Commentary on "Don Monkerud: 'The new Americanism: The Eichmann Syndrome'"

My commentary on:

War & Terrorism

Don Monkerud: 'The new Americanism: The Eichmann Syndrome' Posted on Monday, February 07 @ 10:17:43 EST By Don Monkerud

Good article. Below are my half-thought-out observations:

On the growth of tyranny:

The situation depicted in your excellent article did not happen overnight, it has been growing for decades. It was already well established by the end of Eisenhower's term, see

Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1961. Many readers of this post will be very familiar with the key warning in that speech.

So, the roots of tyranny were already in existence then; it took time for this malign plant to flourish. Perhaps the seed was in the genesis of the country itself, with various wars of imperialistic aggression against the native population, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the Central and South Americans, the Canadians, and so on. You can argue that those were different times with different standards, but I can't see that the practice has ever changed much. Things now different, at least in degree, include:

• The issue of a coming massive energy crisis (sometimes referred to as “peak oil”),


• The Project for a New American Century,


• A greatly corrupted political process, with systematic disenfranchisement, and only one party, The War Party, with two faces,


• An incredible number of U.S. military bases throughout the world – maybe 700-800,


• The extraordinary growth of the corporatist state – military, industrial, media, think tank, security, surveillance, prisons, even parts of academia,


• The brazenness of the assault on freedoms and social justice,


• The new heights for suppression of internal dissent,


• The new government willingness to act against the well-being of citizens, in the U.S. and other industrialized democracies,


• The sophistication of Orwellian media control, with extraordinary disinformation and big-money funding,


• The extraordinary coarsening and brutalisation of political language, entertainment and public discourse,


• The U.S. indifference to world opinion,


• The inclination of the rest of the world to stand against the U.S. (other countries have their own priorities),


• The probable high-level U.S. government foreknowledge of and likely complicity in 9-11, and,


• The misguided right-wing fundamentalist belief in the coming “end times”

Going back to the theme of the article:

It is undoubtedly true that not all who commit evil on a large scale are so different from the rest of us, but do not understate the degree of psychopathy to be found in the power hungry either. Anywhere from 1-3% our fellows are callous, egocentric, grandiose, devious and selfish enough to be reliably classified as psychopaths, according to U.B.C. psychologist Robert Hare. A very good percentage of those reach positions of influence. The higher in the power hierarchy you look, the more psychopathy you discover. These individuals number in the tens of millions worldwide.

In addition to the outright psychopaths, there are an even larger number of people who are at best unethical opportunists – “slime bags” to use the technical term. They might not make the psychopathy cut, but cause immense damage. These may indeed exhibit the “banality of evil” identified by Hanna Arendt.

There are social processes at play here just as important as individual issues of deeply flawed character. Many of us routinely ignore issues of justice, fairness, accountability for our actions simply because we want to get along, have a little success in life, and block out the unpleasantness. We go with the flow. Maybe this is the group – most of us – who allow the injustice to happen, and best fit the phrase “banality of evil”.

It is seldom clear what one should do to change things, and most of our actions seem ineffectual. We get outmanoeuvred at every turn I fear. If progressive forces do not realize the nature and extent of the problems, and many, many – white bread liberals – do not, there is no hope for solutions.

Regards, Michael Zimmer

The Progressive Mind

On Conspiracy Denial

There is little doubt in my mind that elements of the U.S. establishment had clear prior knowledge of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, yet allowed them to happen. There is also a compelling case that some elements of the U.S. establishment facilitated the attacks. Now, this sounds unlikely to many people, and there is a small cottage industry out there writing articles and making speeches that paint people such as myself as deluded "conspiracy theorists". However, as one wag stated, I don't mind if you call me a conspiracy theorist if I can call you a coincidence theorist. Below are some links that address the issue of conspiracy denial. Michael

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9/11 'Conspiracies' and the Defactualisation of Analysis - How Ideologues on the Left and Right Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless Supposition: In this article, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed writes the definitive article on complicity denial.

• The 'Stand Down' of the foundation funded liberal / left alternative media Left Censorship about the 'War on Terror' by Mark Robinowitz: Mark Robinowitz maintains the excellent site Oil Empire. In this article, he takes on a number of prominent progressive writers who have written against U.S. complicity in the attacks.


• Coincidence theory versus Conspiracy fact by Mark Rabbinowitz: "It is not a "Conspiracy Theory" that the Bush regime is complicit in September 11 -- that is proven beyond any reasonable doubt. There are unproven theories about particular aspects of 9/11 that are not yet proven, not provable, erroneous or deliberately planted disinformation. Some conspiracy "theories" on the web are inaccurate or an effort to invent material not based on detailed evidence in a failed effort to explain discrepancies in the official story. But the paradigm that 9/11 was not a "surprise attack" is a conspiracy fact, not a theory." Mark Rabinowitz


• Conspiracy and the State of the Union by Jamey Hecht, PhD: This is a key article on 9-11 conspiracy theory by Jamey Hecht, one of the writers from the "From the Wilderness" site, one of my favourite sites.


