{"id":118117,"date":"2018-09-10T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=118117"},"modified":"2018-09-07T15:08:08","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T14:08:08","slug":"a-diabolic-false-flag-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/09\/a-diabolic-false-flag-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"A Diabolic False Flag Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Review of David Ray Griffin\u2019s, <\/em><\/strong>The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?, Published <\/em>Jul 2018<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

10 Sep 2018 – <\/em>The past is not dead; it is people who are sleeping.\u00a0 The current night and daymares that we are having arise out of murders lodged deep in our past that have continued into the present.\u00a0 No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves.\u00a0 We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on \u201ca vast tapestry of lies\u201d that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time.\u00a0 We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But, as Pinter said, \u201cI believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real<\/em> truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one is more emblematic of this noble effort than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters.\u00a0 His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary.\u00a0 Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world.<\/p>\n

In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been \u201cmore malign that benign, more demonic than divine.\u201d\u00a0 He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis.\u00a0 In his previous book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World<\/em>, Griffin cataloged the evil actions that flowed from the inside job\/false flag attacks of September 11th<\/sup>, while in this one \u2013 a prequel \u2013 he offers a lesson in American history going back centuries, and he shows that one would be correct in calling the United States a \u201cfalse flag empire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The attacks of 11 September 2001 are the false flag fulcrum upon which his two books pivot. Their importance cannot be overestimated, not just for their inherent cruelty that resulted in thousands of innocent American deaths, but since they became the justification for the United States\u2019 ongoing murderous campaigns termed \u201cthe war on terror\u201d that have brought death to millions of people around the world.\u00a0 An international array of expendable people.\u00a0 Terrifying as they were, and were meant to be, they have many precedents, although much of this history is hidden in the shadows.\u00a0 Griffin shines a bright light on them, with most of his analysis focused on the years 1850-2018.<\/p>\n

As a theological and philosophical scholar, he is well aware of the great importance of society\u2019s need for religious legitimation for its secular authority, a way to offer its people a shield against terror and life\u2019s myriad fears through a protective myth that has been used successfully by the United States to terrorize others. \u00a0He shows how the terms by which the U.S. has been legitimated as God\u2019s \u201cchosen nation\u201d and Americans as God\u2019s \u201cchosen people\u201d have changed over the years as secularization and pluralism have made inroads.\u00a0 The names have changed, but the meaning has not. God is on our side, and when that is so, the other side is cursed and can be killed by God\u2019s people, who are always battling el diabalo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

He exemplifies this by opening with a quote from George Washington\u2019s first Inaugural Address where Washington speaks of \u201cthe Invisible Hand\u201d and \u201cProvidential agency\u201d guiding the country, and by ending with Obama saying \u201cI believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.\u201d\u00a0 In between we hear Andrew Jackson say that \u201cProvidence has showered on this favored land blessings without number\u201d and Henry Cabot Lodge in 1900 characterize America\u2019s divine mission as \u201cmanifest destiny.\u201d \u00a0The American religion today is American Exceptionalism, an updated euphemism for the old-fashioned \u201cGod\u2019s New Israel\u201d or the \u201cRedeemer Nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the core of this verbiage lies the delusion that the United States, as a blessed and good country, has a divine mission to spread \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201cfreedom\u201d throughout the world, as Hilary Clinton declared during the 2016 presidential campaign when she said that \u201cwe are great because we are good,<\/strong>\u201d and in 2004 when George W. Bush said, \u201cLike generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Such sentiments could only be received with sardonic laughter by the countless victims made \u201cfree\u201d by America\u2019s violent leaders, now and then, as Griffin documents.<\/p>\n

