Anybody interested in Project Paperclip should probably stay away from the Jacobson book

Thu Mar 6 11:33:14 CST 2014

I just watched the documentary Dirty Wars (2013), based on Jeremy Scahill's book, which details his investigation of the Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC), a paramilitary organization started after the Iran hostage crisis, in 1980, and engaged in very covert capture/kill strikes.

Interesting parallel to Paper Clip, in a way. In the first half of the doc, Scahill's digging up very hidden info about this clandestine paramilitary organization. But then JSOC is involved in the capture/kill of Osama Bin Laden, and suddenly JSOC's being lauded all over the press, and the shadowy figure in charge, McRaven(the name sounds a little Pynchonesque), is the toast of Washington, being personally awarded by Obama and Co. If this is all out in the open (the doc got an Oscar nomination), and accepted, more or less, by all, how does one fight it? 

Scahill reports that JSOC, which for long relied on a "Kill list," has abandoned even the pretenses of a list - striking with drones and land-operations in at least 75 countries around the world. 75! Reporting only to the President (and it's flourished under Obama), it shares no info with Congress, or even the CIA. Scahill describes it as sort of an unstoppable machine, creating potential (and that's enough for JSOC)anti-Americans in exponential relation to those it kills. The point is, whether this is out in the open or not, there is absolutely no way for anyone outside of the President to even attempt to put a stop to this.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>Sent: Mar 6, 2014 2:52 AM
>To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Anybody interested in Project Paperclip should probably stay away from the Jacobson book
>
>Yes but my question really was not about the moral failure but the 'Us" implied in  the word "our". How can 'we' be responsible when fundamental policy decisions are made with no pubic input. Where are the operable democratic mechanisms to oppose the insane militarism  you are talking about. Did voting for Obama help "change" direction? Or are both parties part and parcel of the embedded machinery of the MIC and the power of big oil, big biz etc? 
>
>Paperclip is old news and I don't care about it  either except as an historic indicator with many parallels, but the dilemma of nasty unaccountable policies is with us as you elaborate. The military spending grows  despite public opposition. Our direction as a country has the earmarks of paranoia, denial and obsession with violence.  Substantive alternatives are not  gaining enough political clout to make a difference.  It doesn't matter whether one sees the abiding and little changing policies as the conspiratorial collusions of concentrated power or  a mirror of public will, neither explanation points toward  an effective means of changing direction.  
>  If there is some obvious solution that I am being distracted from by mentioning a few of the numerous documented criminal government conspiracies , what is it?  Because I sure would like to hear more about it.  
> 
> 
>On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:38 PM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>> No, by "our own vast moral failure" I mean building nuclear weapons and delivery systems far beyond any rational need. During WWII we and the UK had already taken "terror bombing" of cities to a scale far beyond what we'd called horrible when enemies did it to Guernica, Chinese cities, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London. In the decades that followed, we spent several trillion dollars systematically equipping ourselves to do a thousand times worse.
>> 
>> That the equipment has not yet been used (and that it has been modestly scaled back since the 1980s) does not make it less of an abomination. The decisions that led to that were made by Americans, not by German emigres. Millions of Americans (including young Tom Pynchon, cranking out Boeing technical documentation and company magazine articles) took part in the process. Details of bombs and rockets were secret; that we were gearing up for mass murder -- only if forced to it, of course! -- was not a secret, not a conspiracy. 
>> 
>> One of the central concerns of GR (and the reason for its arc from a missile in 1944 to a missile in 1972) is to ask: "Given all the destruction and horror of the Zone, and 1945's opportunities for a fresh start... was Mutual Assured Destruction really the best we could do by 1972? Why did we fuck up all over again, only bigger and shinier?"
>> 
