We Have It All ~ Video

Part 15
Freeland's Kremlin-Oligarch Theory goes Global with Jewish Plutarchetype
In her 2012 book Plutocrats, Freeland expanded upon her earlier book's focus on the supposed preponderance of Jewish oligarchs controlling the Kremlin, to examine "the rise of a new super-elite" of the "global super rich" who control much of the world's economy. In the first chapter, when introducing her readers to a newly devised definition of the term "plutonomy," she describes the "striking" "emergence of this new virtual nation of mammon."[ii] (Emphasis added.)
Freeland's phrase, the "new virtual nation of mammon," is itself "striking," at least for anyone who may be interested in the use of language to conjure people's imagination. "Mammon"[iii] is a longstanding antiSemitic epithet that, for hundreds of years, has been wielded to great effect as a linguistic weapon against Jews. It was, for instance, employed throughout the Middle Ages during Christianity's holy wars against Jews. It was in fact part of the repertoire of linguistic devices used to rouse people into frenzied murderous pogroms.
Although the word "mammon" simply meant "riches" in Mishnaic Hebrew, its use in the New Testament led to the creation of a whole Christian mythology around the fake news that Mammon was a false Jewish God of money. ("Ye can not serve God and Mammon," Matthew 6:24) "Mammon simply means money or wealth in the Hebrew of the time," explained Rabbi Julian Sinclair, "but most English versions of the Gospels leave the Hebrew word untranslated, which lends to the love of money a Jewish sound."[iv]
For centuries, many European Christians used the heavily-loaded word "Mammon" in their crusade to demonise all Jews by associating them with a specific archetype, namely, the diabolical worshippers of money. Historian Paul L. Rose has researched the "long ancestry" of abuse around misuse this term. He explains that the term "mammon" was instrumental in spreading the idea among Christians that "Jews were the demonic servants of a false devil-god of money opposed to God and the truly human."[v]
Freeland's phrase the "nation of mammon" loads the key word even further by implying that the worship of money is tied to a specific "nation" of people. "Nation" ‑ from the Latin natio meaning "people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock" ‑ now generally refers to a large grouping of people which shares a specific language, culture or ethnicity. Which "nation" of people are we supposed to associate with the Hebrew word "mammon"?
Many articles and books have since repeated Freeland's catchy phrase for plutocracy, the "new virtual nation of mammon."[vi]
Use of the word "mammon" as a veiled swear word against Jews had never faded from memory. It has been in continual usage for centuries, and has a definite popularity among certain online communities. It can, for example, be found on more than 500,000 webpages housed within the world's 67 largest internet "hate sites."[vii]
It is possible that Freeland has no idea that the word Mammon has been used by antiSemites for centuries. But perhaps, as a professional wordsmith, she have known better than to use it. Considering the Jewish ethnicity of many of the plutocrats whom she chooses to highlight, it may not be just a mere coincidence that she selected this particular turn of phrase.
Freeland's book Plutocrats postulates what she calls an explanatory "model" using "archetypes" to explain how certain specific people manage to become plutocrats. Her idea has to do with how people with an "outsider's" perspective who become "insiders" are better able to exploit "revolutions," such as those in globalisation and technology. To illustrate her novel idea, Freeland begins by hand picking a few oligarchs from the US, Russia and Europe. These are men who she says fit her specific "archetype" for plutocrats.
The first three on her carefully selected list are all Americans who attended Harvard. This she explains is because "the archetype best equipped" to explain why some succeed in becoming plutocrats is: "Harvard kids who went to provincial public schools.” The three "literal examples" of her explanatory "model" are: Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Schwarzman and Lloyd Blankfein. All of these men, perhaps only coincidentally, are well-known Jewish businessmen. (Freeland did not mention that Zuckerman ranked 35th, with $17.5 billion, and that Schwarzman was 184th, with $5.5 billion, on Forbes' list of 1,153 of billionaires for that year, 2012.[viii] Blankfein did not even make it onto the 2012 billionaires' list, so it's not clear why Freeland draws him to the readers' attention, except that he fits her anecdotal "archetype."
Since Freeland chose to use billionaire Harvard students to argue her premise, she could have chosen from many other examples of Harvardian billionaires. It turns out that "Harvard has graduated some 52 billionaires, with a collective fortune of $205 billion."[ix] Freeland for example could have drawn her readers' attention to such Harvard billionaires as Bill Gates. But, although Gates was the world's second richest man in 2012 (with $61 billion),[x] he is not Jewish. Gates' wealth however was two and half times more than Freeland's two Harvardians combined (Zuckerman and Schwarzman), and Zuckerman never even graduated from Harvard.
It may be worth noting here that of the world's five richest men that year, four of them were raised in Christian families: Carlos Slim Helu (Catholic),[xi] Bill Gates (Catholic),[xii] Warren Buffet (Presbyterian)[xiii] and Amancio Ortega (Christian,[xiv] likely Catholic[xv]). Their combined wealth in 2012 was $211.5 billion, far more than wealth accumulated by the Jewish billionaires highlighted by Freeland. The fact that the world's top five oligarchs included a disproportionate number of Catholics may have been of interest to Freeland, as she herself has Catholic family influences. Her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was deeply committed to the Ukrainian Catholic faith and was for a time, as we've seen, the editor of Canada's top Ukrainian Catholic newspaper, The Ukrainian News. And, as we've also seen, Freeland herself worked for that Ukrainian Catholic newspaper in the late 1980s.
