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Good for Sanders! And Shame on Him!

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At a town hall forum in South Carolina a couple of days ago, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was asked by CNN whether he stood by recently surfaced comments he made about the CIA back in 1974, which I wrote about in my blog post yesterday. Back then, Sanders pointed out that the CIA was a dangerous institution that “had to go,” especially since it was accountable only to “right wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.” Unfortunately, Sanders took it back, partly. He responded that he doesn’t believe that the CIA should be abolished because “it plays a role” but at least he went on to point out a couple of the horrific regime-change operations that the CIA orchestrated. The two that Sanders mentioned were Iran and Chile. Consider Iran. All the current U.S. problems with Iran are rooted in the CIA’s destruction of Iran’s democratic political system in 1953. As Sanders pointed out in ...

Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Blacklist

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I wish every American would see the movie Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston, which was released last November. The movie is based on a true story. It depicts how the U.S. anti-communist crusade during the Cold War damaged or ruined the lives of many innocent people, including Hollywood screen-writer Dalton Trumbo and nine others, who became known as the Hollywood Ten. Up until the 1950s, Trumbo had been one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters. Films that he worked on included Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944) and Kitty Foyle (1940), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Like many other leftists during the 1930s, Trumbo had become attracted to communism. One reason is the obvious one: Like many Americans today, he believed that government should play a paternalistic role in society, by taking care of people, regulating economic activity, and managing the economy. Another reason is that Trumbo viewed communism as a counterweight to fascism and Nazism, which were rising in prominence ...

Who Killed JFK?

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In my blog post of yesterday, “Civil Rights and Peace: JFK’s Two Most Dangerous Speeches,” I pointed out that the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA — vehemently disagreed with President Kennedy’s policies regarding the Cold War, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and communism. For his part, Kennedy perceived his detractors to be nut balls. Of course, defenders and promoters of the federal government’s conversion to a national-security state after World War II would say, “But Jacob, it was Lee Harvey Oswald, who was supposedly a devout communist, who killed Kennedy, not the U.S. national-security establishment” In actuality, however, that position has never made any sense. Since Kennedy was the communist sympathizer that right-wing conservatives, the Pentagon, and the CIA perceived him to be, then why would a supposed American communist want to kill him, especially since he would be replaced by a conservative vice-president who was philosophically aligned with the Cold War mindsets of the rightwing ...