>> Wernher von Braun and his team brought the experience and technical _virtu_ to make one part of the process somewhat faster for the US. They brought their own guilt -- which as far as I'm concerned, is lost in the enormity of the larger enterprise. The process as a whole would have been very little different if Paperclip had never happened and they'd all been hanged. They weren't; neither were thousands of other Germans whose war efforts depended on -- and who spent years managing -- horrific slave labor operations.
>>  
>> Listen,  Joseph: against the enormity of what we (and the USSR, and the UK, and France, and China, and Israel, and India, and Pakistan, and...) have chosen to live with quite openly, I DON'T FUCKING CARE about Paperclip as a conspiracy, about Sekrit Nazis REVEALED!!! (for the 12th time since that Sekrit Gallup Poll in 1946). Or that (gasp) senior officers and statesmen LIED about it!!! 
>> 
>> Paperclip is an acid-etched little bit of historical irony, rich in symbolism... and that's all. To the extent that we keep rediscovering it, and keep emphasizing (against abundant evidence) how Very Very Hush-Hush Top Secret it was, and that Now It Can Be Told, we're reassured that we've found the hidden root of evil.
>> 
>> Does everybody remember Pynchon's earlier title for GR? "Mindless Pleasures"? I don't believe he intends us to understand that historical conspiracies go on while we're distracted by mindless pleasures.
>> 
>> I believe he intends us to understand that a focus on conspiracies *is* another mindless pleasure, one that distracts us from what's staring us in the face.
>> 
>> In the mirror.
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> I don't really see the logic of what you are saying. 1st point) "our own vast moral failure". 'Our own' meaning the majority of citizens who did not want to import Nazi scientists? Or some other us who have the power to ignore public opinion and the stated policy of the President and do as they wish?
>> I agree that most of our national problems are plainly visible, but isn't the fact that powerful policy makers in defense and intelligence wanted  to skirt legal accountability for war crimes and bring in Nazi science and policy people and wanted to do so against popular will and against important opposition voices indicative of  something other than a united expression of national will? Doesn't the fact that they went ahead secretly also indicate how policy is made in the US regardless of democratic process?
>>    We talk about the cold war as a battle with Soviet Russia and China but big enemies are always a psychological part of totalitarian systems and can be convenient cover stories.   Meanwhile all the actual fighting we engaged in apart maybe from Korea was to continue colonial projects.
>>  Part of what GR is about is the tendencies within the culture of the western allies toward the generation of systems of totalitarian control which are parallel to the axis madness . It also points out the tendency to override moral restraint and ignore human rights in the interests of a paranoid strategic priority. This is what a conspiracy is  and there are thousands of examples from Abu Graibh to the gulf of Tonkin to the Tuskeegee syphilis  experiments to cointelpro to operation paperclip. The idea that all have been exposed is naive.
>>   A modern parallel to operation paper clip is Total Information Awareness, proposed by Dick Cheney publicly, roundly rejected, and made operational secretly, and in contradiction to public statements, by Barak Obama.
>>  So Mr Le Carre is all wrong. There is no deep state, there is no deep state, there is.....
>> 
>> On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:59 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>> 
>> > I liked some of Blowback, but also found in it some of the tacit "Nazi magic" attitude I object to in l'affaire von Braun: in Simpson's book, that our stance toward the postwar USSR was corrupted by a relative handful of Germans with their own _parti pris_ and axes to grind; in von Braun's case, that we don't have to think about our own vast moral failure in missile/nuclear strategy, or the Cold War origins of the space race -- because hey, there were NAZIS providing a technical leg up at White Sands and Huntsville.
>> >
>> > In both cases, there were so many other, broader causes at work that when I ask myself: "Would US choices and policies have been materially different if Paperclip had never existed?" the answer is "no."
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>> > I enjoyed, if that is the right word, Christopher Simpson's "Blowback."
>> >
>> > Thomas
>> >
>> > Am 04.03.2014 10:11, schrieb Mark Thibodeau:
>> >
>> > Here is what some "serious" conspiracy minded people think of Ms
>> > Jacobson and her work...
>> >
>> > http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37827
>> >
>> > YOPJerky
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> >
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> >
>> 
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>> 
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