But since Freeland seemed so keenly interested in drawing readers' attention specifically to Jewish billionaires, it might be worth noting that the one nonChristian billionaire in Forbes' top-five list for 2012 was Jewish, namely, Bernard Arnault. He is the CEO of LVMH a French company making luxury products enjoyed by the "super-rich." Although his company's major subsidiary, LV, was exposed in 2004 for having collaborated closely with the Nazi regime in Vichy France throughout WWII,[xvi] LVMH has not relinquished its ownership of LV.
A related story, that Freeland also did not mention, is that the fifth richest man in 2012, Ortega, owns a famously antiSemitic fashion company. In 2012, his firm was sued for $40 million by its former attorney for discriminatory policies against Jews, Gays and Blacks. Ortega's company has also been publicly denounced for profiting from the production of stylish handbags bearing swastika motifs, concentration-camp garb bearing the Star of David, as well as jewellery and T-shirts with Black faces saying "white is the new black."[xvii]
But these interesting truths about what Freeland did not say in her 2012 book Plutocrats have distracted us from our narrative about what she did say in elucidating her so-called "model" of the "super rich." To further exemplify her particular image of the global plutocrat, Freeland moved immediately from her listing of three relatively insignificant US plutocrats (all of whom were Jewish), to provide some Russian examples. Here she harks back to her earlier writings on the Kremlin's "Faustian deal" with Jewish bankers by stating that:
"Most of the Russian oligarchs who were clever and driven enough to get degrees from elite Moscow universities before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but were mostly Jewish and therefore not fully part of the Soviet elite, have a similar insider/outsider starting point."[xviii]
Then, for her final biographical anecdote to paint her initial portrait of what a global plutarch looks like, Freeland presents us with the case of Hungarian-American George Soros, a very famous businessman and financier, who she calls "another representative of the genre."[xix] It perhaps goes without saying that Soros too is Jewish. For decades, Soros has been a key player in pushing Ukrainian politics in directions generally favoured by Freeland and her three key communities (Ukrainian ultra nationalists, the Canadian government and the corporate media). Through his Open Society Foundation (OSF), which ‑ like Freeland ‑ is now banned from Russia, Soros took over much of the financing for the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Wurlitzer after the Agency began to privatise this propaganda arm of the US government.
Although Freeland was overly fixated on using Jewish examples to illustrate her plutarchic archetype, this is not to say that she is antiSemitic. In the acknowledgements for her 2012 book, Freeland notes that "Many plutocrats have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends (though that does not mean we always agree)." She then provides a list of 18 plutocrats, the first of which is George Soros, who has ‑ for decades ‑ been a great friend and very generous financial supporter of ultranationalist Ukrainian causes.[xx] Freeland's list also included several other Jewish plutocrats, including two from the original "Group of Seven" Russian oligarchs: Mikhail Fridman and Vladimir Gusinsky,[xxi] although she does not say which, if any, of these plutocrats are her "friends."
Immediately after provided the reader with an overwhelmingly Jewish preponderance of global oligarchs, to illustrate what we might call her "plutarchetype," Freeland then guides us even further down the rabbit hole. And, as Alice in Wonderland once said, things become "curiouser and curiouser." She (Freeland, not Alice) moves straight into a most surreal speculation about the nature of "plutonomy" that had been postulated by three Citibank investment advisors. These glorified stock brokers ‑ who Freeland calls "an elite team of strategists at Citicorp"[xxii] ‑ had come up with some seriously hare-brained, pseudoscientific speculations that how wealth acquisition and immigration patterns are influenced by genetically-determined dopamine levels in the brain. This, Freeland notes, they believe is "hard-coded in our DNA."[xxiii] What? The reason certain people become plutocrats may be a genetic thing?
But besides supposedly shedding light on why individual plutocrats get rich, the historical success of economic superpowers such as Britain, the US and Canada, are ‑ according to this wild speculation ‑ also explained by genetically-caused brain chemistry.[xxiv] Freeland favourably presents this outrageous notion and makes no effort whatsoever to expose it for what it is, ridiculously far-out conjecture on the supposed biological determinants behind the creation of "super rich" individuals and nations. The idea that certain specific groups of individuals are predestined by their genetic make-up to acquire vast amounts of wealth is a profoundly preposterous quack theory.
Freeland did not explain that the purpose of the Citigroup report, by her "elite team of strategists," was to get investors to buy stocks in certain specific luxury-oriented companies. One stock in particular that her experts were flogging in their dopamine report is worth mentioning, namely LVMH. This is the French company that had collaborated with the Nazis throughout WWII. Predictably, in the fine print appended to their bizarre report, the Citigroup's "elite" theorists were forced to divulge that the bank employing them owns (1) LVMH stocks, (2) is paid by LVMH for services rendered and (3) that they are personally compensated for boosting LVMH profitability.[xxv]
In other words, the whole exercise was an elaborate corporate confidence scheme in which this "elite team of strategists" were acting as witting "shills" for LVMR. Their work as accomplices in this corporate scam is to lead the investors (i.e., the "marks") to believe that they are receiving sage advice from an objective, unbiased source. As "shills" their personal goal included lining their own pockets by enticing the readers of their report to invest in specific companies that then kick back some of the rewards to them. This of course is all perfectly legal because the deceit is ostensibly disclosed, albeit in tiny print that most marks don't bother to read.

