Taboo Truths by Jason Zenith: Still Smearing the Anti-War Movement After All These Years

The spontaneous grassroots movement against the monstrous war on the three Indochinese nations of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, was one of the noblest occurrences in U.S. history. The power establishment reviled it at he time, simultaneously fearing and hating it. The view of those who rule was- and is- that the proper role of the citizenry is to be docile and obedient and willingly offer themselves up as cannon fodder in whatever imperialist war the masters decided on. It was certainly not to meddle in “policy decisions” made by the Wise Ones, and it was most certainly not to protest such policies. And attempting to reverse those evil policies was regarded as depraved and diabolical. [1]

Lest you think that “elite” attitudes have changed, today on a U.S. government-hosted propaganda show, “Fresh Air,” presented by Terry Gross and aired on the U.S. domestic radio network NPR, one Elaine Kamarck, a minor made member of the U.S. nomenklatura, casually tossed off the following slander with no demurral from the program host; that the anti-war movement “were out rioting” during the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, Illinois. [2]

Actually, what really happened was “a police riot” that went on for a week! Those are the words of the official government-appointed commission that reviewed the matter! But inconvenient history is routinely tossed down the memory hole and replaced with lies by the U.S. commentariat. The Chicago police, under the rule of the corrupt, iron-fisted political boss Mayor Richard Daley, brutally attacked protesters assembled in a park and on the street, tear-gassed the delegates of the anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy in their hotel (the CIA had assassinated Robert Kennedy in June, who otherwise would have won the nomination and the election against Nixon), and even punched CBS reporter Dan Rather in the stomach on the convention floor on live television. [3]

But pseudo-scholar Kamarck tells us it was a “riot” by protesters.[4]

Anyway, that cheap shot was just a gratuitous sideswipe. Kamarck was brought on to explain to us how the electoral primary process works. And who better to give an objective explanation than a Hillary Clinton superdelegate, which is what Kamarck is! Kamarck is also the perfect person to tell us why superdelegates are necessary, which she proceeds to do. (Clinton started with over 500 superdelegates before the first primary. It's like a race with one person having a hundred yard- or meter- headstart.)

You see, when the grip of rightwing corporatist party bosses, the kind who are aggressive imperialists, was broken after Senator George McGovern managed to get the party's presidential nomination in 1972, the result was, according to Kamarck, “a lot of uncertainty and chaos.” Chaos! And horror of horrors, machine hack pols weren't going to the convention as delegates! And they were sorely needed as “leaders,” according to both Kamarck and Gross. So in 1982 something called the Hunt Commission was formed, to reempower the machine party hacks. Oh, by the way, Kamarck was a member of the Hunt Commission. Just an irrelevant coincidence. I'm sure it in no way biases her version of history and contemporary politics.

Look, if you're interested in the rest of the Democratic Party establishment propaganda that party machine apparatchik Kamarck spoon-fed to Terry Gross's audience, you can go online and listen to it. Obviously she is not a reliable source for an objective picture of reality.

Kamarck is one of these barnacles who is permanently attached to institutions of power. She was a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where the curriculum can be summed up as How To Rule. Currently she is ensconced at the Brookings Institution, where she is the director of a thing called the “Center for Effective Public Management.” She was a “Senior Policy Advisor” to rightwing Democratic Leadership Council politician Albert Gore when he was vice president under the first (and hopefully only) Clinton regime, and also during his 2000 presidential campaign, which he and the Democratic Party allowed to be stolen by the Gang Of Plunderers (GOP).

Which reminds me of another piece of Democratic Party “history,” namely their canard that Ralph Nader cost Gore the election. Absurd bullshit in so many ways.

Clinton, whose power circle Kamarck belongs to, helped commit much evil as co-president with her husband from January 1993 to January 2001. They helped spur a massive increase in the prison population. They gutted welfare, imposing a 5-year lifetime limit on aid, among other things. When Bill Clinton's war secretary, Les Aspin, wanted to intervene to stop the genocidal ethnic cleansing being carried out by the Serbs, Hillary stopped her. Her political and personal partner Bill is responsible for three mass murders: the killing of thousands in Haiti by Fraph, a CIA-controlled terrorist organization; the deaths of thousands for lack of medicines when Clinton blew up the just-completed first and only pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, pretending it was an “Al-Qaeda biological warfare factory;” and blocking the UN from sending requested reinforcements to the peacekeepers in Rwanda just before the ensuing massacre of hundreds of thousands.

