The Power Principle - Part II: Propaganda

This film contains controversial subject matter. Interview subjects and creators of some source material may not agree with certain views presented. The power principle is a non-profit documentary and has been released for free. The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. - Alex Carey (Announcer) This is the Kremlin, citadel of Russian communism. Looking at Russia, we might see it as a country to be studied as we study other nations of the world. Yet, we know that Russia today is regarded as a grave threat to our nation to our freedom, to the peace of the world. Why so? What makes it a threat? Looking closer, we see a clue: public display of giant portraits of communist leaders. These leaders, by their actions, have caused the world to stand guard. Here in Russia, you see the reason why so many nations are building up their defenses. Here in Russia, you see the reason why we are spending billions of dollars in defense production, why your family is paying the highest taxes in our history. The leaders of Russia tell us their only concern is the defense of their own nation. Is this so, or are they ambitious for world conquest? (Narrator) Produced in collaboration with the defense department it is one of thousands of propaganda reels created during the Cold War to mold the opinions of the American people. According to the dominant narrative, the Soviet Union, was engaged in a massive conspiracy, ran out of the Kremlin. The goal: world domination. In light of this threat, the United States had no choice but to counter the soviet menace with massive military spending and constant interventions in the internal politics of sovereign states around the world. In Iran, prime minister Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup d'état, after nationalizing oil reserves. In Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz suffered a similar fate after engaging in land reform and supporting union rights. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba was overthrown and executed after initially coming to the United States for help. In Grenada, the New Jewel Movement was removed from power after a military intervention. And in Chile, the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown and replaced with a dictatorship. The interventions continued: in the Dominican Republic, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Juan Bosch. Bosch has written a liberal constitution pledging support for unions, women and the homeless. In Brazil, a CIA-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected labor government of João Goulart. As a contingency plan, the U.S. drew up a scheme to provide a naval task force to intimidate Goulart's supporters. In Bolivia, a CIA-backed military coup overthrew the leftist president Juan Torres. He was replaced by dictator Hugo Banzer who banned all political parties and began a regime of torture and murder. In Argentina, the U.S. backed a military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla which went on to commit massive atrocities. In El Salvador, a U.S. backed junta killed tens of thousands of civilians. The infiltration into the Americas by terrorists and by outside interference and those who aren't just aiming at El Salvador but, I think, are aiming at the whole of Central and possibly later South America and I'm sure eventually North America. His name was Bishop Romero. Unlike so many Christian leaders, he took seriously the idea that you cannot serve both God and money and that it is the duty of every Christian to help uplift the poor. He was murdered by U.S. backed forces, on March 24, 1980. Not content with murdering Romero, the death squads detonated a bomb at his funeral. During the carnage, military aid by the United States was suspended for one month, following the rape and murder of 4 American nuns. Then, it was resumed. The question is: why are we supporting El Salvador? - No, the question was why are we killing priests in El Salvador? - The answer is: we're not. Now, you be quiet. President Cristiani is trying to do a job for democracy and the left wing gorillas must not take over El Salvador. (Narrator) The most notorious intervention by the Reagan administration occurred in Nicaragua, where U.S. intelligence created the Contra army. Am I correct Mr. Secord that from December 1984 until July 1985 you were engaged in selling arms to the Contras for profit? - That's correct. Prior to the rise of the Sandinistas members of the same family had ruled Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Somoza clan had monopolized almost every industry in the country stealing millions from their own people. When Anastasio Somoza (II) was finally overthrown and fled to Miami, a U.S. intelligence report placed his net worth at nearly $100 million. Anastasio had been a particularly sadistic ruler. One of his favorite methods of execution was to throw dissidents from helicopters into the Masaya Volcano. In 1979, the people revolted. The Sandinistas undertook radical reforms. They established the first public education system for children, building thousands of schools and playgrounds. They cut illiteracy to less than 10% of the population. They cut infant mortality by a third. They established a national health service. They abolished the death penalty. They allowed the development of independent cooperatives, increasing food production by over 100% and they enjoyed the support of the vast majority of Nicaragua's people. This revolution was not made by a proletariat party, it was produced by a popular insurrection. Everybody took part in the destruction of the dictatorship. This is not a political party. It's a front who made the revolution and you have in this front different parties: the socialist party, the Christian democratic party, the liberals, the conservatives; all of them took part in this insurrection. Christians took part in this insurrection at the same time as Marxists. The church, many prisoners supported the insurrection, even fought in the insurrection. (Narrator) After a study of 76 developing countries, Oxfam stated that Nicaragua "was exceptional in the strength of that government's commitment to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their act of participation in the development process." But it was not to last. Fearing that the Sandinista model may spread to other countries, former treasury secretary George Schultz called the Sandinistas: "A cancer, Right here on our landmass". Trained in neighboring Honduras as well as back home in Florida the Contras would unleash a rain of terror on the people of Nicaragua. They focused heavily on economic targets. Missions included the blowing up of oil pipelines, the illegal mining of Nicaraguan ports, the burning and bombing of grain silos, farmhouses and machinery and numerous other wanton attacks. It is possible that the Nicaraguan people may have been able to withstand these assaults, but the brutality of the Contras took its toll. So I guess in a way they're counter-revolutionary and God bless them for being that way. I guess that makes them Contras and so it makes me a Contra too. As long as there is breath in this body, I will speak and work, strive and struggle for the cause of the Nicaraguan freedom fighters. (Narrator) A later congressional intelligence committee revealed that the Contras had raped, tortured and killed unarmed civilians, including children and that groups of civilians, including women and children were burned, dismembered, blinded and beheaded. (Journalist) There was an election here in Nicaragua in 1984; I think most people must have forgotten that because there was a brilliant piece of agenda setting up in Washington whereby they certainly decided that the Sandinistas where getting MiGs into the country and a lot of the press corps down here knew that this wasn't true because it had been announced in Washington we were obligated by our news desks to go running up to the port and investigate the arrival of these mythical and non-existent MiGs and the whole election coverage was abandoned. Everybody had covered the entire campaign, but everybody ceased to cover the election itself because Washington very cleverly changed the issue, from the issue of democracy in Nicaragua to the issue of national security. The United States has circumstantial evidence suggesting that as many as a dozen Soviet MiG 21 jets may have arrived today at the Nicaraguan port of