Dr. Edward Curtin is a sociologist and writer who has written extensively about the role of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in destabilizing American democracy. He is the author of The Real Fauci, a book that documents the CIA's long history of spying on journalists and their families, and he has been a long-time critic of Operation Mockingbird. In this episode, Dr. Curtin and I discuss the CIA s long-term campaign to delegitimize American ideals and democracy, and the role played by the intelligence services in delegitimizing the American ideal of freedom, freedom, and democracy. He is a scholar of the classics of philosophy, literature, and theology, and a lifelong promoter of personal freedom and the American justice system, and an idealized vision for our country. Edward is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and a widely read writer. He used to be a newspaperman for the Berkshire Eagle, one of the great local papers in our country, and is a longtime supporter of the ideals of freedom and justice championed by the framers of the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Ed is a great admirer of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, two of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. And he is a champion of the anti-war movement, and of the fight for civil rights and civil liberties. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world and what s going on. in the 21st century, and why we should be worried about it. and why it's important to have a better understanding of the dark side of history, and what it means and why it matters why we need to pay attention to it what it matters, and how we should care about it, and how it s important to know it, not just in the first place not only in order to understand it, . What do you think about it? Do you think it matters to you, do you agree with it, or disagree with it ? or do you have any thoughts on it matters? or don t you agree or disagree are you in any thoughts or opinions on what it does not matter ? or are you looking for more information about what it s really going on in our culture, or would you like to know more?
00:00:14.000He used to be a newspaper man for the Berkshire Eagle, one of the great local papers in our country.
00:00:21.000He is a scholar of the classics of philosophy, literature, and theology, and sociology, and he's been a lifelong promoter of personal freedom and the American justice system and an idealized vision for our country.
00:00:49.000And one of the things that Ed has written extensively about is the role of the intelligence agencies in essentially the demolition of the American ideal of American freedoms and democracies.
00:01:07.000I wrote an article actually mentioning my book about the role of the intelligence agencies in the COVID crisis that I covered extensively in my book to the response to the pandemic.
00:01:23.000I wanted to start by asking you something.
00:01:25.000Did you read Dick Russell's article in The Defender this week about the CIA control of Rolling Stone, of Daily Cosmic, I think Daily Beast?
00:01:48.000You've been a critic of Operation Mockingbird, which of course is the CIA's long, long history of program to control journalism in our country and around the world by essentially compromising journalists.
00:02:08.000And actually, today, December 16th, I noticed there was a scathing article about you by an associate press writer, which I consider very clearly part of that whole Operation Mockingbird program to attack anyone.
00:02:32.000Especially anyone who exposes, as you have in numerous ways in your last book and in the current Fauci book, the operations of the intelligence services, most especially the CIA. And as I've written...
00:02:51.000And you know your book about your family and much more American values, which is a fantastic, a beautiful, beautiful book.
00:03:01.000When it was published three or four years ago, I believe I was the only person to write a review of that book.
00:03:12.000By all the mainstream newspapers, the legacy media.
00:03:17.000It was the, that book is basically a chronicle of my family's, of the Kennedy family's 60 year fist fight with the CIA.
00:03:27.000Yeah, it was, it was, there was airtight wall to wall, like out of that book in the mainstream press, as you pointed out. - Aside from your devastating and, Really well-documented critique of the CIA in that book.
00:03:45.000You know, it was just a lovely book as a family story.
00:03:49.000It was the kind of family romance book that you would think the mainstream media would gobble up and surely give some great reviews to.
00:04:02.000I think they honed in on your essential critique of the CIA. Just as they're doing now with your Fauci book, The Real Fauci, which again is devastating with its analysis of how the intelligence agencies have been involved in the whole germ propaganda and COVID and going back much further than that,
00:04:30.000of course, as you document so assiduously in Chapter 12 of that book especially.
00:04:38.000One of the reasons I wanted to have you on this show is that you've been an extraordinarily eloquent and articulate critic of that trend in our country.
00:04:51.000Of the light brightness of American ideals of democracy that our framers put in motion and the assault on that since World War II by this growing power of the military-industrial complex.
00:05:17.000I think that We've been subjected for decades now to a materialistic propaganda effort that has tried to reduce the spiritual dimension of human life to nothing,
00:05:35.000really, and to, in its place, put a deterministic view of life, life determined by things, by Technology, and it's a very, very dark, dark vision in which people really give up hope and embrace the, how shall I put it, the dark side of life.