As Obama's Secretary of Sate, Clinton helped protect the Honduran military coup that overthrew the elected president Manuel Zelaya and instituted the current reign of terror, under which hundreds have been murdered, most recently two environmental activists. Clinton brags of her role in legitimizing the coup with a sham election and blocking EU interference in her recent book.

As is obvious from just this brief synopsis of her crimes, Hillary Clinton is evil, and anyone allied with her and helping her in her quest for power, is aiding and abetting evil.

1] Lyndon Johnson literally believed that the anti-war movement was the creation of Moscow, and ordered the CIA to uncover the “links” to prove it. As if millions of Americans were marching in the streets against U.S. barbarism on the command of the Kremlin! This mad conspiracy theory is never ridiculed, whereas establishment polemicists and media hacks regularly ridicule those speaking true facts about the Kennedy assassinations or the demolition of three buildings at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan on September 11 of 2001, for example.

2] “The Mind-Boggling Story Of Our Arcane And Convoluted 'Primary Politics',” NPR, “Elections.” As I said, the show is called “Fresh Air,” and is hosted by Terry Gross. The day's segment is described thusly: “Author Elaine Kamarck explains superdelegates, the difference between caucuses and primaries, what happens in a brokered convention and how the rules of primaries can sometimes change.”

Conveniently, NPR and Gross arranged things so you can buy Kamarck's book directly from a link on top of the NPR/Fresh Air program page. In case you still didn't purchase a copy, there's also a link on top of her bio page at Brookings. The book is “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates.” So you don't need to think. She'll tell you “everything you need to know.”
Or rather, what she and her ilk want you to believe.

Both the book and Kamarck's and Gross' dog and pony show are junior high school civics class-style propaganda aimed at adults. Apparently one can have cushy career spushing such pablum.

The underlying gimmick of Fresh Air is typical of NPR; appearing to be “thoughtful” and “in depth” and giving off a vaguely liberal odor, while in fact often being quite reactionary. The day before, Gross had on Fred Kaplan, a reactionary who is more subtle than most U.S. reactionaries, the better to brainwash people in his hawkish ideology. Both a militarist and a supporter of police state powers, Kaplan feigns neutrality and objectivity. (Not exactly an original ploy.)

3] National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, aka The Walker Report. The commission was chaired by Milton Eisenhower, brother of former president and general Dwight David Eisenhower. Its over 200 members interviewed more than 1,400 witnesses and reviewed film and FBI documents. Here are excerpts:

“The nature of the [police response] response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in, the areas where confrontations were occurring.”

“Newsmen and photographers were singled out for assault, and their equipment deliberately damaged. Fundamental police training was ignored; and officers, when on the scene, were often unable to control their men. As one police officer put it: “What happened didn’t have anything to do with police work.”

In other words, standard U.S. police procedure in treating protesters (and bystanders) whose message the power structure despises. Something we've seen many times before and since.

4] Kamarck's bio on the Brookings Institution website presents her thusly:

'Elaine C. Kamarck is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings. ['Effective Public Management' being a euphemism for How To Rule, like 'governance.'] She is a public sector scholar with wide experience in government, academia and politics. Kamarck is an expert on government innovation and reform [sic! Anti-reform, reaction against reform more like it!] in the United States, OECD countries and developing countries. In addition, she also focuses her research on the presidential nomination system and American politics and has worked in many American presidential campaigns. Kamarck is the author of 'Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates.'"

She is listed as “Founding Director” of that Center.

Senior Fellow at Brookings, Senior Policy Advisor to Al Gore, past Senior Fellow at the Progressive [sic] Policy Institute, Senior This, Senior That- are there any Junior Fellows at these joints? I've never come across one. Apparently they aren't allowed out in public. (They might upstage the Senior ones, I guess. Can't let that happen.)

Brookings is considered “liberal” in the U.S., even though it is pro-U.S. imperialism and corporatist to its core, simply because it isn't rabidly reactionary like the Heritage Foundation or numerous other propaganda mills are. The business of these propaganda mills is to traffic in “expertise” designed to influence government policy in the desired direction. They are political pressure groups disguised as centers of scholarship. (Brookings website actually uses the .edu suffix, reserved for educational institutions. How presumptuous. You ain't no school, Brookings.)