Corinto. The Power Principle II. Propaganda (Narrator) Following World War II, American policy planners were faced with a choice: to embrace democracy in all its forms or suppress huge populations around the globe through violence. Metropolitan Cathedral, El Salvador (May 9, 1979) The first major test came from Greece. Rejecting the participatory government created by the anti-nazi resistance during the war both the British and Americans chose to support fascist elements that the resistance had been fighting only months before. The resulting civil war caused over 100,000 deaths. Though seldom acknowledged in official histories, Western elites had long supported fascism in Europe as a means of counteracting the left. Do you think we're going to win this war against Russian communism? - Yes I'm an American Mr. Haslett, I'm not very good a being a pessimist. We can't afford to do anything which isn't honorable. The honor comes before peace, it comes before victory, it comes before anything else. (Narrator) For many American leaders, as well as military and intelligence officers, the Soviet Union and the philosophy of communism were seen as real existential threats. According to Phillip Agee, one of the first CIA whistle-blowers, the reading list at The Farm, an advanced training facility for CIA officers consisted almost entirely of critical books about the Soviet Union. Notably absent was any literature dealing with democratic or libertarian socialism or any text written by socialists themselves. Not even Marx himself was part of the reading list. According to Agee, CIA recruits were taught that communist attempts to set up dictatorships around the world were really "manifestations of Soviet expansion which in turn was determined by the need to maintain power at home. Our country was the real target." One of the most interesting things about propaganda is the relationship between what the propagandist believes and what he or she has to say. What we see is a system of propaganda in which the main propagandists believe what they're saying. They believe in what they're doing or acting for the greater good of humanity or whatever their cause is. What happens in that kind of circumstance is a phenomenon that some people call blowback. In other words, you come up with messages that are aimed at ideologies or world views, you put them out and then the messages comes back to you as though they were truthful, of wars in particular but self-destructive actions of all sorts. When the public sits back and looks at it later they'll ask themselves "How did they get into this foolishness?" Part of it is this cycle of self-deception. When I joined the agency, I was a dedicated Cold Warrior who felt the agency was out there where fighting for liberty, justice, democracy and religion around the world; I believed whole-heartedly in this. I just felt proud everyday that I went to work because I was out at the vanguard of the battle against the international evil empire, international communist evil empire. (Narrator) If the overriding belief system cultivated amongst foot soldiers was that the Soviet Union was fanatically imperialist, others were more skeptical. Speaking of the claim that Soviet Russia was determined to conquer the world, republican Senator Robert Taft remarked that: "No Russian military attack is threatened in Western Europe... I certainly do not pretend to understand the Russian mind, but for 4 years they have shown no intention of making a military advance beyond the zones of influence in Central Europe allotted to them at Yalta." History would prove Taft correct. While occasionally lending token support to liberation movements in the Third World, Soviet foreign policy would remain remarkably conservative throughout the Cold War. The Soviet Union, contrary to what all Americans were taught, was not a revolutionary society at home or abroad. After the initial overthrow of the Tsar and of a capitalist system, they settled into a very conservative pattern. They fought against change. Their main concern was to be on good terms with the West, which would surprise most Americans, but being in good terms with the West was what they wanted. They wanted to pursue what was known as 'socialism in one country', not expanding it. This is Stalin now who was in charge. Trotsky felt otherwise; that's why he had that great dispute with Stalin. He lost that internal battle, that's why he was forced into exile. About the Cold War, one must keep this in mind: we're taught it was a struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; I maintain that as fallacious. The Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Third World, that's who they were fighting against. The native left wing forces who were agitating for very radical change. The Soviet Union, in almost all cases, played either no role whatsoever in these scenarios or a very insignificant role. Whatever they did was highly exaggerated by the Western media. A world communist conspiracy? The Soviet Union was not in a position to bring communism around the world. There were people in their own countries who wanted communist revolutions. The Soviet Union was not behind a... They didn't start the revolution in Cuba, in Vietnam, or in China; they didn't start revolutionaty movements around the world. No, revolutionary movements came out of the needs of people in those countries. When they created revolutionary movements, all of this was attributed to the Soviet Union. When people in Vietnam created their own nationalist movements, first against the French then the U.S., this was seen, or portrayed, I should say, by the American elite which I think understood this was not a part of a world communist conspiracy. They may have justified it to themselves that way, but they also knew something else and they said it in their secret memos which were all revealed if you read the Pentagon papers and the secret defense history of the Vietnam war. Their real intent was to have a base in Vietnam. A base that would be near all the tin, rubber and oil, the rich resources of that area of South-East Asia and also to have another military base in the world. Their motives were not given to the American people, but their motives were clear and really had nothing to do with a world communist conspiracy but with economic and military power. Lying, dirty: its goal of world conquest. Shrewd, godless: its insidious tactics. Murderous, determined: its cunning strategy. It's an international criminal conspiracy! (Narrator) Numerous internal documents from the State Department the Defense Department, the CIA and other Western intelligence services revealed that many top policy planners were well-aware that the international communist conspiracy was a myth. One such document speaking of American designs against Syria notes that: "the USSR has shown no intention of direct intervention in any of the previous Mid-Eastern crises, and we believe it is unlikely that they would intervene." Another declassified document this from the British Foreign Office joint intelligence committee states that: "The Soviet Union will not deliberately start general war or even limited war in Europe", and that: "Soviet foreign policy has been cautious and realistic". (Interpreter) There were so many suspicions on both sides. The West exaggerated the strength of the Soviet Union. We could not possibly have moved into Europe. We were a devastated country. We had lost millions of people. (Narrator) Despite popular belief, post-war doves in the United States were not limited to leftists. Among the advocates of non-interventionism were conservative and libertarian figures that foresaw in determined doctrine a dangerous ideology that would lead to massive empire and self-destruction. Yet the voices of these men and women were a minority, and there were far more powerful interests with a seat at Truman's side. One of these was Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Electric Corporation. GE had garnered enormous profits during World War II and Charlie Wilson saw no reason why the prospect of peace should interfere with his prerogative. He suggested what he called 'a permanent war economy'. It was only one of the General Electric networks, employing 125,000 workers. Westinghouse employed 75,000. General Motors electrical division: 25,000. (Narrator) Echoing Wilson's sentiments was a chorus of voices in the corporate media. Businessweek spoke of military spending as "a way to maintain