*”These attitudes you have adopted – I know they comfort you. You are indifferent and incurious about the important events of our times. You are smug about it, thinking yourself wise to be so. But I must advise you that from a distance your attitude is indistinguishable from stupidity.”
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History draws rave reviews. I remember picking him up on ITunes as far back as 2009 and enjoying his podcasts, but at a certain point I dropped him from my list. I am not sure why, but his intensity had something to do with it. Each podcast was a roiling half-hour, and I was looking for more relaxing fare.
This is going to be about my own personal failings rather than his. His History of World War One comes highly recommended. It is 26 hours of listening, and I thought what the heck. It’ll make background noise as I build birdhouses.
I’ve read quite a bit about that war, enough to know we were roped into it by the Brits after they ran out of money. I know that throughout our history the Brits have generally been reviled here in the states. Their ruling class is seen as cynical, brutal, bloody and manipulative, leaving a wake of corpses that Stalin would envy, as Bertrand Russell reminds us. They are always willing to spend some other country’s youth in their current war. Faced with a choice of being the enemy or friend of Britain, enemy is safer.
So in the wake of World War One, being a Brit in the U.S. was equivalent to being a Muslim these days. We were snookered, lied to, propagandized, and enough of the population figured that out so that the Brits had a bad odor about them. Excuse me: odour.
Back to Carlin: So I turned on episode one a couple of days ago. Carlin starts out by explaining how hard it is for some people to accept that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, just like the government says. He lost me.
As I said, this is about my failings. But honestly, how can a man claim to be a historian, hardcore, no less, and ignore the mountains of evidence that have accumulated over the last fifty-one years about that event? How?! That takes willful blindness.
Just two items of physical evidence, among hundreds:
- CE 399, the so-called “magic bullet.” A man with a reasonably skeptical mind will look at that and realize that the physical feats it was said to have performed are impossible, and further that its pristine condition after supposedly shattering bone was equally impossible. Not just unlikely. Physically impossible. It cannot be. It is a lie.
- The Mannlicher-Carcano, the supposed murder weapon. If we need to know only one thing about the Italian-made humanitarian rifle, it should be this: Ballistics tests run by the House Subcommittee on Assassinations in the mid-70s concluded that M-C that is said to be the offical murder weapon did not fire CE 399. So even if you are gullible enough to buy into CE 399, you are still missing a murder weapon.
Carlin is overlooking all of this, and simply defers to authority. Oswald did it. Carlin is nuts.
But I understand it. He has a long list of credits and awards and recommendations. If he questions the official story of JFK, a military coup d’etat, a crime solved by real (but non-professional) historians back in the 1960’s and the pivotal event of the postwar period, those credits and awards and recommendations evaporate, and he disappears beneath the sight line. As Rand Paul reminds us, “truth is treason in the empire of lies.”
My failing: Given that awful and incoherent opening to episode one, I opted to forgo listening to the next 25. I would not be harmed, and he probably has useful insight into that war, but I am thinking if the guy cannot see through the most blatant lie of our time before 9/11, how can I not question anything else he offers? I got lots of stuff to read and hear. I’ll skip Carlin.
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It is worth noting here that our country is amazing in the degree of thought control around us, most people unaware of it. [Now that I think about it, if they were aware of it, it would not be effective, would it.] It is so effective that evidence can be hidden in plain sight, and remain undiscovered. People who consider themselves serious and curious will flock to Carlin and avoid the most obvious conclusions from a cursory examination of that evidence. That it is hidden in plain sight, and people take pride in not knowing about it – that is quite a feat. Hence the *opening paragraph above, my tribute to the American Intelligentsia.
But it is not new. Hans Christian Andersen published The Emperor’s New Clothes in 1837.
I’ve a notion here to play around with physical evidence in the next few posts. Should be fun.
