02-11-2008, 10:03 PM
The dark game of M.S. Arnoni and The Minority of One
John J. Miller, “InDigestible: The decline of a great magazine,” The National Review, 11 February 2002:
http://www.nationalreview.com/11feb02/mi...1102.shtml
Let me begin with a proposition. Between January 1961 and December 1963, someone who read only the New York Times would have been better informed about President Kennedy’s attitudes, policies and domestic opposition – most notably and catastrophically, from the CIA - than someone who read, in the same period, only M.S. Arnoni’s The Minority of One (TMO). Absurd? Far from it, as we shall see.
To illustrate the fog of selective amnesia in which Arnoni’s organ has been enveloped by its post-December 1963 coverage of the coup which claimed Kennedy’s life and America’s future: We remember Eric Norden’s piece “The Death of A President,” which dominated the January 1964 edition of TMO; we rarely, if ever, see mention of the same author’s preposterous caricature of the Kennedy, a mere month before, in the magazine’s December 1963 edition, as a hard-line racist:
This was anything but an isolated instance. Here is Arnoni in June 1961 in a piece entitled, “Cloak and Dagger: Another ‘Peace Corps,’”:
Two months earlier, in April 1961, Kennedy’s Peace Corps proposal died a death at Arnoni’s hands: “It is indeed tragic that a basically wonderful idea has so little chance of actual success just because it may be entrusted into the wrong hands.” The major threats to it? The CIA? The FBI? No: Political vetting; and Sargent Shriver.
In June, and again in July, 1961, first Arnoni, then a contributor, highlighted the most egregious horror of the Bay of Pigs affair: Kennedy’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 20 April.
Commenting on that awful speech – unquestionably one of the worst of Kennedy’s career - Arnoni assured readers that “what Messrs. Eisenhower and Dulles often voiced as propagandistic slogans, Mr. Kennedy seems determined to pursue literally.” Kennedy had “put the world on notice that his Administration…will defend…America’s interests irrelevant of any moral or political merits or legal restrictions of international law” and brutally “establish her international power predominance” (“The Kennedy Offensive,” June 1961, p.1).
Turning from Cuba, Arnoni was no less sure of the tactical deceit underpinning Kennedy’s intentions with regard to Laos (p.5). In May, Arnoni had written of the same country: “When President Kennedy launched his greatest display of ‘brinkmanship’ diplomacy yet, putting the world on notice that the United States was not averse to a military conflagration in Laos, he took pains to present his policy not as an improvisation but rather as a considered inter-party course, charted even before he became President” (“Venit, Vidit, Vicit,” May 1961, p.1).
July saw TMO devote three pages to Norbett L. Mintz’s ruminations on the Bay of Pigs. “The Cuban ‘Episode’ and the American Press April 9-23, 1961” was, again, more exercised by the ambiguity of Kennedy’s speech of 20 April to the American Newspaper Editors than the CIA’s all together murkier role, a murkiness acknowledged, but not explored by Mintz: “The irresponsibility in the Cuban affair appears in the encouragement the CIA gave (perhaps manufactured?) concerning the uprisings that would occur. From recent post-mortem reports, it appears that the CIA was more eager to invade than were the exiled leaders” (p.5).
The strongest attack on the CIA in the pages of TMO in the course of 1961 appeared in its August edition – and that was, in effect, borrowed criticism, confined to one, effectively sacked, man. In F.W. Jaeger’s “Nazism: Resurrected or Continued?,” pp.6-7, three paragraphs were devoted to a pamphlet published in the London in January 1961: A Study of a Master Spy: Allen Dulles (Housmans), jointly authored by the Labour MP Bob Edwards and Kenneth Dunne, charted Dulles’ anti-semitism, subversion of the agreed Allied policy of unconditional surrender, and manifestly tender feelings towards the ostensible Nazi enemy (no surprise here, given his pre-war work for Germany’s corporate sponsors of Hitler). But even this piece did not represent a rupture with the general anti-Kennedy line.
In its October edition, editor Arnoni, in the course of “Who Won the War?,” insisted that the President had embraced nothing less than “the adernauerized formula for American prosperity” (p.2) – manufactured crises leading to “more arms and more soldiers” (ditto). In December, Arnoni returned to the theme: “President Kennedy seems to be more eager to learn from Adenauer than Adenauer is to teach him” (“Scouting for Trouble,” December 1961, p.1).
