More Nixon. No Jesuits.

[Mark Kohut]

from Jonathan Schell's *The Time of Illusion.* Which I picked up
because I have 'always' wanted to read it and now the key theme
---illusion and its effects---seemed it might offer some insight into
the current US admin's massive shell game of articulated illusion.

This: we are reminded how Nixon ran and won as the peace candidate who would
get us out of the Dem war in Vietnam. The anti-war voices at all levels
shut down at the '68 convention. How he convinced many of the nation's
influential opinion-mongers that he was a 'new' Nixon, not the one who had
ended
his own career earlier. How he actually had a post-election lunch with
Humphrey--to
show the nation's new unity; how he spoke of how 'the Negro"--the word faded
quickly around this time--would rise higher under his administration's
policies; how
his administration would be so transparent, the whole nation would be
reassured.

Then he beagen the absolutely secret bombing of Cambodia; he ordered a plan
to
'round up' anti-war protestors; he wrote memos on how PR image-making was
the only way to publicly
run the admin; he ordered wiretaps on some aides and five major reporters
(previous
AG Ramsey Clark declared the recent law re warrant permission
 was unconstitutional and he would never); Schell argues that even a couple
of bills
were presented that were INTENDED to fail so that where Congress stood vs
his
admin was evident to all.

Schell shows how Nixon's PR image campaign then became a "domestic war"
against
any kind of nay-saying. Even invading Cambodia was a test of national
resolve and commitment not real horrible policy.  Which lead to Kent State,
hard hats beating up on protestors, among other horrors.

Hating Nixon, which almost any writer worth reading,  not only
Pynchon, did, and was the least we should have done.

And Nixon did in secret what Pres Trump does openly, is one way to frame
it,
Trump's base image-making just for his base.

What a world.








On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 2:57 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://twitter.com/americamag/status/895357514061144064
>
> On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 9:50 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes.  As were also the Jesuits.
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 8:09 PM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
>> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> In some respects the East India Company can - especially with view on
>>> Pynchon's work - be characterized as an early IG Farben ...
>>>
>>> https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-east-offering-its-ri
>>> ches-to-britannia-191140
>>> http://brugger.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/1/4/2014824/empire.pdf
>>>
>>> > ... It is sometimes said that the British acquired their empire in a
>>> fit of absent mindedness. The evidence as shown in this painting dating
>>> from a time when the British colonial expansion in India was really just
>>> beginning may, however, suggest that the early founders of the British
>>> Empire were not absent minded at all but knew exactly what they wanted ... <
>>>
>>> Am 29.07.2017 um 08:42 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>>>
>>>
>>> "Something richer than many a Nation, yet with no Boundaries, --- which,
>>> tho' never part of any Coalition, yet maintains its own great Army and
>>> Navy, --- able to pay for the last War, as the next, with no more bother
>>> than finding the Key to a certain iron Box, --- yet which allows the
>>> Britannick Governance that gave it Charter, to sink beneath oceanick Waves
>>> of Ink incarnadine." (M&D, p. 140)
>>>
>>> > ... The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation
>>> and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the
>>> systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of
>>> indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and
>>> patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the
>>> obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their
>>> identities and their self-respect. In 1600, when the East India Company was
>>> established, Britain was producing just 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while
>>> India was generating some 23% (27% by 1700). By 1940, after nearly two
>>> centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10% of world GDP, while
>>> India had been reduced to a poor “third-world” country, destitute and
>>> starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. The British left a
>>> society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic
>>> industry and over 90% living below what today we would call the poverty
>>> line.
>>>
>>> The India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and
>>> commercialising society: that was why the East India Company was interested
>>> in it in the first place. Far from being backward or underdeveloped,
>>> pre-colonial India exported high quality manufactured goods much sought
>>> after by Britain’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen
>>> and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative
>>> textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. In the 17th and 18th
>>> centuries, British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made
>>> textiles as Indian in order to charge higher prices for them.
>>>
>>> The story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old
>>> civilisational history, is replete with great educational institutions,
>>> magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the
>>> world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, and
>>> abundant prosperity – in short, all the markers of successful modernity
>>> today – and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been
>>> the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British ... <
>>>
>>> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-
>>> empire-railways-myths-gifts
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
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