 

Part 16
Institutionalised Confidence Scams:
An Open Conspiracy of Oligarchs, Politicians and Journalists
Citigroup's entry into this discussion makes a good segue into some generalised concluding remarks about how banks, the mass media, industries, governments and military forces have worked together in vast institutionalised confidence programs to assist in the creation and sustenance of plutocracies. This discussion is also useful in moving us towards a better understanding of how ordinary people who are compartmentalised within these large institutions ‑ while staying calm and carrying on in their mundane careers ‑ can be so entranced by a cause, movement, organisation or ideology that they can become complicit in crimes, up to and including genocide. Finally, we have to understand that collaboration with the Nazi cause was not just a social psychosis that occurred in Europe, it also ravaged North America as well, and Citigroup was right in the thick of it.
The ability to pull off any confidence scam ‑ whether on an individual or social level ‑ hinges on one thing, gaining the mark's confidence. Once their trust is acquired, the next task is to get the target to hand over whatever assets are being sought. Often, especially with individual grifters, the desired asset is simply the victim's money. But with institutionalised confidence programs, where a whole social group, class or nation is being targeted, the goal is much more complex. Sometimes mass, institutionalised confidence schemes are aimed at getting people's votes. Other such con games are designed to rally the marks into supporting an organisation or movement ‑ whether religious, political, nationalistic or military. Such institutionalised confidence scams aim high. They may essentially want people to hand over not just pocket change, but a life-long commitment, or even a willingness to die or kill for the confidence institution's righteous cause.
It is ironic that in her 2012 book, Plutocrats, Freeland encouraged readers to join her in placing confidence in what she promoted as that "elite team of strategists at Citicorp." That year marked exactly two centuries since this American bank's creation in 1812. That is when it began profiting from the war of 1812 in which the Americans fought with Britain over their colonies in Canada. By 1912, because it was by then America's largest bank, political pressure had forced the City Bank of New York (as it was then called) to sell off all of its domestic holdings. So, by 1929, after going global, the City Bank had branches in twenty Latin American, European and Asian countries.[ii] Like Freeland, with her Ukrainian grandfather, Citigroup's heritage is now infamous for having aided and abetted Nazism. In Citigroup's case its deep complicity with Nazism came through dealings with such corporations as General Aniline & Film, International Telephone & Telegraph, the Swedish Enskilda Bank and I.G. Farben.[iii]
Let's just look at Citibank's links to I.G. Farben and how this relates to the globalisation of institutionalised confidence schemes. On April 2, 1929, the National City Bank of New York ‑ through its investment banking affiliate, the National City Company ‑ established the American I.G. Chemical Corp.[iv] This was done on behalf of Germany's largest war profiteer, I.G. Farben. It was also Europe's largest company and the world's largest chemical maker. I.G. Farben had manufactured chemicals for the production of Germany's gunpowder and TNT throughout WWI.
Two days after the creation of American I.G., on April 26, 1929, "an advertisement appeared in the financial sections of the leading American newspapers" to promote the sale of American I.G. bonds worth $30 million. (That is the equivalent of $426 million in 2017 dollars.[v]) "Before the morning of the offering was over," says Joseph Borkin, "the entire issue was sold."[vi] Borkin, a lawyer with the US Department of Justice, was responsible for prosecuting thirteen I.G. Farben officials in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials of 1947. The crimes for which they were found guilty included using slave labour from the Auschwitz death camp and producing the odourless Zyclon gas which Nazi extermination camps used in the mass murder of Jews.
Hermann Schmitz, the president of American I.G., received a mere six-year sentence for his crimes. It was a steep fall from the early 1930s when Schmitz travelled around the world as a special advisor to Heinrich Brüning, the Chancellor of Germany (1930-1932), for meetings with various heads of state. Schmitz was even present for a meeting at the White House with US President Herbert Hoover.[vii]
Why were US capitalists so confident in I.G. Farben that they would hand over almost half a billion dollars in one morning? "To inspire investor confidence," explained Borkin, "the board of directors of American I.G. included four impressive figures from American industry and finance": a member of the Warburg banking family, and top officials from Standard Oil, Ford and National City Bank.[viii] But American oligarchs, many of whom ardently supported fascist goals, methods and ideologies, weren't just investing in a company, they were investing in a political dream.
Many American oligarchs wanted to support Germany in a global cause that they had confidence in. They saw the rise of Nazism under Hitler as a good thing, and they had confidence that he would succeed. The Nazi Party had joined a coalition of rightwing groups in October 1928; Goebbels had taken over the Nazi's propaganda machine in November; Hitler was becoming a household name in Germany thanks to widespread mainstream newspaper coverage; His second volume of Mein Kampf had been published in December; and Himmler had begun leading and strengthening the SS in January. Meanwhile in America, President Hoover, an ultrarightwing Republican businessman had just been inaugurated on March 4, 1929.
All this built the oligarch's confidence in Germany and its growing Nazi movement. As a result, the Nazi party was making breakthroughs in soliciting support from bankers and wealthy businessmen in Germany, America and elsewhere. The Nazi's fed the dreams of their oligarchic backers with confident promises that upon taking power they would smash European communism. Hoover, like other US oligarchs, had lost lucrative corporate assets in Russia because of the 1917 revolution. He, and others in his class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, had for decades been anxious to see Soviet communism smashed. They had, for example, supported the west's military intervention against the Soviets when troops from a dozen foreign countries (including the UK, US, Canada, France, Greece, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Japan) had sent more than 100,000 soldiers to intervene in the Russian civil war (1917-1925). The rise of Hitler's Nazi Party inspired the confidence of oligarchs around the world that a final solution to their communist problem might soon be realised.
In the early 1930s, the National City Bank of New York (today's Citigroup) was exposed as a puppet master behind US military interventions in the Caribbean. The American patriot who outed this bank was one of the country's most remarkable whistleblowers, US Major General Smedley Butler. In 1934, after an illustrious, 33-year career with the US Marines, in which he had won two Congressional Medals of Honour, Butler testified before a US House Committee on "Nazi Propaganda Activities." In his testimony Butler named several lawyers, bankers and businessmen (linked to oligarchs J.P.Morgan and du Pont) who had approached him in 1933 with the idea of recruiting his support for a fascist coup against Hoover's successor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[ix] By 1935, Butler ‑ who was still America's most popular military leader ‑ had become an outspoken opponent of American imperialism and foreign military interventionism. He spoke with great confidence and authority about the collaboration between large corporations and the US military when saying:
"I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested....
"I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents...."[x] (Emphasis added.)

