an upsurge of democracy (at least for white males), it was necessary from the beginning for the wealthy to find ways to control uses of democracy that threatened them. This began with the Alien and Sedition Act, and has continued ever since, especially as democracy has expanded to include more of us. Almost every great reformer in this nation -- Jane Addams, Dr. King, Margaret Sanger, every major labor leader, Eugene Debs, Cesar Chavez -- has at least been threatened by political police of one form or another. While Dies and McCarthy are important examples of this, the great political enforcer of the 20th century was J. Edgar Hoover, arguably more powerful than most Presidents. It was obvious to those who know our history from the first moments of 9/11 that it would be used as a pretext to intensify anti-democratic control, and that our current neocons have ambitions to re-institute Hoover's regime.
http://www.user.shentel.net/llyates
THE CHRISTIANITY of American fundamentalism is a faith for futurists, the sort of people who delight in imagining what is to come next, even if it's awful. World War II had changed the steady plod of Christian futurism, quickened it. Christendom had at times raced toward apocalypse before, but never with such technology at its disposal—no rockets, no bombers, no nuclear missiles. The stakes were higher in the new era, the enemy stronger. Fundamentalism responded with great imagination, not just following the popular trend of spotting flying saucers and aliens among us, but driving it.
The aliens among us were not green men from Mars; they were red, at least on the inside, and they could be your neighbors. On the outside, they looked just like good Christian Americans. Many of them were Christians, in fact, or so supposed the conservative mind. By the end of the decade, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover would declare that communist stealth operatives, "schooled in atheistic perversity," had made Christian pulpits a main objective—and tool--of their propaganda. A "deadly radioactive cloud of Marxism-Leninism," he preached, was fogging America's liberal houses of worship.(The Family pp.183-184)
Study the symptoms not the virus...
Property owning white males.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Fierce defender of mosque-state and synagogue-state separation: "The minute you turn [the Constitution] into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society." --Pat Robertson (1930– )
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Pope Leo XIII (Vincenzo Pecci, 1810-1903), Italian Pope (1878-1903). Trivia: Awarded a gold medal to a cocaine-laced wine called Vin Mariani, the drink that inspired Coca-Cola.
"The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its ends when obstinate heretics disturb the ecclesiastical order.”
"The equal toleration of all religions is the same as atheism."
--Pope Leo XIII
...Well, then, thank God we live in the atheistic United States of America. :P
Study the symptoms not the virus...
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