Pius XI, the Vatican, and Lost Chances to Stop Fascism

Two books have emerged recently, both dealing with Pope Pius XI (Achille Ratti) and the failure of his intention to call out fascism publicly in his last speech and encyclical. Italian scholar Emma Fattorini addresses this in Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech That Was Never Made (Polity Press: 2011; originally published 2007). Not very well written (or perhaps it’s the translation), Fattorini’s book focuses chiefly on the speech Pius XI had prepared to deliver in February of 1939, but which was foreclosed by his death two days before a conclave of the Vatican Curia. The Pope, who early on had hailed Mussolini as “the one whom Providence has sent us,” lived to regret both these words and his 1929 Concordat with the Fascist government, especially when the Duce instituted Italy’s racial laws in August and September of 1938. The Pope was mainly incensed about the proviso of the laws that prevented Jewish children from attending public schools at all, and about another section that forbade marriages between Catholics and Jews—even those Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Fattorini describes a meeting on October 24, 1938 between Pius XI and his advisors trying to find a solution to the possible rupture with the government over these laws. When the Jesuit Tacchi-Venturi, the Vatican’s liaison with the Fascist government, explained the government’s rigid position on the “racial question,” and under-secretary of state Tardini underscored this by pointing out the absolute prohibition of any newspaper argument against the racial laws, the Pope erupted:

“But this is enormous! And I am ashamed…ashamed to be Italian. And tell that, Father, to Mussolini himself! I am ashamed not as pope but as an Italian! The Italian people have become a herd of stupid sheep. I will speak out, without fear. I am forced to by the Concordat, but even more so by my conscience. I have no fear! I would prefer to beg in the streets. I will not even ask Mussolini to defend the Vatican. And even if the piazza fills with people, I will not be afraid!” (Fattorini, 163).

Strong words, also cited by David Kertzer in his book, The Pope and Mussolini (Random House 2014.) Kertzer’s book, like Fattorini’s, was made possible by the 2006 opening of the secret Vatican archives referring to Pius XI’s papacy, and is, in my opinion, far superior for being far more detailed, especially for a general reader. It not only leaves us lamenting the fact that Pius XI’s death interrupted what might have been a serious blow against Mussolini’s government and some reduction of the horrors that followed in World War II; it also prepares us by demonstrating the degree to which the Vatican was willing, in the 1920s and early 1930s, to compromise with Mussolini and fascism in order to maintain cordial relations with the Italian government and its (the Vatican’s) prerogatives as a separate state. I will refer mostly to Kertzer in what follows.

            What one must know, to understand the fatal 1929 Concordat, is that the Church had, since the 1870 Italian revolution, lost its immense power in Italy. Once in control not only of the Vatican itself but of the Papal States in central Italy—making it a world power that could forge alliances such as the ones that brought the French and Spanish armies to Rome in 1849 to defeat the Italian patriots who had established a Roman Republic—the Holy See had been stripped of its possessions and rule outside the 108 acres of Vatican city. Even there, it was not really sovereign, because technically the Italian government exercised authority over all of Rome and its citizens, including those in the Vatican. All popes had chafed under this perceived reduction of papal sovereignty, and when Pius XI was offered the opportunity to recoup some of this power by allying the Church with Mussolini’s Fascist government in the 1929 Concordat, he did so. Thereby, Mussolini got the legitimization of his rule that he needed (fascism now, in effect, enjoyed the approval of the Catholic Church), and the Vatican recouped some of its power, at least over Vatican City and the major churches in Rome. Those who lived in Vatican City, mainly the Roman curia, became citizens of the Vatican, with the Pope as their ruler. The Catholic religion was made the official and only religion of Italy (even Mussolini, the one-time atheist and socialist became “Catholic”, baptizing and confirming his children, and celebrating his marriage in a Catholic ceremony), with crosses and religious instruction in all Italian classrooms. It was chiefly to maintain these recovered powers and privileges that Pius XI and his curia acceded to each new outrage perpetrated by the Fascist Government: the daylight murder of Unitary Socialist Party leader Giacomo Matteotti; the brutal aggression against Ethiopia in 1935; and the growing alliance with, and even subservience to Adolf Hitler.