 

Sources and Notes
Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, 2012.
http://www.rulit.me/books/plutocrats-read-262812-3.html
[ii] Robert Wright and Richard Sylla, Genealogy of American Finance, 2015, p.101.
https://books.google.fi/books?isbn=0231539215
[iii] This book has more 17 references to how the National City Bank of New York helped the Nazis rally money for their cause.
Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949, 1983.
https://archive.org/details/TRADINGWITHTHEENEMY_201611
[iv] Amendments to the Trading with the Enemy Act: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 1953, p.370.
http://books.google.fi/books?id=I6WnGGCmH0IC
[v] US Inflation Calculator
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
[vi] Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben, 1978, p.184.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=8ki7AAAAIAAJ
[vii] Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben, 1978, p.166.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=8ki7AAAAIAAJ
[viii] Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben, 1978, p.184.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=8ki7AAAAIAAJ

[ix] Press for Conversion! Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism (Richard Sanders, ed.), March 2004.
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/53-index.html​

For the testimony and evidence collected by Congress into the fascist coup plot exposed by Maj-Gen.S.D.Butler, see:
Investigation of Nazi propaganda activities and investigation of certain other propaganda activities, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, November 24, 1934.
http://www.flagrancy.net/salvage/HUAC1.pdf
http://www.flagrancy.net/salvage/HUAC2.pdf
http://www.flagrancy.net/salvage/HUAC3.pdf

McCormack–Dickstein Committee​

[x] Major General Smedley D. Butler, "America's Armed Forces: 'In Time of Peace,'" Common Sense, Vol.4, No.11, November, 1935, pp. 8-12.
http://www.flagrancy.net/salvage/smedley.html

The Chomiak-Freeland Connection (ncf.ca)
https://coat.ncf.ca/research/Chomiak-Freeland/C-F_16.htm

 

Part 17
Escaping the War Racket starts with Seeing the Elephant
In his post-retirement speeches and writings, Smedley Butler made some blunt and shocking confessions. He had faced with great honesty the ugly truth about his own deep complicity in many unjust American wars. To atone for this personal guilt, Butler tried to make amends by revealing to the public what he knew about state crimes that he had helped commit. "I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers," said Butler. "In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." But, despite his crimes, Butler is now seen as great hero by many antiwar activists who respect the integrity with which he reconciled his personal complicity in war by bluntly speaking truth to power.
Butler's book, War is a Racket, is a classic exposé of militarism. It began with these definitions:
"War is a racket. It always has been.

"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. ...
"A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."[ii]​

Butler's use of "racketeering" jargon to describe war is jarring, and his use of terminology from the debased world of organised crime to describe the respectable, glamorous world of politicians, bankers and military elites, was genius. Butler said
"There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle men' to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations, and a 'Big Boss' Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism."[iii]
One the matter of "'finger men' to point out enemies," it is interesting to note who Butler says they targeted. In another article, Butler talked about "military intelligence" saying "[t]he domestic brand of M.I. is mainly unadulterated Red hunting." After naming well-known ultra-right individuals, organisations and a newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, Butler said
"intelligence men further justify their jobs by spy work on radical gatherings, by attending public forums in an attempt to detect political or economic heresy, by keeping tabs on various suspects, and by smelling out what they consider to be subversive activities everywhere.... Radical meetings are attended, notes taken, speakers listed, and as many of the audience identified as possible."[iv]

As to exactly which "radical" heretics were pointed out by these "finger men," Butler then cited a 1933 newspaper article revealing that the US "Secret Service" had used young officers in training to infiltrate campus and city groups to gather "information regarding the activity of communists."[v]​

The war-profiteering racket described by Butler is so vast and so institutionalised that it cannot possibly be kept a secret. While the minute details of closed-door meetings between conspirators are hidden from public view, war requires huge programs of collaboration between vast institutions that can only be hidden in plain sight. To do this requires concealing the truth behind deceitful veils of words, cleverly wrapping them in blind-eye ideologies, and hiding them within the niceties of fine-sounding propaganda. The plutocracy-building joint efforts of corporations and the military, as Butler well knew, also involves the active participation of other large social institutions, such as the churches, the government and the mass media.