In the same October edition, on the page facing Arnoni’s curious attack on Kennedy’s reforms of the CIA, contributor Friedrich J. Jaeger mocked Kennedy’s 24 August repudiation of East German charges of subversive activity in Berlin – “the legitimate activities of free men in West Berlin” – by offering a brief overview and summary of US intelligence activities against East Germany since the late 1940s. He concluded thus: “There is nothing new about the facts recounted above. They are known to everyone acquainted with the Berlin situation. They certainly are well known to President Kennedy. His definitions of the provocations in Berlin as “the legitimate activities of free men” is an attempt to coerce the Soviets to concede, on pain of war, that facts are not facts, and moreover, to submit to ever more hostile provocations” (p.3). You get the picture: The real war-monger is in the White House; and, by inference, the CIA is a loyal presidential tool. One sees at once the origins of the Chomskeyian imposture.
To be continued.
Quote:In 1982, Susan Sontag sparked a bristling controversy on the left with this confession: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?"
John J. Miller, “InDigestible: The decline of a great magazine,” The National Review, 11 February 2002:
http://www.nationalreview.com/11feb02/mi...1102.shtml
Let me begin with a proposition. Between January 1961 and December 1963, someone who read only the New York Times would have been better informed about President Kennedy’s attitudes, policies and domestic opposition – most notably and catastrophically, from the CIA - than someone who read, in the same period, only M.S. Arnoni’s The Minority of One (TMO). Absurd? Far from it, as we shall see.
To illustrate the fog of selective amnesia in which Arnoni’s organ has been enveloped by its post-December 1963 coverage of the coup which claimed Kennedy’s life and America’s future: We remember Eric Norden’s piece “The Death of A President,” which dominated the January 1964 edition of TMO; we rarely, if ever, see mention of the same author’s preposterous caricature of the Kennedy, a mere month before, in the magazine’s December 1963 edition, as a hard-line racist:
Quote:“…the New York Post. [That] house organ of eviscerated liberalism, whose unrequited love affair with the Kennedy Administration causes it to redouble its Cold War fervour in anticipation of a few liberal scraps from Massa John’s table…” (“The Prophet Honored,” p.19).
This was anything but an isolated instance. Here is Arnoni in June 1961 in a piece entitled, “Cloak and Dagger: Another ‘Peace Corps,’”:
Quote:General Maxwell D. Taylor, former Army Chief of Staff, was appointed by President Kennedy to “conduct a survey and review of organization and capacity of the United States in para-military planning.” The President’s Press Secretary Pierre Salinger confirmed that the study will include, but not be confined to, intelligence activities and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency.
The use of the term ‘para-military’ indicates that the study will concern itself with activities of an even more military nature than espionage. In fact, the CIA has not been strictly an intelligence-gathering organization; but also a policy-enforcing arm of the American Government abroad.
General Taylor’s mission is at least partly due to the CIA’s spectacular success in deposing a despised Guatemalan government but also, ironically enough, to its spectacular failure to depose the Castro Government. The former occasion must have impressed on the President how much can be “achieved” by the Government’s resort to foreign underground operations, while the latter may have shown a “need” to perfect the efficacy of the foreign underground branch.
For decades we have been told about the existence of a cloak and dagger subversive communist organization that, working underground, stretches the Soviet arm throughout the world and maintains an invisible but dangerous web over it. Now, the President of the United States seems set on using our traditional depictions of communist subversion as a blueprint of our own operations. It is fair to speculate that the nature of the activities Mr. Kennedy intends to assign to America’s “para-military” agencies is that which he attributes, rightly or wrongly, to communist forces. “Power is the hallmark of this offensive – power and discipline and deceit,” the President told the nation’s editors. And then he added that “We intend to re-examine and reorient our forces of all kinds, our tactics and our institutions here in this community.” The link between these words, uttered on April 20, 1961 and the subsequent assignment of General Taylor, on April 22, is obvious.
The President seems to believe in championing synthetic revolutions. Libertarian movements have been launching revolutions? – Why couldn’t the USA do the same in reverse? By accepting revolutionary slogans, methods of operation and organization, we can capture the Great Revolution of the Twentieth Century.