            The murder of Matteotti is instructive, for it was here that Vatican support truly saved Mussolini from disaster. The murder was simple and brazen: on June 10, 1924, Matteotti was walking from his Roman home to give a speech in the Chamber of Deputies, when three men dragged him into a waiting car. The car then raced through Rome’s streets, blaring its horn to cover the struggle and screams of Matteotti, being savagely beaten in the back. His screams stopped when Matteotti died from the blows; he was then unceremoniously dumped in a shallow grave 15 miles outside of Rome. An uproar followed, impelling Mussolini to fire the head of police and his undersecretary for internal affairs, but it was not enough to quell the storm. Cesare Rossi, Mussolini’s press secretary, became a chief suspect, in addition to Amerigo Dumini, an American-born henchman working for Rossi. With Matteotti’s body still not found by July, the fascist government was mired in deep crisis, with its leader, Mussolini, in a deeper one. Depressed and immobilized, he fully believed, with his enemies in parliament emboldened and even the conservative press opposing him, that his government could not survive. It was at this point that the Vatican came to his aid. The pope instructed his liaison, Father Tacchi-Venturi, to assure Mussolini he still had the pope’s support. Then the pope instructed Father Enrico Rosa, editor of Civilta cattolica, a twice-monthly organ known to express the pope’s views, to write an article on the crisis. The pope even edited drafts that went back and forth before the article was published. What the article did was praise the Fascist leader for all he had done for the Church, imply that he had nothing whatever to do with the murder, and warn the public against any violent action against the government. Indeed, it said that

            Even the use of legitimate means to bring it down, as through new elections, should be avoided, for it would bring “serious misfortune.” Most important, the Popular Party [the Catholic party, ed.] could never be justified in entering into an alliance with the Socialists. (Kertzer, 75).

The Pope underlined this last point in a speech he gave to a group of university students in September, when he warned that Italian Catholics could never cooperate with Socialism (almost the entire Church hierarchy regularly inveighed against the Communist-Masonic-Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy threatening civilization). He also ordered Don Luigi Sturzo, former head of the Popular Party, to stop his attacks on the fascist regime. The result was that Sturzo left the country, not to return for twenty years. 

            Still, Mussolini’s decline continued, save for one problem: no one could come up with an alternative to his rule. By January, he had regained his footing enough to speak in parliament, and faced his accusers with breathtaking boldness. He admitted that “I and I alone assume full political, moral, and historical responsibility for everything that has happened.” After cheers from his Fascist deputies, he went on: “If Fascism has been a criminal organization, I am the head of this criminal association!” As the applause and shouts grew ever more thunderous, he concluded by shouting his defiance:

            “Sirs! You have deluded yourselves! You believed that Fascism was finished…but you will see…Italy, sirs, wants peace, wants tranquility, wants calm. We will give it this tranquility, this calm through love if possible, and with force, if it becomes necessary.” (77)

The crisis was over, or, one might say, it was just beginning. For with this speech, Mussolini had effectively ended democracy in Italy; within hours, his thugs had rounded up opposition leaders and jailed them, beat Giovanni Amendola, Liberal leader in parliament, so severely that he eventually died of his wounds, and turned parliament into a Fascist-only house. He then began to take on the aura of a Roman, or even Christ-like deity who could do no wrong.

            It was with this conviction of his own infallibility (it should be noted that one of Pius XI’s main objections to both Mussolini and Hitler was their arrogation to themselves of pagan, god-like attributes; in the pope’s view, he alone, as vicar of Christ on earth, could rule infallibly, absolutely; totalitarianism was his prerogative and no one else’s) that Mussolini embarked on his Concordat with the Church mentioned above, and his invasion of a defenseless Ethiopia in order to give Italy an empire. It also allowed him to go to Munich, ostensibly to mediate between Hitler and the European countries looking on anxiously as Germany swallowed up territory, and to welcome Hitler to Italy in order to firm up the alliance he was striking with the Fuhrer in order to defeat the ‘communism threatening to destroy Europe.’ Of course, it was the Fascist-Nazi axis, signed secretly in October of 1936, that would nearly destroy Europe, but facts such as these are no obstacle to one who conceives of himself as infallible. And indeed, one of the major reasons the Vatican was willing to ally with fascism was the pope’s sense that opposing communism, socialism and liberalism were common goals of both the Church and Mussolini.  

            When it came to the anti-Semitic laws instituted first in Nazi Germany, and then in Italy in 1938, however, the pope began to comprehend the mistake he had made. He had already criticized what he saw as the “aggressive paganism” of the Nazi regime and its efforts to “blend Christianity with race worship.” When Mussolini announced in July 1938 his campaign against Italy’s Jews, claiming that Italy’s people were “of Aryan origin,” and that “All of the work that the regime has done thus far is, in essence, racism,” the pope, despite being seriously ill, felt compelled to resist. He expressed his determination to do so, even though most of his advisors feared angering Mussolini and many in the Church actually agreed that “defensive anti-Semitism” was legitimate to combat the “Jewish invasion in politics, the economy, journalism, morals, and all public life” (Kertzer, 291). So it was that when the racial laws were actually passed on September 1, the pope spoke from his heart in a September 6 audience with the staff of Belgian Catholic Radio. Emotional and near tears, he said:

“It is impossible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. We recognize that everyone has the right to self-defense and can undertake those necessary actions to safeguard legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all Semites.” (Kertzer, 320).

