Mark Lane is married to Willis Carto' daughter. Represents the Liberty Lobby. http://www.google.com/search?q=mark+Lane+Willis+Carto http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/left-n-fascism.html The Left and the Far Right: Curious Bedfellows? The Left has been very serious in its critique of American foreign policy and its cynicism. The basis of that policy has been, "if you are an enemy of communism, you are my friend," which has led America into cooperation with a whole range of tyrannical, military-backed dictatorships. But we should be very careful about the wisdom of that statement, because those on the Left should take heed too. Not everyone who speaks out against "the government" and "the State" is on our side. Indeed, they may have an entirely different agenda, of a decidedly fascist bent. Despite the fact that they may make statements against "capital" or "the finance class" or whatever else, their real enemy is liberal democracy, which they hate with a greater passion than even the most determined Stalinist on the left.
Now imagine this scenario. It's 1991, and you're at an anti-Persian Gulf "war" speakout. Someone gets up and starts blasting CIA involvement in the region and drug trafficking from the area, and everyone applauds. Then he starts saying things like "this is really the Zionists' war, fought for the Elders of Zion." Another man gets up and starts talking about the murderous policies of the IMF and World Bank in Middle East development, and the genocidal character of the war against Iraq. Some more applause. Then he follows up by saying how he sees "the hand of the Anglo-American cartel in all this." A third individual starts talking about the role of "capital" and how the war is a distraction from the S & L looters. A third round of applause. Then he starts talking about "international bankers" and the "Trilateralists" and their role in the war. At this point, you are severely confused. This war is probably about oil, the 'VietNam syndrome', maybe even Israel. But "the Elders of Zion?" What's going on?
None of these three people can, in any charitable sense, be called 'anti- war' or 'anti-intervention.' They are not interested in institutional analyses of the 'military-industrial' complex or the complexities of State Department policy and the extension of American power. The first belongs to the Liberty Lobby, publishers of the Spotlight paper, known to be anti- Semitic and anti-communist. The second is a LaRouchite (follower of jailbird Lyndon LaRouche), who speaks within a conspiratorial framework of incredible paranoid depth. And the third belongs to the 'Populist' party, which claims to represent workers & farmers, but is really xenophobic, nativist, and racist. As Chip Berlet, a researcher of Right wing movements, has noted, all three of these groups have grown in strength recently. What is really scary, though, is that people on the Left have begun listening to their diatribes. They often talk about some of the same things - government complicity in drug trafficking, the role of the CIA and 'Shadow Government', even the JFK assassination - but with a decidedly different "take" on what's going on.
Perhaps due to its marginalization within American politics, the democratic Left has tended to become interested in conspiracy theories, especially during the 1980s. We've all heard of them - October Surprise, Iran-Contra, JFK's assassination, the Samson Option, etc. - but we may not know that many of them have come from Rightwing sources, such as the Liberty Lobby's newspaper, in particular. Much of the Christic Institute's information in their "La Penca" case Avirgan v. Hull , which was filed by Daniel Sheehan to close down the 'secret team', came from a 'right-wing' military specialist, according to the affidavit. That source probably was Lt. Col. James "Bo" Gritz, a Vietnam vet whose adventures to rescue POWs and MIAs in southeast Asia probably provided the basis for the Rambo movies, or Air Force Col. Fletcher Prouty, who wrote in 1973 The Secret Team: The CIA and its allies in control of the U.S. and the world. Oliver Stone admits that Prouty, a former Pentagon 'insider,' was the basis for "X", his secretive informant, in the movie JFK. Unfortunately, Prouty and other CIA critics like Mark Lane, who recently defended the Spotlight against a libel suit, have begun to drift within the Liberty Lobby's orbit, with its theories about 'dual loyalty' and 'Jewish' control of American foreign policy.
The Liberty Lobby recently got an award from Project Censored for its early reporting on the S & L crisis, and it was LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review that released a lot of documents pertaining to October Surprise and Iran-Contra. Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey, the named plaintiffs in the Christic Institute's case, kept trying to get legal counsel Sheehan 'down to earth' by getting rid of right-wing conspiracy theories in his legal brief from sources such as Prevailing Winds' Guns and Drugs reader. Prevailing Winds is an anti-CIA group whose membership includes anti-Semite Eustace Mullins and Bo Gritz, and it claims that the CIA is really controlled by the Mossad and/or the KGB. In each of these cases, these right-wing groups were the first to break ground on stories that may be of extreme interest to the Left. But, in each case, the Left has to be very careful about some of the more fantastic conspiratorial assumptions offered by these groups, and stick to the facts.
Liberty Lobby's founder Willis Carto is also connected to the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a 'revisionist' group which tries to prove the Holocaust never happened. LaRouche's outfit regularly lambasts not just George Bush and the IMF, but the Anti-Defamation League, Cult Awareness Network, the British Monarchy, and the "Greenie Nazis," meaning environmentalists. The Populist Party uses bank failures in the Midwest and elsewhere to whip people up into an irrational frenzy, and it has connections to neo-Nazi groups like Posse Comitatus and the Identity movement, as well as the John Birch society. All three of these groups are active in promoting conspiratorial theories, some of which are of interest to the Left; but we must be wary of their true agendas. Right-wing radio personality Craig Hulet has quite an audience on left-leaning Pacifica radio when he criticizes the "corrupt government" of George Bush. Sadly, Hulet also talks frequently (off radio) to right-wing audiences about 'Z.O.G.,' the "Zionist Occupation Government," and how they control "most of the Left-wing groups in this country." Hulet is connected to Gritz and Carto, and other fascists who have tried to make coalitions with the Left in cynical ways.