00:06:00.000And it's no wonder that there are so many people suffering tremendous anxiety and depression, and they're all drugged up on pharmaceutical drugs, which is part of this push to drug people.
00:06:15.000And to take from them this sense of idealism and hope and love for other people and replace it with this very, very dark vision.
00:06:28.000And the people who are doing this, there's something greatly evil about it.
00:06:34.000You know, I know that's a strong word, but I think it is evil.
00:06:39.000I know you're a great connoisseur of American literature and literature in general, and it's pretty extraordinary how Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and Robert Heinlein kind of predicted this dystopian embrace of, you know, what's called today transhumanism.
00:06:59.000And the use, I remember in And, you know, we're now seeing basically the entire population that's lulled with pharmaceutical products and screens, and nobody's really noticing that, you know, our humanity as well as our democracy are under attack.
00:07:24.000Well, I think some people are noticing, and with your help, And your great efforts.
00:07:31.000I think more and more people are noticing this.
00:07:33.000I see that perhaps it's just the people that I know.
00:07:37.000They seem to be waking up to this reality that I noticed that you mentioned the French sociologist and theologian in your Fauci book, Jacques Ellul, who long ago, long ago, the late 40s, then in the late 50s and the early 60s, wrote a series of books One called propaganda, another called the technological society, in which he predicted all of this.
00:08:09.000And that was at the time of Eisenhower's farewell address and the assassination of your uncle, President Kennedy, and then your father.
00:08:22.000So This has been a long process and it's, I think, deeply tied in with the development of the CIA, their mind control programs, MKUltra and all of the others.
00:08:36.000I guess I'd say there's a worldwide MKUltra program going on now.
00:08:41.000To destroy people's ability to think and hope and have faith in the future.
00:08:48.000My wife and I recently went to see, I don't go to movies that often, but we went to see West Side Story, the remake.
00:08:57.000As a young man of 17, the original West Side Story affected me profoundly.
00:09:04.000Even though it's a tragedy, it also It was a story of hope as well.
00:09:12.000It seems to me that that feeling of hope, hopefulness, it was in the fall of 1961 when I first saw that film, the original.
00:09:22.000I remember feeling a sense of optimism in the country, even though some bad things had already happened that year, the Bay of Pigs, the killing of Dag Hammarskjöld that month.
00:09:37.000But I remember as a young person feeling, still feeling hopeful.
00:09:42.000And that sense of hopefulness has been diminishing down through the decades.
00:09:48.000I mean, it's long ago, and we've arrived now at this dark place where the forces who have been working on people seem to be triumphant, but I don't think they will triumph.
00:10:01.000I think the human spirit is stronger than their evil.
00:10:08.000Well, you come from a liberal community and a liberal background.
00:10:13.000How do you think and how do you explain the fact that it is the people that is liberals like Noam Chomsky and, you know, these iconic figures of resistance, the corporate critics, Naomi Klein, the many, many others who have become most vociferous today.
00:10:34.000In supporting these totalitarian lockdowns, all of the other things that accompany it, and forced vaccinations with a zero-liability pharmaceutical product that's experimental and that's made by these companies until recently regarded as criminal enterprises, but now they're embracing as kind of deities and saviors.
00:11:08.000Number two, do you think that people will emerge at some point from this past psychosis?
00:11:15.000Well, those are really hard questions to answer.
00:11:18.000But to go to the first one, I think some of the people who...
00:11:24.000Well, let me speak of Noam Chomsky to begin with, because he's sort of the godfather of many of the people on the liberal left and even further to the left.
00:11:40.000I can't really tell you exactly what has motivated him, because I can only look at what he's done and what he said in recent years.
00:11:52.000And I've had some correspondence with him, and I have good friends who have been involved with him going all the way back, Vince Salandria.
00:12:02.000But he's had contact with Chomsky going back to the early 60s over the death of President Kennedy.
00:12:09.000And Chomsky has, from the start, closed his eyes to President Kennedy's assassination and never really wanted to look at it.
00:12:19.000He said he would at one point, but then he just turned away.
00:12:23.000And he has some kind of unexplainable hatred for your family, which...
00:12:31.000What the source of that hatred is, I don't know.
00:12:35.000But he refused to look at the facts of the assassination and even said, well, it doesn't really matter.