This was exactly the type of comment the pope’s advisors, especially Tacchi-Venturi and the pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (soon to become Pope Pius XII), feared. Sadly, they were able to limit what they considered irreparable damage by excising the Pope’s inflammatory remarks from the published version in the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore romano. How this was actually done is not clear for, as Kertzer remarks, “Most of the pages from Pacelli’s log of his meetings with the pope in these months are, curiously, missing from those open to researchers at the Vatican Secret Archives” (320).

            Increasingly frail, and increasingly disillusioned with what he considered a betrayal of his trust by the fascist government, the pope nevertheless vowed to do something ‘memorable’ before he died. When told of this, Mussolini at first made threats, and then realized an agreement was needed to prevent an open break before the 10^th anniversary celebrations of the Concordat on February 11. But the pope did not wait that long. In remarks he gave to his cardinals, he referred darkly to “the recent apotheosis in Rome prepared for a cross that is the enemy of the Cross of Christ.” The “cross” referred to was the Nazi swastika, leaving no doubt that Nazis should be considered the enemies of Catholicism. And this time the ailing pope made certain that his sentiments were published in L’Osservatore romano. Mussolini exploded once again, refusing the invitation to meet with the pope on February 11, but he still held out hope for some reconciliation. Yet rumors of an impending papal denunciation of his regime, even a secret encyclical on its racism (which was true), continued to spread. Meantime, both the pope and the Duce were proving true to their intransigent natures: each was determined to celebrate the Vatican Accords in his own way, and on his own terms. Mussolini busied himself with preparations for war; the pope made sure his remarks scheduled to be given to the gathered bishops and cardinals went to the printer. An open break seemed inevitable. But by Thursday evening, February 9, 1939, Pius XI’s condition had weakened to the point that death seemed near and he was given the last rites. The next morning, at 5:31 A.M the pontiff breathed his last—only a few hours before he was scheduled to celebrate his Concordat, and issue his most urgent condemnation of racism in Italy yet. Also on his desk was the encyclical, Humani generis unitas, he had been preparing: it rejected “the idea that a good Christian could embrace racism, and demanded an end to the persecution of the Jews.”

            In the end, Benito Mussolini’s luck held out for a little longer. Instead of having to deal, in wartime, with the powerful and volatile Pope Pius XI, he was favored with a successor, the Secretary of State Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would become even more of an enabler . Pacelli, an instinctive diplomat and conciliator, did all that he was asked, and more. Within days of his predecessor’s death, Pacelli ordered Pius XI’s secretary to gather all copies of his prepared remarks, including all notes pertinent to it, and secrete them. All printed copies of the speech, as well as the planned encyclical, the new pope ordered destroyed. No one would be allowed to see them in full until the Secret Archives for Pius XI’s papacy were opened in 2006. Then, as the newly elected Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli opened his papacy by meeting almost immediately with the German ambassador, and assuring him of his Church’s plan to inaugurate a new era of understanding. Having been papal nuncio in Berlin, he understood, he told Ambassador Bergen, that each country chose its own form of government and “it was not the pope’s role to judge what system other countries chose.” On March 15, 1939, three days after Pacelli’s formal coronation, the German military seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. And with their invasion of Poland on September 1, the Nazis made clear that nothing could stop their march to total war and genocide. As to Pius XII’s relations with Mussolini’s fascist government, the days of easy collaboration seemed to have returned with the new pope. As Kertzer puts it, with the death of the irascible Pius XI, “it was as if a dark cloud had lifted.” Of course, an even darker cloud was beginning to envelop Europe, but that, as they say, is another story.

Lawrence DiStasi

Syria, Sarin, and Obama's 'Red Line'

I assume most of my readers remember the phony “evidence” that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction,” (WMDs can include nuclear weapons, biological weapons and chemical weapons) ready to be used at a moment’s notice, thus justifying an American attack in 2003 on this Hitlerian regime. The ‘shock and awe’ attack—and the years of mayhem that followed, still far from over—took place to the cheering of American news media, but somehow the WMD were never found. With the change of administrations, though, we went from Bush to Obama and, presumably, an end to such phony justifications for war. Now, however, Seymour Hersh, probably the premier investigative journalist of our time, has written a piece indicating that the era of the ‘phony’ casus belli is far from over. Rather, it seems to be part of America’s DNA.