The fallacy of this government by imitation is tragic and comic at the same time. There are all kinds of people who use guns in the dark of night, yet not all are social revolutionaries and visionaries. Some are plain bandits. Others, like many of the anti-Castro leaders, are people willing to shed a nation’s blood to retain or regain immoral and anti-social material benefits. It is not the gun or dagger that makes one a revolutionary but the social reality he is striving to bring about. The synthetic revolutions and the synthetic conspiratorial forces the President wishes to breed will not only bring about a further devaluation of American political morals, but also contribute to intensifying fear of America and Americans. Mr. Kennedy may call this “prestige,” but in truth it is always the forces one is scared of that he rebels against.
Two months earlier, in April 1961, Kennedy’s Peace Corps proposal died a death at Arnoni’s hands: “It is indeed tragic that a basically wonderful idea has so little chance of actual success just because it may be entrusted into the wrong hands.” The major threats to it? The CIA? The FBI? No: Political vetting; and Sargent Shriver.
In June, and again in July, 1961, first Arnoni, then a contributor, highlighted the most egregious horror of the Bay of Pigs affair: Kennedy’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 20 April.
Commenting on that awful speech – unquestionably one of the worst of Kennedy’s career - Arnoni assured readers that “what Messrs. Eisenhower and Dulles often voiced as propagandistic slogans, Mr. Kennedy seems determined to pursue literally.” Kennedy had “put the world on notice that his Administration…will defend…America’s interests irrelevant of any moral or political merits or legal restrictions of international law” and brutally “establish her international power predominance” (“The Kennedy Offensive,” June 1961, p.1).
Turning from Cuba, Arnoni was no less sure of the tactical deceit underpinning Kennedy’s intentions with regard to Laos (p.5). In May, Arnoni had written of the same country: “When President Kennedy launched his greatest display of ‘brinkmanship’ diplomacy yet, putting the world on notice that the United States was not averse to a military conflagration in Laos, he took pains to present his policy not as an improvisation but rather as a considered inter-party course, charted even before he became President” (“Venit, Vidit, Vicit,” May 1961, p.1).
July saw TMO devote three pages to Norbett L. Mintz’s ruminations on the Bay of Pigs. “The Cuban ‘Episode’ and the American Press April 9-23, 1961” was, again, more exercised by the ambiguity of Kennedy’s speech of 20 April to the American Newspaper Editors than the CIA’s all together murkier role, a murkiness acknowledged, but not explored by Mintz: “The irresponsibility in the Cuban affair appears in the encouragement the CIA gave (perhaps manufactured?) concerning the uprisings that would occur. From recent post-mortem reports, it appears that the CIA was more eager to invade than were the exiled leaders” (p.5).
The strongest attack on the CIA in the pages of TMO in the course of 1961 appeared in its August edition – and that was, in effect, borrowed criticism, confined to one, effectively sacked, man. In F.W. Jaeger’s “Nazism: Resurrected or Continued?,” pp.6-7, three paragraphs were devoted to a pamphlet published in the London in January 1961: A Study of a Master Spy: Allen Dulles (Housmans), jointly authored by the Labour MP Bob Edwards and Kenneth Dunne, charted Dulles’ anti-semitism, subversion of the agreed Allied policy of unconditional surrender, and manifestly tender feelings towards the ostensible Nazi enemy (no surprise here, given his pre-war work for Germany’s corporate sponsors of Hitler). But even this piece did not represent a rupture with the general anti-Kennedy line.
In its October edition, editor Arnoni, in the course of “Who Won the War?,” insisted that the President had embraced nothing less than “the adernauerized formula for American prosperity” (p.2) – manufactured crises leading to “more arms and more soldiers” (ditto). In December, Arnoni returned to the theme: “President Kennedy seems to be more eager to learn from Adenauer than Adenauer is to teach him” (“Scouting for Trouble,” December 1961, p.1).
In the same October edition, on the page facing Arnoni’s curious attack on Kennedy’s reforms of the CIA, contributor Friedrich J. Jaeger mocked Kennedy’s 24 August repudiation of East German charges of subversive activity in Berlin – “the legitimate activities of free men in West Berlin” – by offering a brief overview and summary of US intelligence activities against East Germany since the late 1940s. He concluded thus: “There is nothing new about the facts recounted above. They are known to everyone acquainted with the Berlin situation. They certainly are well known to President Kennedy. His definitions of the provocations in Berlin as “the legitimate activities of free men” is an attempt to coerce the Soviets to concede, on pain of war, that facts are not facts, and moreover, to submit to ever more hostile provocations” (p.3). You get the picture: The real war-monger is in the White House; and, by inference, the CIA is a loyal presidential tool. One sees at once the origins of the Chomskeyian imposture.
To be continued.