00:12:42.000It's not very important, which is absurd.
00:12:45.000And he said the same thing about the attacks of September 11, 2001.
00:12:55.000But he has many acolytes, many people on the left, many prominent people today.
00:13:01.000Who rely on him as their so-called godfather, Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky.
00:13:07.000And what motivates them, I don't know either, except that perhaps it is their jobs and their careers, and they don't want to be shut out of the mainstream media and access to it.
00:13:22.000You know, if you criticize or delve too deeply, Into a lot of these things, you could be fired very easily and your career is over.
00:13:34.000So it's hard to understand people's motivations.
00:13:38.000I do think there are people out there who really do work for intelligence agencies and not so-called independently, but they project themselves as independent writers.
00:14:34.000Or when my uncle was killed, he was incapable of adjusting his thinking and his narrative.
00:14:42.000And that's probably one of the reasons that he didn't want to look into it.
00:14:46.000But I've always overlooked that part of him, you know, the extreme kind of poisonous, venomous hostility that he has toward my family, because he has such an interesting mind.
00:14:58.000And he has this brilliant take on historical events that I think that I wouldn't want to miss, you know, even if he doesn't, even if he differs with me.
00:15:12.000The clarity of thought in which he views other parts of history and America's role in history is very interesting to me.
00:15:22.000I don't accept it as received knowledge, but I want to hear what he has to say because he's brilliant.
00:15:32.000Sometimes these little flashes of lightning that are very, very reliable in his His thoughts and his narratives and his writing are just things that I don't want to miss, despite the fact that he doesn't like my family a lot.
00:15:48.000So I've had him when I was running my show at Air America.
00:15:52.000I had him as a frequent guest on that show, and I had very, very congenial discussions.
00:16:16.000And he wants everybody to kind of recognize that.
00:16:19.000So if you're put off by those kind of things, you wouldn't want to hang out with him.
00:16:25.000But I have always been able to overlook those kind of things.
00:16:29.000And I see the brilliance of the way that his mind burns.
00:16:34.000And I always enjoyed having him on my show.
00:16:37.000And so I had this little kind of weird side friendship with him where we didn't talk about the other stuff.
00:16:45.000But recently I corresponded with him on email.
00:16:50.000I invited him to come on this podcast to talk to me and he ultimately refused.
00:16:57.000I directly refuse because he's always prided himself on being willing to debate in any forum.
00:17:04.000I don't think that he wanted to have this debate with me.
00:17:07.000And so he began, you know, kind of gratuitously insulting me and basically telling me I was a dangerous person and that I was stopping people from vaccinating and that this was going to kill people and, you know, all these kind of things.
00:17:23.000And he became, in the end, he cut off the conversation in a very abrupt way, indicating that he didn't want to have anything more to do with things.
00:17:32.000So it's interesting, though, because he is such an influential figure and there's other people like Naomi Klein, who I've always admired, whose books are, you know, again, brilliant.
00:17:45.000Her analysis of history has a clarity to it and a truth to it that is just like a gut punch reading her books.
00:17:56.000I've had a friendship with her, too, that appears to be over because, you know, she's part of this kind of liberal orthodoxy that has brought down Canada, that has transformed Canada into, you know, really a template for a ruthless kind of totalitarianism.
00:18:31.000He's written some wonderful, great things.
00:18:34.000I think he's taught a lot of people, a lot.
00:18:37.000I do think something you said about his institutional analysis was, He does have a problem, I think, with understanding that history, to understand history and social issues and society, institutional and structural analysis is very important.
00:19:03.000And everyone isn't totally determined By their place within the social order and their institutional affiliations, people are able to rise above them.
00:19:18.000For example, a lot of critiques are thrown at you, I've seen them at least, and I'm sure you have, to say, well, look, you're from this rich family and you're just in it to make a buck and to make your name and, you know, really the Kennedys are just this old line or new line.
00:19:41.000Kind of new old Irish American wealthy families who all wanted to be kings and queens.
00:19:48.000And, you know, that's the story with them.
00:19:52.000This new AP piece out on you is, you know, you're making so much money.
00:19:57.000And I mean, it's just, it's a ridiculous piece of garbage, a hit piece.