            Recall the dire situation: Syria and its president, Bashar al Assad, were engaged in a life-or-death struggle with what American media called “freedom fighters,” and what Assad called “terrorists.” The United States, of course, took the side of the “freedom fighters,” even though numerous reports made clear that these were not exactly democracy lovers, or nonviolent activists, or even native adversaries of the devilish Assad, but rather a rag-tag grouping of fundamentalist groups, many of whom openly declared their adherence to Al-Qaeda. The al Nusra Front was only the most prominent of these fighting groups, and it was also clear that it was supported mostly by Saudi Arabia (which had long wanted to get rid of Assad as the main secular leader opposing their hegemony in the Arab world) and other Gulf oil emirates. Yet the public was told that despite the jihadist tendencies of these freedom fighters—which should have fixed them in the camp of our mortal enemies—the United States supported them as the lesser of two evils. The enemy of my enemy is my friend is the way realpolitik types put it. And so we heard congressional hawks urging the president to ramp up the military aid, up to and including a possible U.S. invasion against the Assad regime; and the president and his men explaining that the U.S. was doing all in its power to support the “freedom fighters” short of providing a no-fly zone as it had in Libya. And of course, flush with Israeli intelligence insisting that Assad had used chemical weapons already, the American president in 2012 announced that any use of his chemical stockpile in the conflict was a “red line” beyond which Assad must not go. If he crossed that dread red line, it was implied, the United States would have no choice but to attack and save the world from weapons that threatened all of civilization. 

            In August of 2013 came the terrible news that such an attack by Assad’s forces had occurred in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, and, as “proof,” we were treated to horrifying videos of children writhing in death agony and piles of bodies allegedly killed by Assad’s sarin gas. We were told repeatedly that only Assad and his government forces had the capability to mount such an attack. We were given proofs such as the direction of the missiles that had carried the chemicals, and further proofs alleging that Assad’s forces had been gathering in just the place from which such missiles could be fired, and even alleged recordings of Assad’s commanders ordering the attacks. And so it appeared that with such an airtight case, the U.S. had no choice but to, once again, go to war in the Middle East against this latest incarnation of Adolf Hitler, now disguised as Bashar al Assad of Syria. Air strikes were being readied, we were told, while counter-claims that the gas attack might actually have come from the rebels, were laughed away as so much Syrian propaganda. BUT THEN, with two days to go before the planned strike, the president suddenly announced that prior to ordering the attack he would go to Congress to get approval. And in another two days, as Congress was preparing long hearings, the president accepted a deal brokered by Russian president Putin for Assad to get rid of his chemical arsenal under international supervision. The compulsory air strike and another American war had been avoided.

            What Seymour Hersh addresses is, why? Why did the president suddenly shift from attack to compromise? And what Hersh has found is that it was British intelligence that did the job. At its defense lab in Wiltshire, the Brits had analyzed a sample of the sarin used in the August attack and found that the gas didn’t match what was known to be in Syria’s arsenal. Given that our most loyal ally had evidence that the Sarin attack hadn’t come from the Syrian regime after all, the Joint Chiefs—who had been alerted by British intelligence—urged the president to halt the air strike. And so we learn that, once again, an American administration, goaded by hawks and phony evidence, was on the brink of initiating a major conflict that could have ignited a new conflagration in the most volatile region on earth.

            But Hersh goes further. What he demonstrates is not only that the sarin attack came from the jihadis, most likely the al Nusra Front, but also from its staunch supporter in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. Hersh quotes a former senior US intelligence official with access to current intelligence:

We knew there were some in the Turkish government…who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria—and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.

Furthermore, though the administration insisted repeatedly that only Assad’s forces had access to sarin gas, both American and British intelligence had known since early 2013 that some of the rebel groups were developing chemical weapons. In fact, analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a paper stating that al Nusra was engaged in a sarin production program that was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort.’ Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia were providing sarin precursors in bulk, and several members of the al Nusra front were arrested in southern Turkey in May 2013 with two kilos of sarin. Though Turkish officials claimed the seized material was not sarin at all but ‘anti-freeze,’ the DIA believed the initial arrests were valid. Furthermore, a UN investigation in March and April of 2013 of a series of chemical attacks concluded that the evidence linked NOT the government but the opposition groups to the attack: “It was clear that the rebels used the gas,” said one investigator. “It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.”

            In short, the general public, not just in America but throughout the western world, was once again duped by the “chemical-weapons-in-the-hands-of-a-monster ploy” and very nearly went to war on the basis of phony allegations of WMD. Not everyone of course. There were many in the alternative press who vehemently disputed the claims coming out of Washington. But in the lame-stream media, there was not a peep. And notably, there still isn’t (except of course to ridicule.) Seymour Hersh had to go to England to get this latest piece published in The London Review of Books, where, fortunately, you can read it online (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line). Then, the next time you hear about WMD in the hands of a new ‘Hitler,’ you can start singing that old song: It seems, “we’ve heard it all before.” 