The Left's conspiratorial imagination took off once more after the release of Oliver Stone's movie JFK. We were interested in renewing our critique of covert intelligence and the shadowy spook games of the CIA. Sadly, some of Stone's information comes from an article by Medford Evans in the New American in 1967, in which Evans argued Lyndon Johnson and the 'American Establishment' engineered the assassination in the interests of Big Oil, Big Business, the CIA, the media cartel, and Big Finance. Evans has recently written that he enjoyed Stone's film, but has criticized Stone for saying it was a right-wing plot, and especially for implicating anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, and hawkish Vietnam anti-communists: in Evans' view, you can clearly see "international communism" at work in the assassination, a view echoed by some Birchers who think Oswald was getting orders from the KGB and Castro. Jim Garrison is the other major source of Stone's info, and while Garrison leaned toward right-wing forces being involved in the plot, he makes a curious effort to point out that his cast of villains - David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, etc. - are homosexuals and part of "some perverted subculture." Garrison is as interested in their moral depravity as he is in (curiously) covering up the role of the New Orleans mob... Mark Lane, who recently wrote Plausible Denial implicating the CIA and Watergate veteran E. Howard Hunt in the assassination, and was consulted for the film, recently acted as legal counsel for the Liberty Lobby, and admits getting some assistance from them for his theories.
Lane and Sheehan are not the only lawyers on the Left to have defended some shady characters. Recently, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has acted as legal defender for LaRouche's organization. Ramsey Clark, who was a vocal critic of the Gulf War and has spoken out on other issues (such as the L.A. riots), especially U.S. action in the Third World, may have drifted into the LaRouchians' ideological orbit, although he denies agreeing with their more extreme ideas. Other items of interest to the Left have suspicious connections. Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the Samson Option about the mysterious millionaire Robert Maxwell (who died in a suspicious 'boating accident' recently) and his role in obtaining nuclear weapons for Israel, may have gotten some leads from Liberty Lobby people as well. James Earl Ray, MLK Jr.'s assassin, has recently tried (after 20 years!) to revive the theory that he, like Oswald, was a patsy, and people should really be looking at the FBI and their involvement in a conspiracy to kill King. But Ray's new book which tries to find the "real murderers" has a laundary list of right-wing sources in its bibliography, including books by Willis Carto's Noontide Press.
Returning to our little anti-Gulf War speakout, the moral of the story is : look behind the rhetoric. When a speaker blasts the "government," does he want a more democratic, just, and equal system? Is he against power and privilege, or does he just want his group in charge? Does he oppose unfair or unjust government policies, or is he more concerned with government promotion of 'race mixing'? When he starts complaining about "Zionism," does he want to see Israelis and Palestinians living together in peace and cooperation, or is he really talking about 'the Elders of Zion' and 'ZOG'? When he complains about "the war lobby," is he an anti-militarist who supports Third World autonomy in political and economic development (and opposes U.S. interference for that reason) or an anti-war pacifist, or is he really an isolationist and nationalist - like Charles Lindbergh, whose "America First" movement wanted us to stay out of opposing the Nazis during WW II, for political, not pacifistic, reasons. If the speaker talks highly of Malcolm X, is it because he wants black empowerment in the economic system, or is he someone who admires black separatism, and likes blacks who want to live apart ('race pride')?
After he's done blasting the 'shadow government' and 'international finance,' ask him his attitudes about homosexuality, feminism, integration, freedom of expression, multiculturalism, the VietNam war, affirmative action, and social justice. You may be surprised (or frightened.) Does he feel we "betrayed our boys" in VietNam? Does he think the New World Order is to be "a one-world super-socialist State"? Does he think that one of America's greatest problems is immigration by non-European peoples, like David Duke or Pat Buchanan? Does he believe this is "a Christian nation, first and foremost"? Are his pet bugaboos the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, the Rockefellers & Rothschilds, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.? If so, you may be dealing with a fascist nut. Many of these right-wingers have decided to play at being "wolves in sheep's clothing," and have infiltrated various Left coalitions, playing up (in a cynical way) supposed common agendas ("us against the center," in a way.) They also try and recruit among labor and the poor for their 'skinhead' legions. Fortunately, at least for the moment, the Far Right is even more marginal than the Left in this country. But the Left should not help them get one iota closer to power, because their racist, anti-Semitic, irrationally paranoid agenda could not be further from ours. If they start talking about crazy schemes to eliminate usury or purge 'dual loyalists,' run the other way!
These days, as one political commentator has noted, everybody running for president is a populist and an outsider, from Pat Buchanan to Jerry Brown. The question is, what do they see as the Establishment against which they are tilting their lance? Is that "establishment" the dominance of government by corporate money and the wealthy classes, or do they mean the "establishment" of the welfare state, affirmative action, and 'liberal special interests' (read: ethnic groups) in Congress? In many cases, it is the latter. "Populist" movements in America have had a record of xenophobia, nativism, racism, and paranoia, crusading against Catholics, Jews, Freemasons, and southern European immigrants, as well as "big business" and "big banking." Anyone who understands ideology, and remembers the crowds at the rallies at Nuremberg and the size of the fascist mass movement in the 1930s, knows that not every 'popular' movement is the 'will of the people.' Even today, European racists like Le Pen play at being populists, by exploiting French patriotism and enthnocentrism. David Duke ran as the Populist Party candidate in 1988. The Left should remain wary of the right-wing brand of populism, because much of it still smacks of the way Hitler used to talk about his volkisch fatherland and the horrors of the "Peoples'" State in Cambodia. They should stick to their principles: the enemy of their enemies, in this case, is most assuredly not their friend.
Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1
-- Michael Pugliese