{"id":258134,"date":"2024-04-01T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=258134"},"modified":"2024-03-27T04:32:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T04:32:48","slug":"the-cia-does-soulful-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/the-cia-does-soulful-work\/","title":{"rendered":"The CIA Does \u201cSoulful Work\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

25 Mar 2024<\/em> – Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word \u201csoul\u201d became the rage in the United States.\u00a0 Soul became the chic word. \u00a0It popped up everywhere.\u00a0 Everything seemed to acquire soul \u2013 cars, toasters, underwear, cats\u2019 pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc.\u00a0 Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times<\/em> to O Magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized.\u00a0 While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people\u2019s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume.\u00a0 It was soul propaganda, highbrow New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph Lauren interior.\u00a0 It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become a spiritual void.\u00a0 At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies and tradition at its best.\u00a0 Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.<\/p>\n

The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book \u2013 Care of the Soul<\/em>, \u201ca pathbreaking lifestyle handbook\u201d and soon to be soul franchise (The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas<\/em>, etc.)\u00a0 His works replaced the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception.\u00a0 \u201cYou have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under the tree,\u201d he said, adding that things \u201chave as much personality and independence as I do.\u201d\u00a0 Ah, soul!<\/p>\n

Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and consciousness in God united with the body.<\/p>\n

Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and other human beings.<\/p>\n

Not soul as in \u201cFor what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not even soul as the dictionary defines it\u201d \u201cthe immortal essence of an individual life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of bullshit and thought I couldn\u2019t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled on one that took my breath away.\u00a0 I read in Life Undercover<\/em><\/a>, a memoir by RFK, Jr.\u2019s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is \u201csoulful work.\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know this.\u00a0 I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers (with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information). \u00a0I recall former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, \u201cI was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It\u2019s \u2013 it was like \u2013 we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.\u201d\u00a0 Or as my friend Doug Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is \u201cOrganized Crime<\/a>,\u201d not a bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.\u00a0 He writes:<\/p>\n

CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the \u2018friendly civilians\u2019 who supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making her the woman she has become.\u00a0 \u201cYour allegiance is to the flag, to the Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,\u201d she writes in gratitude.<\/p>\n

For some reason, I don\u2019t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright Eugene O\u2019Neill: \u201cGod damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.\u201d<\/p>\n

The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also wrote a memoir \u2013 American Values<\/em><\/a> \u2013 that revolves around an indictment of the CIA for an endless series of crimes:\u00a0 \u201cWhat are we going to do about the CIA?\u201d he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of JFK\u2019s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA.\u00a0 Kennedy, Jr. writes:<\/p>\n

Critics warned that the \u2018tail\u2019 of the covert operations branch would inevitably wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine services quickly subsumed the CIA\u2019s espionage function as the Agency\u2019s intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA\u2019s endless interventions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy \u2013 you can\u2019t make this weirdness up \u2013 married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency.\u00a0 She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians.\u00a0 Is Fox and RFK, Jr.\u2019s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the iconic movie Cool Hand Luke<\/em><\/a> \u2013 \u201cWhat we got here is failure to communicate\u201d \u2013 or the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?<\/p>\n

Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent. \u00a0They remind you of history that is so shameful you cringe.\u00a0 Fox and Pompeo also seem to live in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which they both worked.<\/p>\n

And here we are in another presidential election year.\u00a0 When you think about presidential politics, you have to laugh.\u00a0 I like to laugh, so I think about them from time to time. \u00a0It\u2019s always a bad joke, but that\u2019s why they are funny. \u00a0It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never comes.\u00a0 Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more) evils is better than nothing have not studied history.\u00a0 They choose the evil of two lessers and wash their hands.\u00a0 They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O\u2019Neill put it in his play The Iceman Cometh<\/em>:<\/p>\n

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It\u2019s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious objector.\u00a0 But if you don\u2019t go to the war, people said to me with straight faces, some poor draftee will.\u00a0 The military needs good people.\u00a0 To which I would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.\u00a0 It\u2019s like what people say about buying a lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 \u2013 someone has to win.\u00a0 Ha!\u00a0 Ha!\u00a0 Never reject the system is always the message.<\/p>\n

Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the world.\u00a0 But we can pretend otherwise.\u00a0 For an egregious recent example, the three leading candidates in this year\u2019s election \u2013 Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. \u2013 all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a soul would condemn.<\/p>\n

That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n

That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n

We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a pretend society.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it can\u2019t buy you money?\u00a0 Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can\u2019t buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government.\u00a0 For the truth is that the CIA\/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November 22, 1963.<\/p>\n

Scott Ritter has recently written the following<\/a> about the CIA and its spearheading of the U.S. war against Russia through Ukraine:<\/p>\n

Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.<\/p>\n

Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.<\/p>\n

That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If this is soulful work, God help us.<\/p>\n

Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli\/U.S. slaughter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe terrible truth is,\u201d writes Douglass Valentine, \u201cthat a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality.\u00a0 Eugene O\u2019Neill could be humorous also.\u00a0 He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the Grim Reaper of two faces.<\/p>\n

There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called upstairs to his wife, \u201cHas the iceman come yet?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNo,\u201d she replied, \u201cbut he\u2019s breathing hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Edward Curtin, Ph.D. <\/em>is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.<\/em> His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/em><\/a> – email: <\/em>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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