Lawrence DiStasi

The Deep State and JFK

Since former Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren wrote his essay on the ‘deep state’ and talked about it on PBS’ Moyers and Co., I have been thinking about the notion more and more. Then I read Mary’s Mosaic, Peter Janney’s riveting book about the death of JFK’s lover, the brilliant socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer. The sickening truth began to sink in once again, 50 years after the Dallas assassination that everyone in my generation remembers, and remembers thinking was an inside job when, right on our television screens, the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot to death smack in the middle of the Dallas police station by the allegedly grief-stricken Jack Ruby. Everyone, that is, immediately thought conspiracy: an assassin doesn’t just get gunned down in police custody by some fat, floozy of a strip-joint owner who, because he does favors for a lot of cops and can walk into the most heavily-guarded police station in the world, can kill the prime suspect of the crime of the century with less trouble than a teenager killing rats at the dump. No. If there ever was an inside job meant to silence a suspect, this had to be it. Until, that is, the Warren Commission deliberated and handed down its verdict: Oswald was a lone, very lucky gunman with some sort of grudge against the President, and Ruby also acted on his own to exact vengeance on the man who killed the President he loved. All other conclusion and speculations were the ravings of lunatic conspiracy theorists. End of story.

            Over the years, however, intrepid researchers and reporters such as Peter Dale Scott and Oliver Stone and Robert Parry have contested the received standard version of this and other stories. And in doing so, they have broached the subject of a secret government operating outside (or perhaps one should say ‘inside’) the boundaries of legitimate political contestation or government oversight. The idea that would not die was that the operation to kill the president was the work of so-called “rogue” elements in the CIA and other government agencies like the ones that nearly brought the world to nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. They were the same or similar elements that have brought down countless foreign governments—as in Iran when they overthrew the democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh and brought back the Shah—and have really dictated the policies of one president after another to such an extent that even the tepid Dwight Eisenhower raised the alarm about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” And they were not “rogue” at all, but fully ensconced in all agencies of government as well as the major corporate and Wall Street power centers which ultimately call the shots. This is exactly what Mike Lofgren now has formally termed “the Deep State.” Here is how he defines it:

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street….

Lofgren then expands on that government-corporate connection by pointing out how mutually reinforcing are the connections between corporate America and the federal agencies in question, and the huge percentage of the national security apparatus that is contracted out to private companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton (Edward Snowden’s employer):

There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts.

Is it any wonder that the federal government has been at such pains to track Snowden down, to silence Julian Assange and Bradley Manning and William Binney, to mount the most savage attack on government whistleblowers and leakers in U.S. history? There’s a lot of money at stake here, not to mention some very unsavory skeletons in America’s closet.

            But to return to JFK and Mary Meyer. Peter Janney, the writer, is a psychologist by profession and a CIA brat by birth: his father was Wistar Janney, a career CIA official. This gives Peter Janney some added credibility when he writes about CIA powers like James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, and Cord Meyer (Mary Meyer’s husband before their divorce), head of the Directorate of Plans. The story Janney tells is both poignant and harrowing. Having known each other when they were young collegians (JFK at Harvard and Mary at Vassar), Meyer and JFK had flirted but never really consummated anything until the early 60s when she was divorced and he, as usual, was hopping from one bed to another. Contrary to his usual pattern of “love ‘em and leave ‘em,” however, JFK is said by Janney and others to have fallen heavily for Mary Meyer. More than that, he is said to have come under her influence, first by taking LSD with her at least once, and second by agreeing that the world, on the brink of annihilation from nuclear weapons, needed peacemakers more than anything else. Mary Meyer had long been an advocate for world peace: she and her husband, Cord Meyer, had been leaders of the United World Federalists (UWF) before Cord, needing money for his new family, succumbed to an offer from the CIA (talk about flipflops!). Now, with JFK and perhaps some emotional insights from LSD, she was allegedly steering him more and more towards détente with the Soviet Union. As evidence, Janney cites JFK’s stunning American University Commencement Speech of June 10, 1963, well worth reading in full (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html). In that speech, JFK talked about peace as more than necessary, especially given the weapons of mass destruction now in the hands of the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But he spoke not the threatening language favored by the deep staters, nor a language of blame for a “godless” adversary, but the language of rational and sane men who know that only by examining one’s own attitudes could real peace ever have a chance:

Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament, and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitudes, as individuals and as a Nation, for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward, by examining his own attitude towards the possibilities of peace, towards the Soviet Union, towards the course of the cold war and towards freedom and peace here at home.