Having established the fact of America\u2019s claim to divine status, he then walks the reader through various thinkers who have taken sides on the issue of the United States being benign or malign.\u00a0 This is all preliminary to the heart of the book, which is a history lesson documenting the malignancy at the core of the American trajectory.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerican imperialism is often said to have begun in 1898, when Cuba and the Philippines were the main prizes,\u201d he begins.\u00a0 \u201cWhat was new at this time, however, was only that America took control of countries beyond the North American continent.\u201d\u00a0 The \u201cdivine right\u201d to seize others\u2019 lands and kill them started long before, and although no seas were crossed in the usual understanding of imperialism, the genocide of Native Americans long preceded 1898.\u00a0 So too did the \u201cmanifest destiny\u201d that impelled war with Mexico and the seizure of its land and the expansion west to the Pacific.\u00a0 This period of empire building depended heavily on the \u201cother great crime against humanity\u201d that was the slave trade, wherein it is estimated that 10 million Africans died, in addition to the sick brutality of slavery itself.\u00a0 \u201cNo matter how brutal the methods, Americans were instruments of divine purposes,\u201d writes Griffin.\u00a0 And, he correctly adds, it is not even true that America\u2019s overseas imperialistic ventures only started in 1898, for in the 1850s Commodore Perry forced \u201cthe haughty Japanese\u201d to open their ports to American commerce through gunboat diplomacy.<\/p>\n

Then in 1898 the pace of overseas imperial expansion picked up dramatically with what has been called \u201cThe Spanish-American War\u201d that resulted in the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines and the annexing of Hawaii.\u00a0 Griffin says these wars could more accurately be termed \u201cthe wars to take Spanish colonies.\u201d\u00a0 His analysis of the brutality and arrogance of these actions makes the reader realize that My Lai and other more recent atrocities have a long pedigree that is part of an institutional structure, and while Filipinos and Cubans and so many others were being slaughtered, Griffin writes, \u201cAnticipating Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s declaration that \u2018we don\u2019t do empire,\u2019 [President] McKinley said that imperialism is \u2018foreign to the temper and genius of this free and generous people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Then as now, perhaps mad laughter is the only response to such unadulterated bullshit, as Griffin quotes Mark Twain saying that it would be easy creating a flag for the Philippines:<\/p>\n

We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That would have also worked for Columbia, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and other countries subjugated under the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine; wherever freedom \u00a0and national independence raised its ugly head, the United States was quick to intervene with its powerful anti-revolutionary military and its financial bullying.\u00a0 In the Far East the \u201cOpen Door\u201d policy was used to loot China, Japan, and other countries.<\/p>\n

But all this was just the beginning.\u00a0 Griffin shows how Woodrow Wilson, the quintessentially devious and treacherous liberal Democrat, who claimed he wanted to keep America out of WW I, did \u00a0just the opposite to make sure the U.S. would come to dominate the foreign markets his capitalist masters demanded.\u00a0 Thus Griffin explores how Wilson conspired with Winston Churchill to use the sinking of the Lusitania as a casus belli<\/em> and how the Treaty of Versailles\u2019s harsh treatment of Germany set the stage for WW II.<\/p>\n

He tells us how in the intervening years between the world wars the demonization of Russia and the new Soviet Union was started. This deprecation of Russia, which is roaring at full-throttle today, is a theme that recurs throughout The American Trajectory.\u00a0 <\/em>Its importance cannot be overemphasized.\u00a0 <\/em>Wilson called the Bolshevik government \u201ca government by terror,\u201d and in 1918 \u201csent thousands of troops into northern and eastern Russia, leaving them there until 1920.\u201d<\/p>\n

That the U. S. invaded Russia is a fact rarely mentioned and even barely known to Americans.\u00a0 Perhaps awareness of it and the century-long demonizing of the U.S.S.R.\/Russia would enlighten those who buy the current anti-Russia propaganda called \u201cRussiagate.\u201d<\/p>\n

To match that \u201cdivine\u201d act of imperial intervention abroad, Wilson fomented the Red Scare at home, which, as Griffin says, had lasting and incalculable importance because it created the American fear of radical thought and revolution that exists to this very day and serves as a justification for supporting brutal dictators around the world and crackdowns on freedom at home (as is happening today).<\/p>\n