"In the [First] World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
"So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side ... it is His will that the Germans be killed."[vi]
The same was true of course in WWII. With regards to the Ukrainian churches, both Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox hierarchy avidly supported recruitment for the Waffen SS Galicia Division. They even lobbied for and received special rights from the Nazis to have their chaplains sent out with the troops. (Note the Waffen SS Galician symbol, a lion with three crowns, in photo with Bishop at left.)

To critique the role of government and media propaganda in promoting war, Butler referenced deceptive WWI catchphrases used to lure men to enlist :
"Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the 'war to end all wars.' This was the 'war to make the world safe for democracy.' No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a 'glorious adventure.'"

The "war to end all wars" line, which spread like wildfire through the print media, was the brainchild of H.G. Wells. It evolved from his August 1914 propaganda articles in British newspapers.[vii] The catchy line about making "the world safe for democracy" came from Woodrow Wilson's April 2, 1917, speech to Congress in which he sought a Declaration of War against Germany. Butler, as usual, drew the attention back to one of his favourite topics, the duplicity of war profiteers.
The nightmare of war is indeed a dream come true for those who profit from the sale of weapons, the theft of land, the plunder of resources, and the murderous eradication of enemies. Camouflaging these crimes as if they are noble achievements requires the deftness of a social magician who can hide an elephant in a crowded room, or, as the Russians would have it, an elephant in the museum.[viii] To make such a large creature disappear is quite a stunt. While a stage magician would rarely attempt such a daring performance, it is done by propagandists on a daily basis. In fact, those who become the masters of vast and mighty news Wurlitzers barely give it a second thought. What's worse, the trick is designed to be replicated by members of the audience who, after leaving the theatre, repeat the stunt for their unsuspecting friends and family.
Propagandists, whether writing newspaper articles, history textbooks, political speeches, religious sermons, business reports or any number of other types of sheer fiction, can conveniently leave out disturbing, elephant-sized aspects of the truth. With the stroke of a pen (or a magical wand), these same propagandists also have the power to make nonexistent elephants seem to appear out of thin air. In this case, although there is no huge beast in the room, people believe they can see one. This propaganda trick is especially useful in the creation of national enemies and the triggering of wars using that particular genre of provocative fake news events which I have referred to elsewhere as "war pretext incidents."[ix]​

Enamoured by the corporate media's fixation on fake news since the 2016 US presidential election, some mainstream propaganda junkies seem to have forgotten the mighty Wurlitzer's long history of cranking out "fake news." Has some huge black hole absorbed the media's guilt in spreading phoney weapons-of-mass-destruction stories that launched the Iraq War in 2003?[x] That war pretext rivalled the fake news of exactly seven decades earlier when the Nazis set fire to Germany's parliament, the Reichstag, blamed it on communists, usurped emergency powers, ended civil liberties (like the free press), and arrested thousands of leftists.[xi] And who can forget the US government's fabrication of the so-called "Gulf of Tonkin incident" in 1964? This fake news, that North Vietnamese forces had attacked the USS Maddox, was the pretext President Johnson used to spark a massive escalation in that US war against communism which led to the murder of millions of innocent people.[xii] Does anyone even "Remember the [USS] Maine!" and the key role played by W.R.Hearst's newspapers in fabricating the fake news that triggered that "fine little war" in 1899 whereby the US grabbed the Spanish colonies of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico?[xiii] Despite the fact that throughout its history the mass media has been using fake news to garner public support for imperialist wars, these facts seem to have all but disappeared into a bottomless pit of historical amnesia.

Those who literally practice the stage craft of hocus pocus are loath to reveal the conjuring secrets of their profitable profession. They must guard sleight-of-hand tricks in order to retain the illusory power of their performance and to prevent competitors from repeating the illusion in their own shows. This however is where conjurers and propagandists part company. The propagandist's whole purpose is to spread their delusion as far and wide as possible. The trick for them is to package the deception into symbolic memes, narratives and myths that are simple enough for others to repeat. That way, everyone who is subjected to the trick not only becomes a dupe of the delusion, they also become accessories in its dissemination. Once planted in the mainstream media, a good propaganda story can take on a life of its own: spreading, growing, mutating and evolving to deal with counter-propaganda.
But social actors ‑ even the propagandists themselves ‑ can easily be victimised by social illusions. Because many of them actually believe that certain falsehoods are true, they become unwitting accomplices in the spread of misinformation. These unsuspecting marks may actually become so good at bringing others into the belief that they are richly rewarded by the institutions which profit from the scam.
Over the millennia, these institutions ‑ populated largely by true believers ‑ have evolved like living species. This has required the development of cultural mechanisms for self-perpetuation. To ensure the multi-generational survival of institutions, individuals within them devise processes to help organisations to adapt to social changes. One such institutional survival mechanism ensures that the system's best propagandists are promoted and encouraged in their work. These individuals rise to the top in such professions as journalism, politics, law and business.
Propaganda elites also have the almost magical ability to walk through walls. They can move between these powerful social institutions in a flash, jumping effortlessly from one career to another. These transitions are eased by the fact that the spheres of discourse within the upper echelons of each siloed profession, share some of the same basic propaganda themes. For much of the last 100 years, western propagandists in all professions have shared a dominant underlying motif, anticommunism. For much of that century, this mass paranoia was closely linked to another common social phobia, antiSemitism.​