a generally upward tone" and "inject new strength into the entire economy". On June 25, 1950 President Truman signed National Security Council Document #68. It would not be released to the public for 25 years, but its contents are illuminating. Endless money forms the sinews of war. - Cicero Military expenditures in the United States are the motor of the U.S. economy, and they've been that ever since about 1950. It's worth reviewing the history because that's where this crisis, I think, comes from, this sought for, needed crisis. In early 1950, there was extreme worry at the highest levels of the Truman administration that the United States was likely to return to the conditions of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Until early in 1950, the decision was taken that this domestic, economic problem was going to be solved through militarism; that is through rearmament in the United States and through U.S. financing of the rearmament of Western Europe, particularly Western Germany. The document which provides the analysis of the world at that time, the U.S. place in the world and the internal situation in the United States was top secret for 25 years. In 1975, it was accidentally or through error, released and published. It is known as NSC-68, NSC standing for National Security Council. It was written by Paul Nitze and it is a very detailed document. The main operative conclusion though was this, as quoted from the document: "The United States and other free nations will within a period of a few years at most experience a decline in economic activity of serious proportions unless more positive governmental programs are developed." The solution adopted by those 'more positive governmental programs' was expansion of the military. He mastered all the hype and emotion he could, and Truman said: "Our homes, our nation: all the things that we believe in are in great danger. This danger has been created by the rulers of the Soviet Union." In his speech, he also called for massive increases in military spending for U.S. and European forces quite apart from the needs in Korea. There was no threat from the Soviet Union. They were still rebuilding from the rubble of World War II in which they had lost 20 million people. They were no threat but they were manufactured from 1950 on, from the time of Korea on, as a great threat to the United States. And that became the justification for this program, which Truman, through manipulation of the Korean war, had been able finally to get through Congress. The result was that in the first 2 years that is the two years between 1950 and 1952, the U.S. military budget more than tripled from $13 billion in 1950 to $44 billion in 1952. During the same two-year period, U.S military forces doubled to 3.6 million people under arms. This was the beginning of the permanent war economy in the United States. The Korean war, by the way, went on 3 more years after it could have ended. In the end, 34,000 U.S. were dead, more or less, more than 100,000 wounded, and the total casualty count was in the millions. It is worth recalling that, because from 1950 on the Soviet threat was the justification; the justification for the permanent war economy and the justification for these enormous military expenditures. (Narrator) Few decades after NSC-68, 15 giant corporations would swallow up two thirds of the 40 billion dollars a year spent on the Pentagon. Five decades later, the armament industry would take up over 50% of all discretionary spending. The Pentagon system came to function not only as a means of waging war but as a Keynesian mechanism designed to transfer public wealth to private industry. The myth of the free market is a very interesting kind of mythology. I'll take the U.S. economy because it's the dominant one, but it's more or less the same everywhere. The U.S. economy relies crucially on the dynamic state sector. Where we're sitting, MIT, it's almost impossible to miss. Things like computers and the Internet complicated software, information technology, lasers microelectronics, pharmaceuticals: it's developed at MIT and places like this under government funding, that means at taxpayer expense and for long periods. Computers and the Internet are supposed to be at the heart of the high tech economy now; they were in the public sector for about 30 years before they were handed over to private enterprise to make profit from. Bill Gates was living off of public funding. The basic structure of software, computers, the Internet, etc. was developed, and he managed to use it to create a quasi-monopoly. The world of entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice is virtually nothing, except at the marketing end. The same is true with the pharmaceutical industries, etc. Actually, at MIT, you see it very strikingly: in the '50s and '60s, MIT was almost completely funded by the Pentagon. It's not because it was doing war work, it's because it was creating the basis of the future economy; the Pentagon understands that. So, public funds are channeled to research and development for ultimate profit under the pretext that it's the defenders of us therefore the public pays the cost. The way the system works is cost and risk are socialized: that's for the public; profit is privatized. It's a very convenient system and it's called the free market. But you have to really think about what happened most recently with 2008, the beginning of the meltdown of the American economy what ultimately happened is that we took care of those of were driving business interests, we took care of Wall Street on the backs of Main Street. We continue to do this today because we have bought in and persuaded ourselves that it's business that is the most protected sector. In many respects, they are allowed to make mistakes and when they make mistakes, these financial firms... Who pays for it? We do! The taxpayer is paying for it. When a worker makes a mistake on an assembly line, the worker pays for it! He might lose his job or maybe will get demoted. But that's an individual result, whereas at the business level, this is all partly feeding into these American ideals of who we are. The business sector or the military sector often work very much interlocked. There's still no other country on the planet that is so militarized as is the United States. It's almost like this 'sleeper effect'. It's often what we say about propaganda, the fish isn't aware of the water surrounding it. It's the same thing with this pro-military, pro-business type of mentality that we have, almost knee-jerk support in that it's our surround sound. We're just not aware of anything that's countering that surround sound. The Eisenhower statement: 'military-industrial complex' is just a continuation of the rise of the corporate sector. The rise of the corporate sector in the 20th century is probably the most... If I were doing a top 10 list of propaganda events, that would be at the very top. We see it now: its tentacles have really taken over through into entertainment, into virtually every sector of our society including education; we've had a corporatization of education. What results is that in everything you do, there has to be a bottom line effect to it. "What's the profit from this? How can we profit from this?" I think once we had declared a Cold War, we often tried to make the building blocks that would support this continuation. What you have happen is a lot of people will show up with their own vested interests in this industry. It's almost like any industry can be the fashion or entertainment industry. This is a war industry. (Announcer) Trident 1: a powerful new three stage missile with a range of 4,000 nautical miles capable of delivering multiple warheads to widely scattered targets. Someday, jet airplanes will be invisible to radar waves. (Announcer) Imagine man-made moons helping us to communicate. Tomorrow, electronic highways in the sky will guide... [Radio chatter] (Announcer) Year after year, Lockheed Martin takes the most amazing ideas about the future, and makes them fly. (Narrator) The new system of perpetual war would create economic growth, but a special kind of economic growth. Instead of developing more extensive social programs, the government would use tax dollars to enrich the already rich. At the same time, America would become a full-fledged empire. CIA whistleblower John Stockwell would describe the Cold War enemy as follows: "Far more Catholics than communists, far