00:20:05.000I don't think, and I know you're very well aware of Jim Douglas's great book, JFK and the Unspeakable, where Jim very, very clearly shows how President Kennedy was transformed as a human being, as a person, in his years in office, and how he underwent a profound spiritual awakening that allowed him to almost...
00:20:34.000Serve as a martyr for the cause of peace.
00:20:38.000I think your father was very, very similar.
00:20:43.000And there was something in their persons, in their background, of course, but in their persons, people can change.
00:21:42.000Jim Douglas' book is an extraordinary book.
00:21:44.000To me, it's the best book written on our family.
00:21:47.000It's called The Odd J.F. Canyon's Fico.
00:21:50.000He makes these really wonderful connections between that ultimate kind That my uncle had.
00:21:58.000It really began during his experiences in World War II when his PT boat was cut in two in the blackened straits.
00:22:07.000When it was in a fog, it was run over by a Japanese destroyer.
00:22:15.000The captain, the commander of that destroyer, who my uncle invited to his inaugural ceremonies.
00:22:23.000And my uncle was stranded with his men, one of whom was badly burned and would be rescued by towing him through the water with a allured in his teeth on a six-mile swim in the middle of the night.
00:22:38.000And they were hiding for days from the Japanese who were looking for them.
00:22:42.000They thought they were He was almost certainly dead.
00:22:52.000And he had, at the beginning, I think, a lot of his, as Jim Douglas shows, a lot of his, the way that he subsequently interacted with the world.
00:23:05.000And there were two Solomon Islanders, who ultimately were searching for confidence.
00:23:15.000His coordinates on a coconut, which an islander is hid in the bottom of the canoe beneath a big vial of coconuts, and then they did the 11-mile paddle to the British naval base and gave the companion that coconut, and that resulted in my uncle being rescued.
00:23:37.000During that period, during that period of the war, he developed this very important skepticism The upper brass came very handy to him during the Cuban Missile Crisis, during the Bay of Pigs, where he was always skeptical of the advice that he was getting from the upper brass, always insistent on doing independent investigations,
00:24:03.000but also the affinity that he had for people from developing countries and colonial countries and their right to be free, which but also the affinity that he had for people from developing countries and colonial countries and their right to be free, which was part of his central thrust of his administration, which I think Jim Douglas
00:24:22.000Solomon Islanders who were under colonial rule, first by the British and then later by the Japanese, and who were fighting side by side alongside the Americans and who rescued my uncle, that they deserved sovereignty and dignity and respect.
00:24:40.000That had a profound impact on his life.
00:24:43.000One of the things that I would mention with going back to Chomsky, the irony with Chomsky is that he really does not see the CIA as a menace to our country.
00:24:56.000He sees it as a menace in In developing countries.
00:25:00.000But he never saw the minutes that it was to our country.
00:25:04.000And one of the things that I talk about in the book is that the CIA had a project for 30 years to blacken my family's name.
00:25:13.000And it was run by a guy called Sam Halpern, who had been a New York Times bureau chief in Miami and Havana.
00:25:21.000But he was really the entire time he was a CIA agent.
00:25:25.000He later became a deputy director of the CIA. And it was his job for 30 years at the CIA to start rumors about my family.
00:25:34.000He was the one who promoted the rumor that my uncle and my father had been involved in the Castro assassination and had spent I had no knowledge of the CIA's project to assassinate Katz from the CIA, was very nervous that they would find out about it.
00:25:55.000He also was the one who promoted this affirmation that is now widely believed that my grandfather made money from bootlegging.
00:26:05.000And if you talk to almost any American, they'll say, yeah, Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger.
00:26:10.000And of course, he was never a bootlegger.
00:26:12.000That was a CIA planted defamation or libel that took root and many, many other things.
00:26:22.000And I show this in the book how they did.
00:26:27.000Many of the other things that people believe about my family were originally sourced to Sam Albert and the CIA. But Noam Chomsky just believes that stuff, swallows all of those things, hook line and sinker,
00:26:44.000I think because they were convenient to his worldview that the Kennedys were part of this aristocracy, part of this kind of deep state American imperialist aristocracy that is manipulating people all over the world.
00:26:59.000And he was never able to acknowledge to himself that it was our family who essentially was battling that plutocracy.
00:27:13.000You're so right that he was never really concerned about the CIA's activity within the United States, but always over there, over there, over there.
00:27:22.000You know, coup d'etats, assassinations, all of that kind of stuff, which of course is true.