Then the President went even farther. He announced that far from just indulging in rhetoric, he intended to back up his words with action, action to pursue the talks already started in Geneva in pursuit of a real nuclear test-ban treaty:

I'm taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two important decisions in this regard. First, Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking towards early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history; but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind. Second, to make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on this matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not -- We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.

In short, President Kennedy announced that day that he was serious about proposing an end to the arms race, an end to the “strategy of annihilation,” and a beginning towards an era of full disarmament and peace. And that announcement may have been the final signal to those in the “deep state” that the President of the United States, already considered unreliable because of his refusal to “nuke” Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and risk nuclear Armageddon, because of his indications of rapprochement with not just Russia but with China and Cuba too, with his reckless (in their eyes) moves toward a test-ban treaty (his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, refused to sign the treaty Kennedy had negotiated), could no longer be trusted or tolerated.

            Janney cites an entry Mary Meyer made in her diary just before she died to confirm this notion: “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast.” Whether or not this was true, it is quite clear that some ‘deep staters’—very powerful people within government who were able to bring about the assassination of a sitting president and then create a commission, the Warren Commission, to confirm the preposterous lone gunman theory that has stood till this very day—wanted the President out of the way. Janney cites the cases building against Lyndon Johnson (the scandals of Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes, about to appear on the cover of Life Magazine until they were replaced by the assassination photos from the Zapruder film, never to be heard from again) and the clear evidence that he would be dropped as Vice President in the 1964 election, as indications that LBJ at the least knew about the plot.

            One way or the other, though, Janney’s main story concerns Mary Meyer. She apparently had told friends and acquaintances, especially after the Warren Commission Report was made public, that it was all fiction, a cover story to hide the truth. Given her well-known intimacy with the assassinated President, and her equally well-known penchant for confronting people about uncomfortable truths, Mary Meyer was not about to be intimidated. Janney quotes liberally from lawyer Jimmy Smith’s notes with his client, writer Leo Damore, who claimed, before he committed suicide in 1995, that he (Damore) had put together the details of both Mary’s death and JFK’s assassination. And his research showed that

…it wasn’t Mary’s affair with Jack that had put her in jeopardy; it was what she had been able to put together…about the “murder of JFK.” Her indignation at the cover-up in the Warren Report pushed her to confront her ex-husband, Cord, and possibly Jim Angleton as well. Smith’s notes, however, indicated that it had to have been Cord who conveyed to Jim Angleton how infuriated Mary had become. Whether Mary subsequently had a separate confrontation with Jim Angleton alone, or with Cord present, wasn’t clear. But it was almost certain both men realized—knowing Mary as well as they did—that she wasn’t the kind of person who was going to keep quiet. (329)

In short, Mary Meyer had to be silenced. Given her habit of walking each day around noon on a towpath along an abandoned Chesapeake and Ohio canal, she was accosted there on October 12, 1964, and shot twice—once in the temple, and once from behind in the right chest above the wing bone. Both were up-close professional shots, the second one fatal. A witness called to tow a Nash automobile nearby heard shots, then moved to a wall from which he could see a Black man bending over a body, wearing a tan jacket and a plaid hat. The witness, Henry Wiggins Jr., identified the suspect as 5’8” tall, weighing somewhere around 180 lbs. Shortly thereafter, police arrested Ray Crump, Jr. (according to Damore, another fall guy like Lee Harvey Oswald), a Black man about 5’3” and weighing no more than 130 lbs. Having just had extra-marital sex with a girlfriend, he refused to explain why he was at the scene, and was charged with the murder. Fortunately for him, Crump was brilliantly defended by renowned attorney Dovey Johnson, who got him acquitted of all charges. The murder remains unsolved to this day.

            According to Janney, however, Leo Damore found that one of the witnesses that day, William L. Mitchell, who claimed he was running along the path, was the real assassin. A known CIA asset, and once part of an Army Special forces kill team, Mitchell, according to another researcher, Hank Albarelli, killed Mary Meyer “at the request of the Agency’s Domestic K [contracts] Office in D.C.” But not so strangely, all records about Mitchell seem to have disappeared. He originally gave his address to police as 1500 Arlington Boulevard in Arlington VA, said to be a known “CIA safe house.” He also claimed to be a math instructor at Georgetown University, but no such person was listed on the math faculty. Damore also asserted that Mitchell had actually admitted that he was the killer of Mary Meyer, but of course, Damore himself ‘committed suicide,’ so that evidence no longer exists.