more Buddhists than communists; most of them couldn't give you an intelligent definition of communism or of capitalism. My expertise as CIA, Marine Corps, three CI secret wars, I had a position in the National Security Council. In 1975 as the chief of the Angola task force, running the secret war in Angola, it was the 3rd CI secret war I was a part of. The national security law creating the National Security Council and the CIA was passed in 1947. The CIA was given this charter to perform such other duties and functions as might be necessary to the national security interests and given a vague authority to protect its sources and methods. I think it was in the mid-'80s that I coined this phrase 'the Third World War' because in my research, I realized that we were not attacking the Soviet Union and the CI's activities, we were attacking people in the Third World. I'm going to, quickly, in the interest of time, give you a little sense of what that means, this Third World war. Basically, I believe, in terms of loss of life and human destruction, it's the third bloodiest war in all of history. They undertake to run operations in every corner of the globe. They also undertook the license of operating just totally above and beyond U.S. laws. They had a license, if you will, to kill but also they also took that to a license to smuggle drugs a license to do all kinds of things to other people and other societies in violation of international or our law and every principle of nations working together for a healthier and more peaceful world. Meanwhile, they battled to convert the U.S. legal system in such a way that it would give them control of our society. We have massive documentation of what they call 'the secret wars of the CIA'. We don't have to guess or speculate. We had the Church Committee investigate them. In 1975, it gave us our first really in depth, powerful look inside this structure. Senator Church said in the 14 years before he did his investigation, that he found they had run 900 major operations and 3,000 minor operations. If you extrapolate that over the whole period of the 40-odd years that we've had a CIA, you come up with 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations. Every one of them illegal, everyone of them disruptive of the lives and societies of other peoples and many of them bloody and gory beyond comprehension, almost. Extensively, we manipulated and organized the overthrow of functioning constitutional democracies in other countries. We organized secret armies and directed them to fight in just about every continent in the world. We encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight, people like the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua. the Kurds in the Middle-East, the Hmong in South-East Asia. We have organized and funded death squads and we still do in countries around the world like the treasury police in El Salvador which are responsible for most of the killing of the 50,000 people just in the '80s and there were 70,000 before that. Trying to summarize this third world war that the CI, the U.S national security complex with the military all interwoven in it in many different ways has been waging... Let me put it this way: the best heads that I coordinate with studying this thing, we count at least 6 million people who have been killed in this long 40-year war that we've waged against the people of the Third World. These are not Soviets, we have not been parachuting teams into the Soviet Union to kill, hurt and maim people. Especially not since 1954, when they developed an actual capability of dropping atomic weapons on the United States. These are all people of the Third World, they're people of countries like the Congo, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Indonesia, Nicaragua, where conspicuously, neither they, nor their governments have the capability of doing any physical hurt to the United States. They don't have ICBMs, armies or navies, they could not hurt us if they wanted to, there's rarely been any evidence that they really wanted to; that in fact is perhaps the whole point: if they had had ICBMs we probably wouldn't have done the things to them for fear of retaliation. Cheap shots, if you will, killing people of other countries of the world who cannot defend themselves under the guise of secrecy and under the rubric of national security. I'm John Wayne. "Is there any better or equal hope in the world", Lincoln asked, "than the ultimate justice of the people?" We Americans believe there is not. The stonework of our national life is made of this belief. We believe in many things, but this belief that man is a responsible being bears out our own unique stamp as a nation. Imperialism is the process of empire. It's more than just dominion and control. Imperialism is when the dominant interests of the empire country go out and they expropriate the land, the natural resources, the labor, and the markets of another country for the benefit of the rich of the imperial country and sometimes for the benefit of a collaborating, controlling class in the colonized country. Imperialism today no longer means direct colonization. You have what's called neo-imperialism, which involves not taking over the country, planting the flag and conquering it but it involves simply moving in and dominating its economic and political life. The fundamental contradiction in world society over the last few centuries has been between the haves and the have nots, between a dispossessed majority in the world disproportionately concentrated in the Third World and the former colonized world and the powerful states and the elites that benefit and control these powerful states in this world system. Depending on what moment in the last few centuries we've been talking about, there's always been one or another way in which that contradiction had been ideologically framed. It was ideologically framed as the manifest destiny, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and its destiny to rule the world before there was any such thing as communism or the Soviet Union. Then it was framed as anarchists that were going to create an anarchic society before the Soviet Union came into existence. During the Cold War, the principal way in which the war of the rich and powerful against the poor majority of the world was framed as a struggle against communism. Then the Cold War comes to an end and it's a struggle against international drug trafficking. Then we had 9/11 and now the principal lines of battle are ideologically expressed as a war against terrorism. So there's been one or the other justification or legitimation for the domination of a small minority of humanity over a majority of humanity. What has not changed is that system of domination. What has changed is how it is justified and legitimated. The U.S. has intervened, coup d'états have taken place, wars of intervention have unfolded before, during and after the Cold War. So we can now attribute the nature of this global system to a mid-20th century battle between a communist and a capitalist system. A lot of people seem to think that American imperialism is of recent vintage, but actually it goes way back. You can argue that it goes back at least certainly to the Spanish-American war and the takeover of the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, but you can also find it going much further back really its roots perhaps in the Monroe doctrine. By the 1920s, we see an article in The Nation magazine called 'The Republic of Brown Brothers' and this was about a bank that would later be... one of its partners would be Prescott Bush the grandfather of George W. Bush and how they were using the U.S. government, particularly the military, the Marines, etc. to go into various countries where the financial interests of private corporations were threatened and essentially neutralize or even remove governments, so there's a long history of this. Always (we are being told) serving the interest of the American people? Questionable. Whether it served the interests of these corporations? Always. Again, we go back to Haiti. The best example historically has been Haiti. The history of Haiti is the history of the world capitalist system. You study what's happened in Haiti, you study the struggle of the Haitian people and you've studied the history of humanity for the last 500 years. What is today the country of Haiti was the first country that Columbus touched down in and