Certain communities have a long historical tradition associated with such social phobias. In his article "Organized Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Ukraine," Swedish-American historian Per Anders Rudling explained that
"From the perspective of the anti-Semites, Jewish domination of Ukraine began in the Middle Ages and [has] lasted until today. The Jews have ruled through 'Jewish' tsars, Judeo-Communists, Judeo-Nazis and the current, 'a-national' Jewish oligarchs and criminals, bent on destroying Ukraine and the Slavic world. The anti-Semites weave together an overall picture where Ukrainian history during the past one hundred years turns into something of a Dolchstoss legend[xiv]: throughout the 20th century, Ukrainians have been stabbed in the back repeatedly by Jews and/or Zionists...."
Rudling, who earned his PhD at the University of Alberta, goes on to say that in his study of this "under-researched" phenomenon among some Ukrainians "[o]ne of the central themes in the anti-Semitic literature I have analyzed is the equating of communists, oligarchs, mass murderers and sexual predators with Jews."[xv]

Having been swept up in their culture's all-encompassing worldview ‑ whether antiSemitism, anticommunism, or both ‑ propagandists are blinded to the fact that they have fallen headlong into a swirling cultural Wurlitzer. Many of the most effective propagandists have no idea that, beguiled by their cultural programming, they are themselves being spun by the mighty Wurlitzer. Not knowing that they have been captivated by their communities' false ideologies, they don't realise that the narratives they weave are drawing others in the same webs of deceit in which they themselves are entrapped. What's worse, they believe their myths are liberating truths freeing others from the tyranny of lies spread by devious enemies. Wurlitzer, they say. What Wurlitzer?
​

 

\

 

Sources and Notes
1933 Armistice Day speech, Philadelphia, cited in R.E.McMaster, Wealth for All: Religion, Politics and War, 1982, pp.210-211.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=4AL-v3hNF8EC
This speech is excerpted here: Smedley Butler on Interventionism
https://fas.org/man/smedley.htm
[ii] Major General Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket, 1935.
https://archive.org/stream/WarIsARacket/WarIsARacket_djvu.txt
[iii] Major General Smedley D. Butler 1933 Armistice Day speech, Philadelphia, cited in R.E.McMaster, Wealth for All: Religion, Politics and War, 1982, pp.210-211.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=4AL-v3hNF8EC
This speech is excerpted here: Smedley Butler on Interventionism
https://fas.org/man/smedley.htm
[iv] Major General Smedley D. Butler, "America's Armed Forces: 'In Time of Peace,'" Common Sense, Vol.4, No.11, November, 1935, pp. 8-12.
http://www.flagrancy.net/salvage/smedley.html
[v] Major General Smedley D. Butler, "America's Armed Forces: 'In Time of Peace,'" Common Sense, Vol.4, No.11, November, 1935, pp. 8-12.
http://www.flagrancy.net/salvage/smedley.html
[vi] Major general Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket, 1935.
[vii] His newspaper articles were reprinted in book form in October 1914.

H.G. Wells, The War That Will End War, 1914.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:The_War_That_Will_End_War_-_Wells.djvu​

[viii] This expression, which exemplifies the problem of blind spots in history, evolved from a fable called "The Inquisitive Man" (1814) by Russian fabulist, Ivan Krylov. A character in one of his short stories tells a friend about all of the exhibits he has just seen at a museum. When his friend asks what he thought of the huge elephant there, the man is shocked because he did not see the gallery's biggest and most obvious display.

Ivan Krylov, "The Inquisitive Man," Krilof and his fables, 1883, pp.43-44.
https://archive.org/stream/krilofhisfables00kryluoft#page/42​

As an aside to this aside, it is worth pointing out a Marxist idiom which many readers may not see reflected in this Russian fable. "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas," Marx said. "How he got into my pajamas, I'll never know." This was one of Groucho Marx's many "irrelephant" lines in that classic of 1933 film ("Duck Soup") which poked fun at American oligarchs,​

Groucho Marx - Capt Spalding shot an elephant

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfN_gcjGoJo
​

[ix] Richard Sanders, "Unravelling the Tangled Web of Pretext Stratagems," Press for Conversion!, Going to War: The American use of War Pretext Incidents (1846-2003), January 2003, pp.1-28.
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/issue50/issue50.htm​