00:27:27.000You know, Guatemala and Iran and all these other places.
00:27:31.000But he wouldn't look at how they were operating here.
00:27:35.000And one of the ironies of all of this is that your uncle...
00:27:39.000President Kennedy was a true anti-colonialist even before he became President of the United States.
00:27:58.000It's a speech in which my uncle made this famous speech in the Senate, which completely isolated him from liberals and conservatives.
00:28:07.000He said Africa should be ruled by Africans.
00:28:10.000And even today, when I travel, I've run into hundreds and hundreds of people from Africa and from the Mideast whose name is Kennedy.
00:28:21.000Because of that speech that he made, he's remembered in all these capitals.
00:28:25.000It was very unpopular in our country at the time, because in our country we were trying to fortify NATO as a bulwark against communism.
00:28:36.000And the NATO countries, France and Great Britain, were completely still dependent on their colonial possessions.
00:28:44.000And there was a terror that if they were forced to relinquish Kenya and Tanzania and Libya, et cetera, that the United States would be left fighting communism alone because all the European nations would financially collapse.
00:29:03.000So he was not only attacked on that speech by the right, by Rockefeller, Goldwater, Reagan, Nixon, et cetera, but by Adlai Stevenson on the left.
00:29:13.000And all the kind of liberal infrastructure went after them, but he stuck with it.
00:29:17.000And that became the theme of his administration.
00:29:26.000And that was another thing that alienated him from the CIA because, of course, Alan Dulles' project was to try to bring the entire globe under U.S. hegemony.
00:29:38.000And, you know, to have the CIA operating, my uncle refused to go into Laos, despite the CIA's He's from the brass.
00:29:48.000He refused to send combat troops to Vietnam.
00:29:51.000and they were begging him for a quarter million and said it would collapse.
00:29:55.000And he kept saying, "It's their war, it's not our war." He didn't believe in the domino theory.
00:30:01.000He believed that people wanted to rule themselves and they had a right to do it.
00:30:05.000And they had a right to experiment with all kinds of government.
00:30:08.000In fact, he told Castro, if you want to experiment with Marxism, we have nothing to say.
00:30:16.000The only problem we have is if you let him fight the Soviets, to use your country for a staging ground or a military base in our hemisphere, But he was very, very much against colonialism and he ended up sending 16,000 advisors who were basically Green Berets to Vietnam We were not officially authorized to take part in combat activities.
00:30:41.000He sent more people, he sent more troops than that, 20,000 troops, to Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, to get one black man, James Meredith, registered.
00:30:53.000And as you point out, a month before he died, my uncle found out that 75 Americans had been killed in Vietnam and he said, we're getting out and this is not worth another American life.
00:31:07.000And he signed the national security order.
00:31:13.000He was out of Vietnam by the end of 1964, with the first thousand out by December 63.
00:31:22.000And he was then killed on November 22nd.
00:31:25.000And one of the first things Lyndon Johnson did was to reverse that order.
00:31:34.000He was killed by the CIA. And to take it back To something else you were just saying, when President Kennedy was first in office in the same year, in that 1961 that I referred to before, Patrice Lumumba was killed by the CIA, and he was an up-and-coming anti-colonialist leader in Africa.
00:31:57.000And then in December of the same year, and I don't hesitate to say, a CIA assisted, if not run, assassination by a plane crash Also, Dag Hammarskjold wanted the same thing my uncle wanted, which was her developing world to be able to run itself at an end of colonialism.
00:32:22.000Patrice Lumumba, people should understand who he was.
00:32:28.000The Congo, which was the richest country on earth, based upon its mineral resources and its forests and all the other natural resources that it had, he was the only leader with the charisma and the credibility to unite all the diverse tribes of the Congo as the Belgians left.
00:32:49.000And so the Belgians wanted to kill him, and the big multinational mining corporations and financial powers wanted him dead because they wanted to encourage war between all these little tribes and break the Congo down into bite-sized bits that I could say,
00:33:18.000no, we are going to keep the resources for our country and manage them for the people of the Congo.
00:33:43.000Dulles sent poison toothpaste to try to kill him that way.
00:33:47.000But eventually he worked with the Belgian Secret Service to capture Lumumba and then execute him.
00:33:55.000And then they put in Mobudo, who just pillaged that country and became one of the richest people in the world for the next, I don't know, 35 years.