conquered. The conquest of 1492 and on which was initiated by Columbus opened up this era of world capitalism that we've gone through now for the last 519 years. Haiti became and very quickly the indigenous in Haiti were completely eliminated in a genocide ; the indigenous basically disappeared from Haiti and the Spanish began to import African slaves to run sugar plantations which now spread all over the island of Haiti. Later on, France and Spain competed for control over Haiti. The French kicked out the Spanish and turned Haiti into this gem of its colonial system. The vast majority of the wealth of France was now generated by 400,000 slaves in Haiti run by a few thousand slave masters. So the Haitians revolt. The Haitian slaves began an uprising in 1793. In 1802, they successfully kick out the French colonialists and set up the first independent and free republic in the Americas. I say independent and free because the U.S. sets up an independent republic in 1776 but not a free one, one based on slavery, in half of this U.S. republic. As a result of setting up an independent and free republic on the basis of the one successful slave rebellion in the Americas, the powers that be in the world capitalist system unleash on Haiti terror and misery and punishment the likes the world has never seen. We feel that Haiti's historic handlebars are in our hands. It is like a two-wheeled bike and we are the ones steering it. The corrupt always want us to turn the bicycle this way that will make us even more miserable, so we fall into the abyss. But we say no to this. And we say yes to the left movement, which we don't have now. In 1986, the Haitian people have another uprising. This is 300 years... almost 300 years after their first uprising against slavery, they throw out baby duck, and after a series of fits and bouts there's free elections held in 1991. 1990 excuse me. The person that wins those elections is Aristide. Aristide begins to transform these structures that have been molded over nearly 500 years: the structures of colonialism, of economic backwardness and of domination. What's the result? The army stages a coup d'état with the support of the United States and of France and the other great powers in the world. Aristide is forced to flee. He comes back in, in 1994, he's not allowed to really make any of the substantial changes that he was trying to make. He finishes up his term. He's then reelected, a number of years later, in 2000 and he's not allowed to finish up his term. He, again, tries to make just the mildest of changes in these structures that had been put in place over several centuries and he's removed from power in another U.S. invasion. This time the Marines literally arrive in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, remove him and send him into exile in Africa. When you ask about first and Third Worlds, you're really asking about how this world capitalist system came into being and how the vanquished became the Third World and how the victors became the First World and these global power relations are being sustained right up through to the 21st century. These people are saying that they'd rather get shot instead of move, so be ready for some resistance. The Haitian police said they're going to take them in and charge them with trespassing and suspicious activity. Jamaica give me job, they give me money... - Back up! Tell them to get into a single file line. Come on, let's go! Duncan, number one... Don't mess with me, let's go! We Americans are always at our best when we hear and heed the cries of others. When confronted with massive human suffering, Americans have always stepped up and answered the call to help. But there's never been anything on the scale of human tragedy in our own hemisphere, like what we're now witnessing in Haiti. Today, President Clinton and I are joining together to appeal to you with real urgency. Give now, and lives will be saved. Thank you. (Narrator) Bill Clinton and George Bush would later help to organize relief efforts after a disastrous earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. Yet, if it weren't for the actions on Clinton and Bush while in office, the Haitian people may have been able to create infrastructure that would have significantly reduced the terrible human toll of the earthquake. As it turned out, the aid itself was grossly insufficient. As was Serbia and more recently Libya, events in Haiti were sold to the public as humanitarian intervention. This technique has long been used as a justification for imperialism. Originally, the idea was to civilize the savages, then to promote what was termed 'democracy'. In the early 20th century, General Smedley Butler described with remarkable candor his actual role in the U.S. army: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." Butler summed up his message with four simple words: "War is a racket." Perhaps the greatest propaganda feat in modern history has been the profound ignorance of the American public of the atrocities committed in their name. This did not occur by accident. Diplomatic historian Richard Immerman observes of President Eisenhower that: "[He] took it as an article of faith that America's strength and security depended on its maintaining access to, indeed control of global markets and resources, particularly in the Third World." He also notes that: "Eisenhower rejected the notion of an international communist conspiracy as the product of paranoid imagination." Unfortunately for the American public, a paranoid imagination was exactly what Cold War propagandists desired in their target audience. John Forster Dulles, brother of CIA director Allen Dulles proclaimed after World War II that: "In order to make the country bear the burden, we have to create an emotional atmosphere akin to wartime psychology. We must create the idea of a threat from without." Senator Arthur Vandenberg was more blunt. In 1947, he advised President Truman to "scare the hell out of the American people." And that's exactly what they proceeded to do. "Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." - General Douglas MacArthur Columbia Broadcasting System (October 30, 1938) - "The War of the Worlds" Ladies and Gentleman, here's the latest bulletin from the intercontinental radio news. Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 PM, a huge flaming object believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty two miles from Trenton. We have dispatched a special mobile unit to the scene... ...We take you now to Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, at the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. ...I guess that's it. Just a minute! Something's happening! Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific! The top is beginning to rotate like a screw! The thing must be hollow! [chatter] Ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it... ...saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. The monster or whatever it is can hardly move. It seems weighed down by possibly gravity or something... Wait a minute, something is happening; A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they're turning into flame! [Screaming] The barns... the gas tanks of automobiles... it's spreading everywhere. It's coming this way.... (Narrator) It is perhaps the single most famous radio broadcast in human history. The night before Halloween, in 1938, thousands of people became panicked when Orson Welles interrupted a regularly scheduled program to broadcast a fictitious news account of alien invaders. Though many listeners found the idea of an alien invasion ridiculous they were equally frightened at the prospect the Germans were invading under the guise of little gray men. One of the reasons for the effectiveness of the broadcast was Welles' use of late breaking news bulletins which audiences associated with updates of nazi aggression in Europe. Radio station's "Attack by Mars" panics thousands I'm quite surprised that the H.G Wells classic which is the original for many fantasies about invasions by mythical monsters from the planet Mars, I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories should have such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners. (Narrator) The public's response to the broadcast was of intense interest to communication theorists and social psychologists. One example was the Princeton Office of Radio Research established by a grant from the Rockefeller foundation. It created a 10-page interview questionnaire given to several study groups. The data was used to write a report entitled "Invasion from Mars: a study in the psychology of panic". It was studied up one wall and down the other by various social scientists trying to get a handle on what is the impact of radio broadcasting and most particularly what is the impact of fear in radio broadcasting, to what extent are either individuals or crowds of people affected by things they hear on the radio. This was of intense interest in the United States. It's important to keep in mind that over across the ocean, during exactly the same time period the nazis had come to power in Germany. Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister, was highly effective at using radio to shape crowds, to shape political movements, this type of thing. The common thread though is that political elites in both countries were deeply interested in how to use the medium to advance their own interests. If you step back and think about it, this is not a particularly radical point of view or radical analysis. This is pretty much the way the world works. Elites in the United States responded in different ways because on the one hand, they were worried that if crowds of people "took things into their own hands" that that would be dangerous! On the other hand, in some ways, it provided great promise because it held out the possibility as that if you could figure out a way to turn that key, then the crowds would do what you wanted them to do. (Narrator) If the 'War of the Worlds' broadcast demonstrated the power of radio to instill terror in the public, it was the Nuremberg rallies that would perform the same function for the moving image. The idea for the rallies came from Ernst Huntsstengel who had previously attended Harvard University and written several songs for Harvard's football team. Huntsstengel proposed using Harvard pep rallies as models for a demonstration of nazi solidarity. What emerged was an awesome display of obedience to power. In 1934, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl chronicled one of the mass spectacles in her film: "Triumph des Willens" or "Triumph of the will". Her artful techniques earned acclaim not only from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, but film critics throughout the world. Ultimately however, Ms. Riefenstahl's work presents but one piece of the nazi puzzle. Weltanschauungskrieg is german and it means 'worldview warfare'. The activists who were most committed to nazi principles would confront other parts of this society and say: "You have the wrong worldview." So this worldview warfare was a way in which they went about consolidating their hold on German society. In nazifying universities, in nazifying companies or cultural institutions or churches; that was worldview warfare. You could call it propaganda, but it wasn't propaganda in the narrow sense of the term like simply radio broadcasts or something. This is not just publicity. This is not just persuasion in the sense of what somebody on the radio has to say, this is a whole range of techniques. From religious or pseudo-religious techniques, evangelism to exploiting the psychology of fear, to exploiting tensions between races and ethnic groups, use of terror, use of violence: it's a whole range of applied manipulation of people. When war finally did break out between nazi Germany and the U.S., "Wild Bill" Donovan who was a Wall Street guy who was great friends with the President who was strongly anti-nazi Germany... He was not a pro-nazi ideologue, but he looked at what the nazis where doing with this worldview warfare. He believed that it was successful and so he tried to come up with an American version of the same sort of thing. While the nazis would appeal to German pride, German racial pride, Bill Donovan attempted to apply to American pride, Americanism, without such an explicit racial component. For example, the nazi version would appeal to a desire for a strong leader. The American version would appeal to a desire for a legitimate leader. Some sort of national consent, national unity, etc. I'm not saying that these are the same things. What I'm saying is that these are two different approaches to a single problem or to a similar problem. (Worker) We have grown used to our workplaces, factories and building sites looking ugly and filthy. Now there will be a change! Our workplaces will be beautiful and worthy of us. This is no superficial matter. Entrepreneurs must realize that even more important a factory's machines are its people. It's a question of a new lease on life. It concerns creative German people's joy in their work. (Announcer) We are shareholders in the greatest enterprise on Earth. The United States of America, unlimited. Our strength lies in the character of our people: young in heart, independent in thought and nature, skilled of hand. American enterprise has harnessed fire, water, wind sun and soil, and produce an abundance of everything. (Narrator) During the Cold War and beyond, the moving image would transmit the American Weltanschauungskrieg to millions of citizens through small flickering screens. Television is the perfect propaganda medium because television really appeals to emotion. It's a very powerful medium. People see something on television, we actually internalize it. If you grew up in the '50s and somebody says what did you think of Ward Cleaver? Anyone who watched television can picture in their minds Ward Cleaver as the father of young Beaver in "Leave it to Beaver" as clearly as we can see our own parents. - You know dad, it's funny. - What's funny? - Well, whenever we cook inside, mamma always does the cooking, but whenever we cook outside, you always do it. How come? - It's sort of traditional, I guess. You know, they say a woman's place is in the home. I suppose as long as she's in the home, she might as well be in the kitchen. I would say that the TV news has shown itself to be probably the worst source of information across the board. There's been some interesting studies that document this. For one thing, if you ever look at transcripts from TV news programs, they actually look sort of weird without the visuals and sometimes it's even hard to get the gist of the story, you need the whole gestalt. But the first thing you notice is that there's very little information actually imparted in TV news, it's not a long script. But after the first Gulf War for instance, the University of Massachusetts Amherst did a study to see how public opinion was affected by news coverage of the war. What they found was that people who watched the most coverage of the first Gulf War were convinced that they knew the most about the war were the most likely to support the U.S. war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuweit. But an actual test, when asked to give factual responses to questions about the war actually tended to know the least and get the most information wrong. (Narrator) When it came to foreign policy in the post-war era there was one central theme: the Russians were coming. Collier's Magazine called it... "The Nightmare that threatens the world!" [Scream] "Invasion of the body snatchers" (Announcer) But some will get through to your home. This, our country and all its people could be in danger of nuclear attack. It can't happen here? Well, this is what it looks like! A light flash and a heat wave, then the blast tears away part of each roof. Let's see it again, in stop motion. THEY'RE HERE ALREADY, YOU'RE NEXT! (Announcer) It's a happy, go spending world, reflected in the windows of the suburban shopping centers where they go to buy. (Narrator) At least as important as news programming in molding public opinion has been the motion picture. Though Hollywood is popularly regarded as a left wing conspiracy, the movie industry has always had an ambivalent relationship with power. During World War I, moving images were used to mobilize the public in support of war. During World War II, the trend continued, but with considerably more star power. In 1956, the joint chiefs of staff met with John Ford, John Wayne and Merian Cooper to brainstorm the subject of what they called 'militant liberty'. By the time "Top Gun" was released in 1986, the American Navy was setting up recruiting booths outside theaters. The Pentagon routinely loans out military hardware to film projects. Here are a few recent examples: - The U.S. government just asked