            All that exists is Janney’s book putting together the assassinations of two lovers, one of whom was the president of the United States, the other a beautiful and powerful woman who had once been married to a high CIA official. And one more piece of evidence that a constantly changing core of powerful insiders in and out of government (today, many are known as neocons) manipulates government policy and our elected leaders to an extent that is frightening to contemplate. The latest instance of this known to me is Robert Parry’s exposure of the inside game with regard to Ukraine. Parry asserts that what’s really at play in Ukraine is the neocon attempt to control Barack Obama, to poison what had been a growing diplomatic partnership between the American President and Prime Minister Putin of Russia—first in solving the crisis over Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons, and then in helping to arrange a tentative deal with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program. By using the National Endowment for Democracy, among other agitprop organizations of the Right, to foment and bring to a violent boil the demonstrations in Kiev, the “deep state” has once again driven a stake into the heart of peace politics when a President appeared to be moving too close to accommodation rather than belligerence. What is involved for the deep state, of course, are billions in weapons contracts for arms manufacturers, endless jobs for high-tech warriors and propagandists and hit-men, and a zealous commitment to keeping the world terrified in order to shape policy towards the manufacture of fear and the weapons associated with it.

            Whether or not the fresh air of publicity can put a stop to such insider tactics remains an open question. But in a certain sense, it is all the rest of us have. The power seems to gravitate, as always, towards fear, and the insiders who stoke that fear. Until, of course, some brave naïf reveals that the emperor, the whole exceptionalist empire, is a mirage.

Lawrence DiStasi

Inside Israel: Closer to the Brink

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We have heard much in the past year about Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bring about a two-state solution. But aside from the fact that no progress whatever has been made, the situation within Israel itself suggests that even were Kerry able to bring off a miracle, the growing power of the radical right inside Israel would never allow it (Israeli officials have recently severely criticized Kerry for warning Israel about increasing pressure from the BDS, or boycott movement). For while most of the world has been focused on the violations inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian territories under occupation, i.e., in the West Bank and Gaza, the plight of Palestinians inside Israel—Israeli citizens all—has been largely ignored. Max Blumenthal’s recent book, Goliath: Life and Loathing Inside Greater Israel, goes a long way towards correcting that omission. What Blumenthal demonstrates, with scores of recorded interviews with Israeli politicians and activists, is that the current Israeli Knesset is controlled by right-wing racists and proto-fascists whose announced aim is to reduce even further the “rights” of Palestinians in Israel, forcing them into ever narrower and more hostile places to live and work, and finally to force them out of Israel altogether. While this has been the aim of Zionism from its founding—as Blumenthal demonstrates with his accounts of early massacres and forced evictions of Palestinians from land Israel wanted for itself: “95 percent of new Jewish communities were established on ‘absentee’ [i.e. confiscated] Palestinian land”—it has gained virulent strength in recent years due to the immigration into Israel of Russian Jews and the concomitant rise of Russian Jewish leaders like Avigdor Lieberman. These are the immigrants who are induced to live in the illegal settlements that have been condemned by the international community and the UN, and which form such a bone of contention in all “peace” talks, and who form the shock troops of the Israeli demonstrations against Arabs that are becoming more and more common in Israeli cities like Tel Aviv and Jaffa. It is the latter that are so shockingly portrayed in Blumenthal’s book.

Here is what Blumenthal writes about Lieberman and his fellow immigrants:

As the home of the world’s largest population of racist skinheads, Russia exported its neo-Nazi plague to the Jewish state. Starting in 2007, mobs of Russian teens who received automatic citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return began spray-painting swastikas on synagogue walls and attacking Holocaust survivors, reportedly screaming “Heil Hitler!” during several attacks. (24)

This is almost too shocking to believe, but Blumenthal’s statement is confirmed by his interview with Zalman Gilichenski, identified as “a Russian immigrant teacher who ran a hotline for victims of neo-Nazi attacks in Israel.” According to Gilichenski, “They distribute cassettes and written material. They began with graffiti and then graduated to beatings” (24). In the city of Jaffa—itself largely cleared in 1948 of Palestinians, many of them orange farmers whose farms were expropriated to become the source of Israel’s famous “Jaffa oranges”—these shock troops of the Israeli right wing began to attack the remaining Palestinians, confined, since 1951, to the “ghetto of Ajami”. Blumenthal calls them part of the right-wing’s “building in the heart” campaign,

which aimed to create a bloc of settlements in the center of mixed Arab-Jewish cities that would be impossible to dislodge, and to use them as citadels for the incitement of ethnic conflict…In the event of a two-state “solution” requiring the evacuation of ideological settlements in the West Bank, many of the most hardline settlers planned to relocate to mixed cities like Jaffa and Acre..(49).