[x] Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline, March 19, 2007.
http://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/iraq-and-the-media/​

[xi] William L. Shirer, Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, 1959, pp.192-196.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=sY8svb-MNUwC​

[xii] "30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War," July 27, 1994.
http://fair.org/media-beat-column/30-year-anniversary-tonkin-gulf-lie-launched-vietnam-war/

[xiii] Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America, Volume 1 (Martin J.Manning and Clarence R.Wyatt, eds.), 2011, pp.386-387.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=c4D1VD4x9M4C&pg=PA386​

[xiv] The Dolchstoss (literally "Daggerstab") legend is a mythology, popular among right-wing Germans, that WWI was lost because they were "stabbed in the back" by civilians on the home front. These treasonous Germans were said to be communists, socialists and antimonarchists, but most especially Jews.
For a Ukrainian use of the "Back Stabbing" metaphor, see this detailed analysis of Ukrainian documents regarding antiSemitism in the preWWII Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and particularly the OUN(B) faction, led by Stepan Bandera, which predominated after the 1940 split see:

Marco Carynnyk, "‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’: A Reply to Alexander J. Motyl’s ‘The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement and the Jews: Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism, Fascism, Rationality, Primordialism, and History."​

[xv] Per Anders Rudling, "Organized Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Ukraine: Structure, Influence and Ideology," Canadian Slavonic Papers, March-June 2006,. p.83.
http://www.oldhost.ucsj.org/stories/FinalMAUPRudlingpp81-118.pdf


The Chomiak-Freeland Connection (ncf.ca)
https://coat.ncf.ca/research/Chomiak-Freeland/C-F_17.htm

 

Part 18
Just Following Orders? Which Orders?
One popularised narrative about the Nuremberg Trials is that it they taught us that "just following orders" is no excuse for having collaborated with war criminals. But what does it mean to follow orders? On a simple level, orders are just oral or written commands issued by authorities. But orders can also refer to religious, economic or political structures which hold people firmly in place, and direct their beliefs and actions in certain predetermined directions. These are the social orders that command and control the way a people will act and interact within the boundaries established by their culture. These orders also separate people into social groups based on their class, race, ethnicity, nationality or other cultural constructs. Social orders also come with ideological frameworks that impose belief systems which govern people's understandings of social reality and their place within the established order.
Simple orders or commands may then be of far less importance than the ordered systems of social mores and the ideological structures that individuals absorb during a lifetime full of diverse forms of cultural programming.
Ideally, from the propagandists' point of view, authorities do not even need to issue outright commands. If people have been properly enculturated into the propagandists' worldview, they will not have to be told what to do. They will respond intuitively, as if by second nature. That way if a newspaper headline tells villagers that "The barbarians are at the gate!" they will immediately know what is required of them. Physical coercion is useful to state authorities, but only a last resort. Much preferred is a docile, thoroughly propagandised community who will carry out the expectations of their social order without actually having to receive any explicit orders.​