us to save the world. - Beam me up, Scotty: (Reporter) In the streets tonight in Moscow, the president issued a direct challenge to terrorist nations across the world... What are the risks involved in such a bold policy? For your consideration: the Jericho. (Narrator) Sir Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down" was given similar support. This might help to explain why the character John Grimes is not shown raping a 12-year-old Somali girl as he did in the mission portrayed in the film. Nobody asked to me a hero. It just sometimes turns out that way. (Narrator) Equally revealing are films that were turned down by the Pentagon: (Character) I love the smell of Napalm in the morning. I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. (Narrator) Under the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels advanced a theory that media should be uniform in principle but polyform in nuances. In this manner, the illusion of plurality and openness could be maintained when in fact, the same basic message was being broadcast from all frequencies. Party comrades, a good government can no more exist without propaganda than good propaganda without a good government. (Narrator) In the United States, dissident voices would be tolerated but at the same time marginalized by what became known as the mainstream media. During the 1950s, Soviets themselves marveled at the uniformity of American public opinion. After Stalin's death in the '50s there was a thaw, a détente in the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. During that time, about two dozen apparatchiki were invited from the Soviet Union to come to the United States for a couple of weeks and run free, just looking at our institutions. The Senate, going to the Senate debates, the Supreme Court, high schools, newspapers, see what our institutions are like. At the end of that, they got them all together. Of course, they were very excited because the idea was to show the Soviets what a truly pluralistic society it was. The response they got was a little different than the one they expected. What the Soviet apparatchiki said to them was: "How do you do it? How have you created such a degree of conformity that everybody repeats the same thing over and over again?" The American politicians weren't too happy with this answer, but it's larger than truth, there isn't much of a spectrum of opinion. So what you have is, people believing that the democrat and republican parties are fundamentally different whereas the truth is, to quote Gore Vidal: "What you've got is one political party with two right wings." These are differences in style, not differences in substance, but Americans get very excited about these minor differences. What's going on then is this brainwashing. Certainly, corporate media today is very similar to in terms of presenting stories that support the government like Pravda was under the Soviet Union. The difference is that the people in Russia they knew that Pravda was an organ of the State. In the United States, we still think it's a free press. Essentially, the corporate media is in the entertainment business. Most of content is keeping us... Updates on personalities, movie stars or scary events, some terrible crime somewhere that gets broadcast all over the country. Very little analysis in terms of working people or what the powerful are doing, what kind of decisions they're making... It was the same in the Soviet Union: Pravda wasn't exposing the communist party or corruption inside of it. They just weren't able to do that. In the U.S. you might get somebody, a single person identified, but you don't look at it systematically or the problems that are addressed in terms of class structure, race, or gender problems in a major way. It almost comes full circle back to Edward Bernays and to Walter Lippman because these were men who were the founders, in many respects, of my discipline in communications, journalism and public relations. But they all really touted the need to have a professional, managerial intelligentsia: the best and the brightest who knew better than the rest of us that the masses as a whole were just not smart enough, were driven more by impulse and emotion and what Walter Lippman 'a bewildered herd'. You can't trust the people as a whole so you have to create a very small elite. You wonder now, looking back, was the Cold War just this perpetuation of controlling people's minds in order to really benefit this minority elite class? Who's up there? Who's running the pictures? (Narrator) To help us understand why the message conveyed through American media in the post-war era was so remarkably uniform, it is useful to examine exactly who was controlling the message. During World War II, the field of psychological warfare grew from a minor component in the government's arsenal to a flagship weapon. Yet this weapon was not deactivated after the war. Many key personnel from World War II psyops divisions went on to play major roles in the allegedly free and independent American press. The country has been demobilized, at least to some extent, after the war. What happens is leading lights in the OSS for example included the publishers of Life Magazine key editorial people in Reader's Digest, Time-Life. William Paley, president of CBS was an OSS man during the war and worked specifically with the psychological warfare side of the U.S. effort in World War II. He goes back to Wall Street and is president of CBS and CBS then, under his leadership, works hand in glove with what were CIA propaganda operations such as Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, etc., and with basically both the overt and the clandestine side of U.S. military operations throughout the Vietnam period and later. Edward Barrett, who was chief of psywar during the early 1950s, was a noteworthy media figure in his own right and later became the dean of the Columbia graduate school of journalism. There are many other examples along these lines. What it points to, and you can read this in their memoirs, is a network of people whose relationship was forged during World War II and then in a common political warfare effort against a specific enemy: nazi Germany or imperial Japan that took that sensibility about media being able to operate both in war and peace and use that and forge that as mainstream media in the United States in the wake of World War II. (Otis Pike) Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation American journal? - We do have people who submit pieces to American journals. (Pike) Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks? This I think gets into the details, Mr. Chairman, that I'd like to get into in executive session. (Pike) Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to the national news services: AP and UPI? Again, I think we're getting into the kind of detail, Mr. Chairman, that I'd prefer to handle in executive session. (Narrator) One of the most important figures in the new media empire was Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine. An early supporter of fascism and a member of the elite secret society "Skull and Bones", Luce has written in 1941 of an "American century" in which the United States had the right to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." (Announcer) Foreign big business was weakened during the war, and today American big business is the strongest. And they have a dream to dominate the world. They call their dream 'the American century'. The American century means the century of big business instead of the century of the common people. (Narrator) After the fall of the Soviet Union, Luce's theory would be rebranded as "the project for a new American century". The latter document laid out a program for full-spectrum dominance of the U.S. military across the entire planet. Following in Luce's footsteps was C.D. Jackson would had served as deputy chief at the psychological warfare division, a supreme headquarters allied expeditionary force. After the war, Jackson became managing director of Time-Life International. According to journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame Jackson was "Henry Luce's personal emissary to the CIA". Jackson would play a significant role in what became known as 'Operation Mockingbird': a blatantly unconstitutional program by the new intelligence agency to buy influence at major media outlets. Media assets were created at ABC, NBC, CBS, Associated