• The Roots of Conspiracy Denial - A review of Daniel Pipes' 'Conspiracy: how the paranoid style flourishes and where it comes from': Authors Jerry Russell and Richard Stanley discuss a prior article be Daniel Pipes. On this page, there are links to other follow-up articles. Note that the issue of what happened at the Pentagon is problematic amongst the 9-11 research community, and the case for complicity does not rest on this aspect of the tragedy. The overarching world-wide and millenia-old conspiracies suggested by some of the authors are not to my taste, and I do not endorse them.


• Oil and “conspiracy theories”: a reply to a liberal apologist for the US war in Afghanistan: This is the first part of a two part article on oil and Afghanistan by Patrick Martin.


• Oil and “conspiracy theories”: a reply to a liberal apologist for the US war in Afghanistan: This is the second part of a two part article on oil and Afghanistan by Patrick Martin.


• Conspiracies Or Institutions: 9-11 and Beyond by Stephen R. Shalom and Michael Albert : This article dismisses 9-11 conspiracy theories. It is followed by various rebuttals and supporting arguments. I believe the main article to be a very flawed set of arguments. Note that some of the comments in the posts following the article are from clearly deranged individuals.

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On The Progressive Mind

This site contains a number of links to articles, publications and editorials expressing progressive and humanistic viewpoints. I have links to many progressive web sites and logs, and a few not-so-progressive sites as well. If I were a real scholar, I would balance that out by looking at more views from the dark side.

By setting up this site, I may have just added to the confusion. I have started with a list of sites, and will try to annotate them over time. I will add editorial content piece by piece. To be fair, I probably should link to the more rational libertarian and conservative sites as well. Of course, I will have to put aside some deeply held biases to do so. Since I do filter based upon my biases, I am not fully aware of what is out there that might be well reasoned, even if not really palatable to me. This is surely a flaw in a would-be scholar. I would appreciate knowing of links from other perspectives. There is no guarantee that I will link to these sites, and if I do, I will undoubtedly add my own cautions.

My personal viewpoints are humanistic, strongly civil libertarian, social democratic, and scientifically sceptical. I do not reject all conservative positions out-of-hand, and in fact have conservative attitudes on some issues. Although I have joked that I am a crypto-anarchist, I believe that the dogmatic libertarian position is as fundamentally flawed as the dogmatic communist position. Neither of these approaches works in practice, and the reasons why this is so are deep and compelling - a topic for my site's editorial content at some time. I am a firm believer that for time immemorial, conspiracies have been perpetrated at the highest levels in all societies. This is true at all scales, in all societies, at all times. However, that powerful people form shifting power blocks, overlapping associations, and then work to further their own interests at the expense of the rest of us should be clear from a study of history, to any but the most thick-headed.

It will never be completely clear what is going on. However, it is a certaintly that various very rich individuals, trans-national corporations, and various societies and organizations collude at the expense of the bulk of humanity. Examples of these groups include: most mainstream political parties, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Project for a New American Century, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations. Much of this is solidly researched, but I suspect that some of this theorizing (e.g., the U.N. wants to dominate the world, the Illuminati are a powerful force for world domination) is wrong-headed, and it gets as silly as David Icke's nonsense about reptilian DNA. These folks give conspiracy theorists a bad name.

Regardless of the existence of suspect views, there is a core of truth to all of this. There are powerful interests, there are secretive and elite organizations, there is routine sociopathic indifference to the plight of the world's people, there is incredible greed at the top, and much of this has been well documented. Politicians lie on a routine basis. Narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths gravitate to positions of power. Conspiracy counts as the largest category of crime, and government and organizational criminal conspiracies have occurred throughout history. They still occur, and always will occur. By exposing and fighting against these pathologies, we may be able to shift affairs to a more just and humane world.

Areas of interest to me include, in no particular order:

• the environment including overpopulation, pollution, global warming, habitat degradation, and species extinction


• water resources


• the folly of technological utopianism and the techno-geek vision


• energy issues including peak oil and alternative energy and full life cycle costing


• the moral and pragmatic bankruptcy of war as a political tool


• the rising tide of fascism


• the culture of violence and media complicity


• political malfeasance


• economics and critiques of the dismal science


• covert operations


• conspiracy of September 11, 2001


• the fake war on terrorism


• the ludicrous war on drugs


• militarization of the world and militarization of space


• government disinformation - media control and media self-interest


• epistemology and the basis for belief


• conspiracy denial


• moral blindness and failure of empathy in society and indifference to the sufferings of others


• ethics and morality


• philosophy and religion and its problematic aspects


• humanism and liberalism


• civil rights and liberties


• social justice


• the prison-industrial complex


• the military-academic-industrial complex


• nuclear weapons


• science and research (and its corruption)


• technology


• labour issues and unions


• corporate and organizational power and influence corporate and individual sociopathy


• the legal system and its abuse


• scepticism


• evolution and paleontology


• anthropoloy, prehistory and archaeology


• geology


• humour


• music


• and most certainly other topics.

I hope to keep the site to be updated on a daily basis, and hope to keep people coming back.