AT THE LOST AND FOUND

I first came across the concept of parrhesia through Mattias Desmet in his presentation at The Future of Humanity conference with Iain McGilchrist last October. It means candid speech, speaking truth to power, the obligation to speak truth for the common good, even at personal risk – which has certainly been the case with Mattias himself as a result of his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Edward Curtin is what used to be described as a man of letters, and his previous book – also reviewed in these pages - was entitled Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Formally, he was a professor of sociology, but also educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, and theology. This gives him a deeply humanistic perspective. This book, subtitled ‘personal and political dispatches of resistance and hope’ consists of 50 essays from his blog and written between 2019 and 2024, covering some of the key issues and events of our time. Ed pulls no punches in his opposition to centralised technocrats ‘trying to mechanise us all, to eliminate passion and will, to transmute love into a chemical and hate into a biological aberration’ promoting endless wars for their own profit. At the same time, we have largely lost our sense of roots, and reality has disappeared into screens and simulations, resulting in ‘the degradation of the human spirit and its lived sense of the sacred. (p. 12)

Ed’s thinking is informed by the likes of Jacques Ellul, C. Wright Mills, Albert Camus and Jean Baudrillard. An overarching argument is that ‘cognitive warfare has been waged against the public mind. Intelligence agencies, war departments, and their accomplices throughout the corporations, media, Hollywood, medicine, and the universities have united to bring about this end. Science and medicine have been weaponised – the objective to convince the public that they are machines, their brains are computers, and that their only hope is to embrace that reality.’ (pp. 18, 99) Narrative control is an essential feature, hence the emphasis on explicit or implicit propaganda to manage perception and behaviour, and to manufacture consent (Noam Chomsky). CIA Director William Casey was overheard remarking that ‘we’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’ (p. 15) More recently, Mike Pompeo said, ‘I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s like we had entire training courses.’ (p. 83)

For Ed, the most seismic events of the last 60 years have been the assassination of President Kennedy, 9/11, and the Covid pandemic. There is a long and detailed factual essay on JFK highlighting key people and events, including the orchestrated assassinations of Patrice Lumumba and JFK’s ally Dag Hammarskjold. Ed regards Kennedy’s assassination as the foundation for today’s dire events coordinated by the same war mongering players (there is another chapter on JFK vs CIA Director Allen Dulles). Bob Dylan expressed his own view in his song Murder Most Foul. As a result of public scepticism about the Warren Commission, the CIA coined the highly effective weaponised term, ‘conspiracy theory’, that has been shamelessly deployed very effectively ever since.

Ed remarks that US history since the 50s ‘confirms the continuity of government policy for war, economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class, and the massacre of the innocent around the world.’ President Trump came in on a ticket of ending forever wars, but - apart from his misguided bullying rhetoric against Russia - he has been hemmed in by the ‘deep state’ CIA/NSA and the Israel lobby, as respected commentators like John Mearsheimer have noted. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this vast interlocking propaganda apparatus ‘the military industrial – congressional – intelligence – media – academia – think-tank complex – MICIMATT.’ And in the light of recent releases by the Director of National Security, Tulsi Gabbard, Ed writes – as is now evident – that the CIA and FBI knew that the claims of a Trump-Russia conspiracy were completely fraudulent - but in the meantime, continuing propaganda has fuelled further hatred for Russia and especially for Vladimir Putin. (See also my review of Glenn Diesen in the last issue)

Ed quotes CS Lewis to the effect that ‘for the wise, the cardinal problem had been to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.’ (p. 104) He goes on to affirm that human beings are emphatically not machines but spiritual and moral beings, and this demands that we consider our first principles and the ends we are seeking, entailing the subordination of science and technology to higher values: ‘all technical decisions are political, and all political decisions are moral.’ This is a very important reminder of the connection between political and moral decisions, and therefore of underlying values informing the political process. The republican ideals of the US Constitution have been undermined by US imperialist belief in exceptionalism, while claiming that they are still moral exemplars at the same time as demonstrating that might is right.

There are many other themes that could be mentioned, but I will confine myself to two further chapters, the first on the assassination and resurrection of Martin Luther King. It is deeply ironic that the same state that assassinated King now commemorates him with a national holiday. Ed deconstructs the contradictions in the official account, behind which was a highly sophisticated intelligence operation. In this and other assassinations of the 1960s, the evidence-based truth needs to come out for the public to understand the implications reaching with its tentacles into our own time with its ethos of power, wealth, and domination by the very few at the expense of the many – and with a systematic agenda to impose global dictatorship. (p. 250)

A powerful essay is entitled ‘A message to Donald Rumsfeld’s ghost about my known knowns’ – a reference to his distinction between known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns from 2002. Rumsfeld was one of the orchestrators of the lies delivered by Colin Powell to the UN Security Council to justify the war on Iraq, in which millions died and the country was destroyed. Ed’s list of known knowns is an itemised and devastating indictment that will shock the uninformed reader, but his assertions are well documented and provide a very different take on the domestic and foreign policy history of the US over the last 60 years. Why is all this important? Because, in my view and after considerable independent research, the general public is unaware of the ramifications and implications of issues so lucidly discussed in these pages. Ed enables us to understand these larger patterns and therefore the power drivers of current developments. Without such a broad and deep understanding, one remains in the dark. Hence, the importance of whistleblowers and parrhesia – writers with the courage to articulate a different and more comprehensive explanatory narrative.