Press, Reuters Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard and virtually every other major news organization. We had been contacted by the CIA. By the time I became the head of the whole news and public affairs operation in 1954, the shifts had been established. (Narrator) Bernstein reported in 1977 that for over 25 years, more than 400 reporters had willingly carried out intelligence assignments for the CIA. The very important critiques of the corporate media and how it functions as part of the establishment need to be supplemented by an understanding of the role of infiltration of the media itself. These are not mutually exclusive: while on the one hand you certainly have the institutional problems with a media owned by wealthy, powerful people, deciding what information we ought to have, but on another level, you actually have this operational capacity in which intelligence agencies have infiltrated and influenced people within the media and the reporting ranks themselves. There are many examples of this, even Carl Bernstein of the famed Woodward and Bernstein duo, wrote an article after he left the [Washington] Post, documenting the role of the intelligence agencies in putting people into news organizations including the Washington Post, Newsweek and many other of the brand names. If you look at the relationship between media organizations and national security agencies in the early Cold War years the characteristic there was: there are two different bodies of people two different groups, but they have a common mission in mind; a common conception of what patriotism was a common conception of that the enemy was, etc. It was really rather simple for CIA agents to go to their old buddies and say: "The country needs you, and here's what we want you to do", or alternately if one of their buddies in the media was getting too out of line as to the discussion of what should U.S. policy about Yugoslavia be or other Cold War era controversies of that sort to have a meeting with them, sit down and say: "We think you're out of line. You're doing a bad thing, because you're raising this question and we think you should not do that." There was that type of social pressure in cooperation. Let's fast forward to the present day. That same type of relationship does still exist. What happened here is a psyops campaign, an incredible government propaganda campaign whereby Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clarke, the head of public relations for the Pentagon, designed a program to recruit at least 75 former military officers as your report said, most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors and they insert them beginning in 2002, before the attack on Iraq was even launched into the major networks to manage the messages, to be surrogates, and that's the words that are actually used. Message multipliers for the Secretary of Defense and for the Pentagon. This program continues right up to now. - Is it that the essence of what the Pentagon did was illegal? Yes, what they did was illegal. The Pentagon might contest that, but we've had various laws on the books going back to the 1920s; it is illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize citizens in this way. In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign. What we need is congressional investigation of not just this Pentagon military analyst program but all the rest of the deception and propaganda that came out of the Bush administration and out of the Pentagon that allowed them to sell and manage this war. - We want to keep, for the purposes of this discussion, focused on this particular report. And the war on Iraq goes forward for 3, 4, 5 years before questions that were obvious even before the war began began to be discussed in the public debate. (Narrator) Illustrating the shared mindset between the state and elite media institutions was Katharine Graham who led the Washington Post for over two decades. In a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at agency headquarters, she remarked: "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." Meanwhile, the military was conducting its own experiments in public opinion, military mobilization, propaganda and related fields. Approximately one billion a year was spent on these endeavors, an incredible amount for the time period. One of the most revealing internal propaganda efforts was "Project Revere". It entailed the dropping of millions of leaflets by American bombers not over a newly occupied territory, but over Washington state Idaho, Montana, Utah and Alabama. To have airplanes drop leaflets in Louisiana and in the northern U.S. states saying essentially: "Warning, this could be a Russian bomb. We need to have people to sign up for watch centers that will watch the skies for Russian bombers and in this way we will protect ourselves. Call such and such a number, and you can join this team." They would dump millions of these leaflets on rural communities and small towns in these areas of the country. Then, the scholars would go in there and see: how many people called the watch center? What happened when kids picked it up? Did the kids take the leaflet to their parents or did they just throw it away? If a parent picked it up, did they take it to their church or school or business, or did they just keep it at home? So this is all studied out. This was both a study of how propaganda works and it was also a propaganda event in its own right that was aimed at the American public at the height of the Cold War with a message of potential fear and devastation to see how they would respond. The realities of warfare at that time were that Russian planes could not reach Europe, often, much less the United States. They simply did not have that capability, the technical capability, and the military organizations knew it. But nevertheless, the projected fear of war was used to, eventually, push the bomber gap into becoming a major political issue of the era and a major source of funding for the agencies that were running this propaganda study in the United States. Continuously, the American elite had to keep the American public frightened about a foreign invasion, in this case communism. The American Congress also had to be kept intimidated. There was always some gap they could point to between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. There was, in some sequence or other, a bomber gap a laser gap, a missile gap; there was always some gap which, if we didn't go in and overcome would lead to a terrible war where we would be at a great disadvantage. That was the idea behind these gap warnings. There always had to be some warning or some great danger abroad. Of course, that hasn't changed at all today. Let there be no doubt. America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. [Applause] We believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons. There is no question that Hussein possesses biological and chemical weapons We know where they are, they're in the area around Tikrit and Bagdad. The Soviet Union has been busy, they've been busy in terms of their level of effort, in terms of the actual weapons they've been producing and in terms of expanding production rates. They've been busy in terms of expanding their institutional capability to produce additional weapons at additional rates. They've been busy in terms of expanding their capability to increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons. I'm not saying with certainty that the Russians are coming, I'm saying the trains are here. I'm not saying the Russians are 10 feet tall, I'm saying they used to be 5 foot 3 and now they're 5'9'½" and growing. Year after year, they've been demonstrating that they have steadiness of purpose, that they're purposeful about what they're doing. Now your question is: "What ought one to be doing about that?" (Narrator) If, for domestic purposes, the Cold War was largely an exercise in propaganda, there can be no doubt that military leaders were sincerely frightened of the Soviet Union in one essential aspect: it was the one rival that had the ability to approach the U.S. in terms of nuclear firepower. The incessant fear-mongering of potential nuclear war became a self-fulfilling prophecy when on October 8th, 1962, U.S. reconnaissance revealed missile bases being built in Cuba for stationing of Soviet missiles. The privileged, the parasites, and the sons of parasites want to hoist the [shameful flag of crime]... End of Part 2