In one Jaffa incident in 2010, Blumenthal tells us, these thugs entered the yard of Zeinab Rechayel, a local Palestinian woman, chanting “This is our land!” and “Yafo is just for Jews.” Not long after, another group attacked the Al Nozha Mosque with rocks, shouting “Death to Arabs!” Police standing by did nothing. Similar violence against Israeli Arabs followed the Mavi Marmara massacre, wherein Israeli commandos had boarded a ship from Turkey bringing relief supplies to the Gaza strip, killing nine unarmed peace activists. When Israeli peace activists demonstrated to protest the killings, the government-linked student group Im Tirtzu organized a counter-demonstration, with right-wing students screaming that peace demonstrators were terrorist lovers, Nazis, or smolinim (leftists.) At the same demonstration, another group of Im Tirtzu supporters attempted to drag famed Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery from his taxi. Moreover, the chant “Death to the Arabs!”, according to Ben Gurion professor of behavioral sciences and leading expert on racism in Israel, Amir Ben-Porat, “has become a common chant in almost every football stadium in Israel” and throughout the culture (247).

All this plays into the hands of, and is an expression of the right-wing politics that has taken over Israel and the Knesset under Benjamin Netanyahu. Laws, such as the Nakba Law, subject anyone (i.e. a Palestinian) participating in commemorating what Palestinians refer to as the Naqba or catastrophe (the 1948 founding of Israel and the resultant forcing of Palestinians out of their villages, lands, and homes) to criminal fines and imprisonment for up to three years. The law was meant to be part of Avigdor Lieberman’s larger program, “No loyalty, no citizenship.” In other words, if Arabs want to commemorate their catastrophe instead of what Israelis call Independence Day, according to Lieberman, then they are disloyal and should not have Israeli citizenship. According to his plan for ending the conflict,

Israel would unilaterally establish permanent borders along demographic lines, bringing the major settlement blocs into “Israel proper” while leaving remote settlements out…In turn, at least twenty-five thousand Arabs would be stripped of their citizenship and transferred into the hands of the Palestinian Authority (25).

Everything is being done to convince and coerce Israeli Palestinians into believing that this would be best for them. We have all heard of the bulldozing of Palestinian homes in the West Bank—indeed, since 1967, Israeli bulldozers have destroyed well over 26,000 Palestinian homes (and killed at least one American, activist Rachel Corrie). But now, with a state campaign of “Judaization,” such demolitions are taking place within Israel proper, for example, in the Lod ghetto 15 minutes to the east of Tel Aviv. There, on December 13, 2010, a 17-year-old named Hamza Abu Eid was told by his principal that bulldozers were destroying his home. He rushed home but was only in time to see that Israeli bulldozers had already demolished all seven homes belonging to his extended family, with 74 people, including 54 children, left homeless. The family—Israeli citizens all—had been trying for years to get permits to improve their land, but the state rejected all of them. It now plans to build a road through the one-time Lod ghetto, and add a yeshiva for good measure. And to deal with other communities where Israeli Arabs might want to live, the Knesset recently passed the “Acceptance to Communities Act.” This legally authorizes Israeli towns to reject Palestinian Israelis as residents for alleged “social unsuitability.” Does no one there remember? Well, there’s memory and there’s memory, or so one Rabbi Aviner would have us believe: according to the good rabbi, Israel is called “to be holy, not moral, and the general principles of morality, customary for all mankind, do not bind the people of Israel, because it has been chosen to be above them” (230). Very convenient.

There is much more in this shocking book, but it might best be summarized in the words of Lia Tarachansky, a Russian Israeli born in the (illegal) settlement of Ariel, and then educated in Canada. Blumenthal’s interview with this peace activist and reporter elicited this:

"To explain the fascism in Israel, it’s not that easy, because honestly I don’t let myself think about it that much. It’s so depressing and so terrifying that I usually repress my thoughts about it. But if you really want me to define it, then I’d tell you that it’s not just the anti-democratic laws, it’s not the consensus for occupation, it’s not the massive right-wing coalition government, it’s not watching the people who ask questions and think critically being interrogated by the Shabak [Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police]. What it really is, is a feeling that you have sitting on a bus being afraid to speak Arabic with your Palestinian friends. It’s a feeling when you are sitting there having dinner—what you feel when you’re alive here. It’s the essence of what this society is. And the closer we get to the brink—and everyone is feeling that we’re getting to the breaking point—the worse it gets." (120). 

In sum, we have a state claiming to be a democracy while it methodically bulldozes its way to racial/religious purity. Now haven’t we heard of that somewhere before?

Lawrence DiStasi