Currently Reading

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Found a copy of Sterling and Peggy Seagrave's 2010 book Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold. It was mentioned in Patricia Goldstone's Interlock and covers the Black Eagle Trust established post-WWII which was used as a slush fund for supporting anti-communism globally.

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Quite the start!

[laundermyhead]

^ Looks cool, I heard about that book from one of the brainsturbator lists, which gave me like 50 new books I want to read: http://www.brainsturbator.com/posts/444 ... e-politics.

I'm reading this climate fiction novel called Eleutheria, it has a cool premise (life at creepy climate change back to the land commune) but it's pretty bad tbh. It's like adult YA. Whenever I try to read a current year litfic novel I feel like Charlie Brown kicking the football, I dunno why I keep trying.

I'm also reading the book of the 70s BBC show Connections and I want to get back into Nixonland and Aberration in the Heartland of the Real. The stack next to my nighttable is really out of control right now though so I feel like I have to get through a bunch of short books to make it smaller.

[marxonwheels]

Working my way through Losurdo's "War and Revolution" and can't recommend it enough, especially from a Marxist/dialectical perspective. As always, Losurdo's grasp of dialectics is superb. Summary from Verso/Random House is below:

War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians, one that’s grown increasingly apparent in recent years. It’s a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or François Furet, who links the Stalinist purges to an “illness” originating with the French Revolution.

The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition. Their true motives have little to do with the quest for a greater understanding of the past, but lie in the climate of the present day and the ideological needs of the political classes, as is most clearly seen now in the work of the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson.

In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle, Losurdo captivates the reader with a tour de force account of modern revolt, providing a new perspective on the English, American, French and twentieth-century revolutions.

[signsandwonders]

The most recent book I read that really turned me on the collection of documents translated and edited by Joshua Depaolis, "1978: A New Stage in the Class War? Selected Documents on the Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades." The Red Brigades are a group that generated a lot of controversy and this book covers the act of theirs that was most controversial: the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro.

Many people believe this was an operation carried out by NATO as part of GLADIO; I'm not convinced, but I'd also like to see any articles that put forth that view convincingly.

I'm looking forward to reading "The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History" - I think the armed struggle within the imperialist countries is important for communists to study. Obviously, up to the present, that has presented nothing but failures, but even so, to study that history is part of moving forward.

[KronenbergTheDJ]

^Nice suggestions y'all! I added a few to my list.

I'm an easily distracted slow reader with a lot of other hobbies but this year challenged myself to read 12 books (I know that's a small number but hey I gotta start somewhere). I'm currently behind schedule lol so maybe later in the year I will need to stick to pamphlets... I seem to be collecting tomes for my to-read pile though...

1. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.
-Very good. It should not have been my first step in researching this topic but I did a lot of online research as I read. I think I should re-read this one in a few years after getting to know all these deep state criminals better. The passage on sus Chomsky was very illuminating. I was already very suspicion of Chomsky before I read Scott's 1993 words on him but wow those words confirmed my deep suspicion.

2. Vitale, Alex. The End of Policing.
-Very good. I would say just go ahead and read it if you haven't.

3. Talbot, David. The Devil’s Chessboard.
-Indispensable. I listened to this one. Aaron Good tweeted that it was on sale on Chirp's platform for 5 bucks so I jumped on that. It took me quite some time to get through the entire unabridged reading, even sped up at up to 1.5x. The narrator did a great job. I learned a lot. Everyone should read this.

4. Denton, Sally. The Bluegrass Conspiracy.
-Really fun read. I learned about this one via Programmed to Chill episode with guests The Trillbillies. I live in the South so it's incredibly interesting for me to learn about the web of deep state activity/ organized crime/ state crime/ drug trafficking/ occultism/ blackmail ops/ etc. in this region. Definitely a must read for anyone interested in Iran Contra. It's funny that phrase is never mentioned once in the book - although Oliver North is... only once I think...? It's not a perfect book but absolutely worth the read especially if you can read between the lines.

Currently reading: Hayden, Brian. The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity
-I just started it. Chapter 1, The Secret, is very good and surprisingly easy to read. We'll see if I can keep up with this academic text. I'll certainly need to look up a lot of terms as I read.

[northwoods_memo]

I haven't been actively reading books lately, but of the ones I remember, Hijacking America's Mind on 9/11 by Elias Davidsson is a good look into the evidence that the U.S. authorities presented in support of the official story. It basically uses the government's own evidence (some of which is pretty revealing if you know what to look for, e.g. the GTE Airfone records, or a thorough reading of FBI 302's) to demolish the official story of 9/11.

I plan to read Keef Van der Pijl's (sp?) book, "The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class", since I think it will inform arguments people are having now over whether NATO is a bloc of imperialist countries led by the US or, if it's closer to a tool to subvert the security structures of Western Europe (and increasingly former USSR) in American favor. NATO is certainly US-led, but I think it's wrong to say that it only represents US imperialism or serves only US imperialist interests. I think NATO is a bloc of imperialist countries (with some semi-periphery junior partners such as Greece) – an institutionalized "truce" or fragile peace formed between rival imperialists against the Soviet Union and decolonial/communist movements when the world rate of profit was high. Basically, the transformation of one contradiction (inter-imperialist rivalry and inter-capitalist competition) into a more fundamental contradiction between exploiter and exploited.

But to start answering this question, I don't think we can only look at the "intentions" of US post-war planners with the Marshall Plan, the ceding of Churchill's plan to combat communism to Truman's plan, etc. We also have to look at how NATO behaves and keep in mind that no country can so thoroughly 'infiltrate' the mid-levels of other countries' security agencies and obtain unquestioning loyalty. I we see a similar disconnect when talking about the "agency" of peripheral countries when coup d'etats happen. There's an argument over how involved the US might be, and others argue that Bolivians (for example) have agency too, not everything is just a result of direct US interference. And this is true. Imperialist countries requires local collaborators and local proxies in order to overthrow unfriendly governments.

For the same reason that "Israel" obviously does not run ops on US soil without the permission and knowledge of the US security state (which have mutual 'national security' interests that dovetail with the Zionist entity), the US did not run Gladio in Western Europe (for instance) without the permission and knowledge of West Germany's own imperialists, etc. because German imperialists have a shared class interests in suppressing left wing politics as well.