Not NP: Re: "the story is fundamentally at odds with reality as we know it"

rich richard.romeo at gmail.com
Wed Dec 23 16:08:35 CST 2015


all very interesting, Thomas

not to state the obvious but John Paul II played a key role in much of this
considering his staunch anti-communist views. the right man at the right
time, paralleling the rise of the Christian right from Reagan in 1980 and
beyond

rich

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 4:46 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

>
>
> This got me interested. As Christmastide is threatening and I do not have
> much time on my hands, let me just forward without much ado a few excerpts
> from various texts that touch upon the topics at hand (this time including
> Pynchon).
>
>
> Seymour Hersh:
>
> "(...) That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large
> percentage of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations
> Command and Stanley McChrystal, the one who got in trouble because of the
> article in Rolling Stone, and his follow-on, a Navy admiral named McRaven,
> Bill McRaven — all are members or at least supporters of Knights of Malta.
> McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the
> Knights of Malta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They’re
> all believers — many of them are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they
> are doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s
> a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the
> Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims in the 13th century.
> And this is their function. They have little insignias, they have coins
> they pass among each other, which are crusader coins, and they have
> insignia that reflect that, the whole notion that this is a war, it’s
> culture war."
>
>
> https://zulfahmed.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/seymour-hersh-talking-in-qatar-in-january-2011/
>
>
> Greg Grandin in "The Nation" defending Hersh against Fisher's criticism:
>
> 'To accuse Hersh of falling under the thrall of “conspiracy theory” is to
> repudiate the whole enterprise of investigative journalism that Hersh
> helped pioneer. What has he written that wasn’t a conspiracy? But Fisher,
> and others, believe Hersh went too far when in a 2011 speech he made
> mention of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, tagging him as a Dan Brown
> fantasist. Here’s Fisher, in his debunking of Hersh’s recent essay: “The
> moment when a lot of journalists started to question whether Hersh had
> veered from investigative reporting into something else came in January
> 2011. That month, he spoke at Georgetown University’s branch campus in
> Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address alleging that top
> military and special forces leaders ‘are all members of, or at least
> supporters of, Knights of Malta.… many of them are members of Opus Dei.’”
>
>
> http://www.thenation.com/article/its-conspiracy-how-discredit-seymour-hersh/
>
>
> And now it gets interesting for Pynchonites because Grandin ties Hersh's
> allegations to the FEMA and REX 84/CoG activities in the 80s that I also
> felt reminded of and which play an important role in VL. He quotes Steve
> Coll, the author of "Ghost Wars", a book we recently discussed:
>
> 'But here’s Steve Coll, a reporter who remains within the acceptable
> margins, writing in Ghost Wars about Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey:
> “He was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the
> Virgin Mary filled his mansion.… He attended Mass daily and urged Christian
> faith upon anyone who asked his advice…. He believed fervently that by
> spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain
> communism’s advance, or reverse it.” Oliver North, Casey’s Iran/Contra
> co-conspirator, worshiped at a “’charismatic’ Episcopalian church in
> Virginia called Church of the Apostles, which is organized into cell
> groups.”
>
> Not too long ago, Ben Bradlee Jr. (son of no less an establishment figure
> than the editor of The Washington Post), could draw the connections between
> the shadowy national security state and right-wing Christianity:
> Iran/Contra was about many things, among them a right-wing Christian
> reaction against the growing influence of left-wing Liberation Theology in
> Latin America. Likewise, the US’s post-9/11 militarism was about many
> things, among them the reorganization of those right-wing Christians
> against what they identified as a greater existential threat than
> Liberation Theology: political Islam. Fisher should know this, as it was
> reported here, here, and here, among many other places.'
>
>
> http://www.thenation.com/article/its-conspiracy-how-discredit-seymour-hersh/
>
>
> In my previous post I referred to David Thoreen's "The President's
> Emergency War Powers and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in Pynchons
> Vineland", an essay I keep coming back to. Here are some relevant quotes
> (like Grandin, Thoreen also quotes Ben Bradlee). The reference is to VL,
> 339:
>
> 'The "red Christer pins" are another reference to FEMA and Rex-84.
> According to Ben Bradlee:
>
> "There had been considerable anxiety within the agency about the legality
> of the Rex-84 exercise. [One FEMA] official said he had never seen such
> security around any other activity inside FEMA, and that agency General
> Counsel George Jett had ordered the installation of a special metal
> security door into the hallway of the fifth floor of the FEMA building in
> Washington where all planning for Rex-84 was conducted.... FEMA officials
> with the highest security clearances had been prevented from going into the
> restricted area.... only Giuffrida, Jett, and FEMA Deputy Director Frank
> Salcedo--all of whom were inexplicably reported to have been wearing red
> Christian crosses or crucifix pins on their lapels--were allowed in."'
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20101116080155/http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm
>
>
> The subject here is indeed "connections between the shadowy national
> security state and right-wing Christianity", as Grandin puts it. Coll,
> Hersh and Bradlee provide evidence/claims for the existence of these links.
> Pynchon uses Bradlee's account of the "red Christian crosses" for his own
> purposes in VL.
>
> Generally I believe that one would have to critizise Hersh on the basis of
> facts. Just saying that he has suddenly become a "conspiracy theorist"
> because he talks about things nobody else in the mainstream media wants to
> cover won't do.
>
> Also, the Knights of Malta are very interesting indeed.
>
>
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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