He gives us brief summaries of some dictators the U.S has supported, and reminds us of the saying of that other liberal Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, who famously said of the brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, that \u201che may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he\u2019s our son-of-a-bitch.\u201d\u00a0 And thus Somoza would terrorize his own people for 43 years.\u00a0 The same took place in Cuba, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc.\u00a0 The U.S. also supported Mussolini, did nothing to prevent Franco\u2019s fascist toppling of the Spanish Republic, and supported the right-wing government of Chiang-Kai Shek in its efforts to dominate China.<\/p>\n

It is a very dark and ugly history that confirms the demonic nature of American actions around the world.<\/p>\n

Then Griffin explodes the many myths about the so-called \u201cGood War\u201d \u2013 WW II.\u00a0 He explains the lies told about the Japanese \u201csurprise\u201d attack on Pearl Harbor; how Roosevelt wished to get the U.S. into the war, both in the Pacific and in Europe; and how much American economic self-interest lay behind it.\u00a0 He critiques the myth that America selflessly wished to defend freedom loving people in their battles with brutal, fascist regimes.\u00a0 That, he tells us, is but a small part of the story:<\/p>\n

This, however, is not an accurate picture of American policies during the Second World War.\u00a0 Many people were, to be sure, liberated from terrible tyrannies by the Allied victories.\u00a0 But the fact that these people benefited was an incidental outcome, not a motive of American policies.\u00a0 These policies, as [Andrew] Bacevich discovered, were based on \u2018unflagging self-interest.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then there are the conventional and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.\u00a0 Nothing could be more demonic, as Griffin shows.\u00a0 If these cold-blooded mass massacres of civilians and the lies told to justify them don\u2019t convince a reader that there has long been something radically evil at the heart of American history, nothing will.\u00a0 Griffin shows how Truman and his advisers and top generals, including Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman\u2019s Chief of Staff, knew the dropping of the atomic bombs were unnecessary to end the war, but they did so anyway.<\/p>\n

He reminds us of Clinton\u2019s Secretary of State Madeline Albright\u2019s response to the question whether she thought the deaths of more than 500, 000 Iraqi children as a result of Clinton\u2019s crippling economic sanctions were worth it: \u201cBut, yes, we think the price is worth it.\u201d\u00a0 (Notice the \u201cis,\u201d the ongoing nature of these war crimes, as she spoke.)\u00a0 But this is the woman who also said, \u201cWe are the indispensable nation.\u00a0 We stand tall…\u201d<\/p>\n

Griffin devotes other chapters to the creation of the Cold War, American imperialism during the Cold War, Post-Cold War interventions, the Vietnam War, the drive for global dominance, and false flag operations, among other topics.<\/p>\n

As for false flag operations, he says, \u201cIndeed, the trajectory of the American Empire has relied so heavily on these types of attacks that one could describe it as a false flag empire.\u201d\u00a0 In the false flag chapter and throughout the book, he discusses many of the false flags the U.S. has engaged in, including Operation Gladio, the U.S.\/NATO terrorist operation throughout Europe that Swiss historian Daniele Ganser has extensively documented, an operation meant to discredit communists and socialists.\u00a0 Such operations were directly connected to the OSS, the CIA and its director Allen Dulles, his henchman James Jesus Angleton, and their Nazi accomplices, such as General Reinhard Gehlen.\u00a0 In one such attack in 1980 at the Bologna, Italy railway station, these U.S. terrorists killed 85 people and wounded 20 others.\u00a0 As with the bombs dropped by Saudi Arabia today on Yemeni school children, the explosive used was made for the U.S. military.\u00a0 About these documented U.S. atrocities, Griffin says:<\/p>\n

These revelations show the falsity of an assumption widely held by Americans.\u00a0 While recognizing that the US military sometimes does terrible things to their enemies, most Americans have assumed that US military leaders would not order the killing of innocent civilians in allied countries for political purposes.\u00a0 Operation Gladio showed this assumption to be false.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He is right, but I would add that the leaders behind this were civilian, as much as, or more than military.<\/p>\n