The Nazi propaganda Wurlitzer over which Chrystia Freeland's grandfather exercised leadership did not literally order Ukrainians to go out and murder people. Or did it? The flagship Nazi-Ukrainian newspaper under his management, Krakivs'ki visti, did actually join German authorities and the Ukrainian churches in their coercive 1943 recruitment campaign which persuaded tens of thousands of young Ukrainian men to sign up for Germany's infamous Waffen SS Galician division. The appeal by Chomiak's boss, Ukrainian Central Committee leader Volodymyr Kubijovych, which was printed in Krakivs'ki visti, wasn't just a casual suggestion. It literally said: "You must stand shoulder to shoulder with the invincible German army and destroy, once and for all, the Bolshevik beast." (Emphasis added.)
The issuance of this literal command aside, the real indictment of Chomiak is that day after day, year after year, page after page, his collaborationist newspapers dutifully churned out the Nazi's spin on the war. His papers turned out fake news about a monstrous Judaeo-Bolshevik "beast" based in the Kremlin that the Nazis and their Ukrainian allies so loved to hate. The Committee's newspapers were among the main devices used to provoke Ukrainian villagers' mortal fears with terrifying stories of a fiendishly authoritarian "monster" coming at them from Moscow.
The antiSemitic-anticommunist lenses ‑ through which many Ukrainians had already been trained to see the social world ‑ became even more polished, thanks to daily newspaper propaganda stories. These Nazified Ukrainian lenses magnified the seeming appearance of a Jewish-Communist "beast" looming just outside their village gate. German and Ukrainian propaganda also fixated villagers' gaze on the ethnic and political vermin which had supposedly infested their clean, peaceable village. Thus programmed, many Ukrainians were psychologically prepared with the rationalisations that allowed them to turn a blind eye towards, if not aid and abet, the international crimes later condemned at Nuremberg.
There should be no doubt that Chomiak was indeed a Nazi collaborator. Some however may still try to deny this, as Freeland's office did when asked outright by the Globe and Mail on March 6.[ii] But since that tactic is ludicrous, Freeland's supporters in the media, government and ultranationalist Ukrainian community are rallying around her with rationalisations. Some will shrug and say that it was all so very long ago that it doesn't really matter anymore. Others will follow the paper trail of narratives that Freeland herself has fabricated over many years, in preparation perhaps for the day when her grandfather's complicity in Nazi crimes would be made public. That paper trail is her carefully-crafted, oft-repeated narrative about his war experiences. It focuses on the underlying idea that her grandfather was a poor victim of war forced to flee from the enemy, i.e., the Soviets, and find shelter in Germany.
This line of attack, which excuses Nazi collaboration as mere opposition to the Soviets, fits well with the now-prevailing official narrative that Russia, and its authoritarian leader Putin, is the world's biggest threat. This means that anyone who dares perpetrate the truth about Freeland's maternal grandfather should be labelled as an enemy of Canada. This offensive defence strategy is designed to put a chill on democratic debate. Freeland, her community of ultranationalist Ukrainians, and their friends in the politico-economic-media Wurlitzer, are hoping that loyal Canadians will back down from exposing or even considering the truth, because they fear being seen as unpatriotic, or worse, as agents of Canada's officially-appointed enemy, Russia.
Others will argue that Chomiak was forced by the Nazis to work for five years as their most prized Ukrainian-language propagandist. He was just following orders after all, working against his will in an aryanised office, living against his will in two nicely-furnished aryanised apartments, and drawing a respectable salary for his role as the most important Ukrainian propagandist spinning the Nazi's mighty Wurlitzer. Meanwhile, all around this charmed little community of Ukrainians living under the protective military bubble of Nazism, tens of millions of Jews, Poles and Soviets were being brutally and systematically wiped off the face of the earth.
Freeland, like her Ukrainian grandfather, built much of her influential career as an advocacy journalist in the mainstream media, by spinning what many see as antiRussian stories. Her contributions to the mighty corporate Wurlitzer have included churning out scores of highly-prized big business news pieces for newspapers, providing gatekeeping services as an editor for various huge media corporations, writing books fixating public attention on the apparent preponderance of Russian and American oligarchs who somehow mostly happen to be Jewish, and exercising her gifts as an orator echoing these themes on the lucrative lecture circuit. That these contributions have been one-sided, opinionated and propagandistic seems blatantly obvious to many observers. Others however will no doubt deny that her work even resembles propaganda. They will claim that Freeland has offered the world a fine example of objective journalism which merely reports the pure and simple truth.[iii]
Whether we see Freeland as a propagandist, or as an objective purveyor of reality, is largely contingent on our political perspective. As usual, it's all in "the eye of the beholder." Similarly, how we perceive the problem of Freeland's refusal to acknowledge the Nazi in the room, will depend on the lenses with which we have been provided through a lifetime of cultural programming.
But does this mean that there is no objective truth, and that everything is simply a matter of mere opinion? Are there not objective ways to determine the truth? Our legal system thinks there are. We have courts that regularly decide the "truth" on many matters. An example of this occurred at Nuremberg when judges there found various people guilty of international crimes.
Among those sentenced to death was Julius Streicher, the editor of a German newspaper called Der Stürmer. The judges' ruling against Streicher included these statements:
"For his 25 years of speaking, writing and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as 'Jew-Baiter Number One.' In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution. ... Streicher's incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity."[iv]
Streicher's antiSemitic propaganda was certainly more extreme than Chomiak's newspapers. However, this isn't saying much because Der Stürmer was the worst of the worst. Krakivs'ki visti and Kholmska zemlia were both still guilty of promulgating Nazi hate speech against Jews. As John Paul Himka, Freeland's uncle, has stated about the daily newspaper, Krakivs'ki vist, that listed his father-in-law Michael Chomiak as editor in chief:
"It is clear ... that the anti-Semitic propaganda of the paper contributed to create an atmosphere conducive to the mass murder of the Jews that was already underway. It should not be forgotten in what context Krakivs'ki visti was lamenting its victims and inflaming passions against Jews."[v]
Peter Kent (Conservative MP, Thornhill),* a former journalist himself, said in March 2017 that the collaboration of Freeland's grandfather with the Nazis has "probably been misrepresented." Perhaps before saying this he should have checked the facts. Then, Kent said that the story "has nothing to do with her ability to represent Canada."[vi] Ironically, however, the evidence in this case demonstrates that, for many years, it was Chrystia Freeland who "misrepresented" the truth about her grandfather's life. Does an ability to accept and to convey the truth have any bearing on one's ability to be a journalist or politician? Apparently not, at least according to some journalists, politicians, and journalists-cum-politicians.

Although an inability to acknowledge the truth and to reconcile with the past may not be a matter of any apparent concern to Mr. Kent and others rallying around Foreign Minister Freeland, these negative traits are worrying to many Canadians whose forebears were among the millions massacred by Nazis and their fascist allies. Others too, even those with no personal or ethnic connection to the victims of Nazism, may also believe that an ability to represent the truth and reconcile with a forebear's complicity in genocide, are actually useful abilities that Canadians should expect from politicians and journalists, who are trusted to "represent Canada."
In the ongoing debate over the significance or insignificance of truth and reconciliation, Canadians will have to decide which social order they will follow. If told that revelations about the Freeland-Chomiak connection are evidence that the Russians are at the gates of our "Peaceable Kingdom" and are trying to undermine "Canadian values" like democracy, will they march obediently in step with such "fake news" narratives?