In the case of \u201cOperation Northwoods,\u201d it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff who presented to President Kennedy this false flag proposal that would provide justification for a U.S. invasion of Cuba.\u00a0 It would have involved the killing of American citizens on American soil, bombings, plane hijacking, etc.\u00a0 President Kennedy considered such people and such plans insane, and he rejected it as such.\u00a0 His doing so tells us much, for many other presidents would have approved it.\u00a0 And again, how many Americans are aware of this depraved proposal that is documented and easily available?\u00a0 How many even want to contemplate it?\u00a0 For the need to remain in denial of the facts of history and believe in the essential goodness of America\u2019s rulers is a very hard nut to crack.\u00a0 Griffin has written a dozen books about 11 September 2001, trying to do exactly that.<\/p>\n

If one is willing to embrace historical facts, however, then this outstanding book will open one\u2019s eyes to the long-standing demonic nature of the actions of America\u2019s rulers.\u00a0 A reader cannot come away from its lucidly presented history unaffected, unless one lives in a self-imposed fantasy world.\u00a0 The record is clear, and Griffin lays it out in all its graphic horror. Which is not to say that the U.S. has not \u201cdone both good and bad things, so it could not sensibly be called purely divine or purely demonic.\u201d Questions of purity are meant to obfuscate basic truths. And the question he asks in his subtitle \u2013 Divine or Demonic? \u2013 <\/em>is really a rhetorical question, and when it comes to the \u201ctrajectory\u201d of American history, the demonic wins hands down.<\/p>\n

I would be remiss if I didn\u2019t point out one place where Griffin fails the reader.\u00a0 In his long chapter on Vietnam, which is replete with excellent facts and analyses, he makes a crucial mistake, which is unusual for him.\u00a0 This mistake appears in a four page section on President Kennedy\u2019s policies on Vietnam.\u00a0 In those pages, Griffin relies on Noam Chomsky\u2019s terrible book \u2013 Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture <\/em>(1993), a book wherein Chomsky shows no regard for evidence or facts \u2013 to paint Kennedy as being in accord with his advisers, the CIA, and the military regarding Vietnam.\u00a0 This is factually false. Griffin should have been more careful and have understood this.\u00a0 The truth is that Kennedy was besieged and surrounded by these demonic people, who were intent on isolating him, disregarding his instructions, and murdering him to achieve their goals in Vietnam.\u00a0 In the last year of his life, JFK had taken a radical turn toward peace-making, not only in Vietnam, but with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and around the globe.\u00a0 Such a turn was anathema to the war lovers. Thus he had to die.\u00a0 Contrary to Chomsky\u2019s deceptions, motivated by his hatred of Kennedy and perhaps something more sinister (he also backs the Warren Commission, thinks JFK\u2019s assassination was no big deal, and accepts the patently false official version of the attacks of 11 September 2001), Griffin should have emphatically asserted that Kennedy had issued NSAM 263 on October 11, 1963 calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, and that after he was assassinated a month later, Lyndon Johnson reversed that withdrawal order with NSAM 273. \u00a0Chomsky notwithstanding, all the best scholarship and documentary evidence proves this.\u00a0 And for Griffin, a wonderful scholar, to write that with the change from Kennedy to Johnson that \u201cthis change of presidents would bring no basic change in policy\u201d is so shockingly wrong that I imagine Griffin, a man passionate about truth, simply slipped up and got sloppy here.\u00a0 For nothing could be further from the truth.<\/p>\n

Ironically, Griffin makes a masterful case for his thesis, while forgetting the one pivotal man, President John Kennedy, who sacrificed his life in an effort to change the trajectory of American history from its demonic course.<\/p>\n

It is one mistake in an otherwise very important and excellent book that should be required<\/em> reading for anyone who doubts the evil nature of this country\u2019s continuing foreign policy.\u00a0 Those who are already convinced should also read it, for it provides a needed historical resource and impetus to help change the trajectory that is transporting the world toward nuclear oblivion, if continued.<\/p>\n

If \u2013 a fantastic wish! \u2013 The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic<\/a>? were required reading in American schools and colleges, perhaps a new generation would arise to change our devils into angels, the arc of America\u2019s future moral universe toward justice, and away from being the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, as it has been for so very long.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

10 Sep 2018 – No one is more emblematic of this noble effort [to report the truth about America’s demonic history] than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 Sep 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":118119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}