-Caveat Lector-
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 11:10:49 -0400
From: Eileen Sutton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Conspiracist Jim Marrs Revealed
...WBAI producer Bill Weinberg offers this excellent analysis of
right-wing conspiracist, Jim Marrs, whose book was recently offered
by Marjorie Moore as a premium in WBAI's last fund drive. The use of
the Marrs material to fund the station is seen by many as strong
evidence of the ideological shifts taken place at WBAI, despite
protests from management that changes in program content are
illusory. Weinberg also discusses Leid's history with the City Sun,
and DeRienzo's recent attacks on the IMC and George Soros.
--efs
====================================
RULE BY IDIOCY: WBAI FALLS FOR RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORY
by Bill Weinberg
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral
Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. The title itself
reads like a self-parody. The fact that it is not is a sad comment on
our times. The fact that HarperCollins chose to publish this
amateurish potboiler is even sadder. But saddest of all is that it
was offered as a premium in the last fund-raising marathon by New
York City's "progressive" WBAI Radio.
WBAI, whose leadership was purged in a notorious "Christmas Coup"
last year, once offered premiums by the likes of Noam Chomsky. But it
was the voice of Jim Marrs that issued from the station's transmitter
in relentless interviews during the May marathon. Marrs was chosen as
the latest political guru by morning show host Marjorie Moore and
approved by WBAI's Interim General Manager Utrice Leid. Both
repeatedly praised his "research" over the air. That WBAI is now
promoting Marrs, a peddler of the most vulgar anti-Semitic conspiracy
theory, loans credence to those who argue that the station has
assumed a rightward trajectory since the "coup."
In Rule by Secrecy, Marrs of course goes out of his way to disavow
anti-Semitism-but in terms that are clearly anti-Semitic! "While it
may be true that secret organizations in the past were built along
both racial and religious grounds" and "[a]lthough many international
financiers are of Jewish descent," it is unfair "to accuse the Hebrew
race of an international conspiracy." Note the slippery use of
"Hebrew race" in place of the more common and accurate term "Jews."
He complains that "the broad brush of anti-Semitism frequently has
been used to besmirch anyone offering a conspiratorial view of
history."
After this requisite disavowal, Marrs goes on to portray the
"gigantic and secretive Rothschilds banking empire" as the "covert
and indirect" power behind nearly every government on Earth
(ultimately tracing their grand design for world domination to the
Illuminati and Masonic conspiracies dating to ancient Egypt). His
"sources" are the usual ones, all too familiar to followers of the
far right and fascism.
Topping the list, of course, is the Protocols of the Learned Elders
of Zion, the purported Jewish conspiracy masterplan which served as
propaganda for the Czarist pogroms and then the Nazi Holocaust. While
Marrs does concede that the Protocols are a hoax, he nonetheless
vests much legitimacy in them: "It is the possibility of 'historical
truth' which has kept the Protocols in circulation since its
inception. Today, modern conspiracy writers see it as a real program
predating Nazism or Communism... The Protocols may indeed reflect a
deeper conspiracy beyond its intended use to encourage anti-Semitism,
one hidden within the secret upper ranks of the Iluminati and
Freemasonry."
The kneejerk anti-Communism which always characterizes this genre is
there as well. Marrs writes that Marx's program points in The
Communist Manifesto "bear a striking resemblance to the Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion, suggesting some common origin." Much, of
course, is made of Marx's Jewish ethnicity. Concludes Marrs: "The
goals of the Russian communists and Karl Marx were largely the same
goals of the Illuminati and continental Freemasonry."
Again and again, Marrs attempts to legitimize the anti-Semitism of
Henry Ford, the Krupps and even Hitler, portraying them as mere
over-reaction to the arrogant power of "international Jewish
bankers." Marrs argues that the Jews themselves were behind Hitler,
another line familiar to those who follow this unsavory milieu. All
of the American, British and Dutch industrialists who aided Hitler's
rise to power are portrayed (on no evidence) as stand-ins for "the
great Rothschild empire." Marrs goes one better by claiming that
Hitler was a Rothschild-that his grandmother was not impregnated by
her husband Johann Georg Hiedler, but by one "Baron Rothschild," in
whose Vienna home she was working as a servant. Marrs cites a
(conveniently) "suppressed" OSS report for this allegation, but
provides no details on its name or where it is to be found.
The actual report, by psychologist Walter C. Langer, was published in
1972 as The Mind of Adolf Hitler, but Marrs doesn't tell us that,
since its findings on the theory of Hitler's secret Jewish
grandfather were utterly inconclusive. This angle really seems to
originate with another "author" extensively cited by Marrs elsewhere
in Rule by Secrecy-David Icke, whose Web site also claims that Jews
are the pawns in an elaborate Rothschild-Iluminati breeding
experiment, and are "impregnated with a reptilian genetic code."
(Marrs fails to mention the reptilian stuff-this being apparently too
wacky, even for him!)
At least Marrs acknowledges the fraudulent origins of the Protocols.
He doesn't seem to have got the word about another notorious hoax,
the Report from Iron Mountain. This one was actually conceived during
the Vietnam era by leftist intellectuals (including The Nation's
Victor Navasky and author E.L. Doctorow) to parody the prevalent
far-right view that anti-war sentiment was the pawn of a secret plot
to impose a super-powerful world government. Ironically, the spoof
was taken by the very folks it was spoofing as the Real McCoy-a
leaked government document revealing the elite agenda! Even after the
satire's perpetrators have long since come clean, right-wing
conspiracy-mongers continue to cite it as vindication of their
worldview. Marrs offers not one syllable of intimation that Iron
Mountain is anything other than legitimate.
Marrs' source that the J.P. Morgan banking empire is a "front" for
the Rothschilds is Eustace Mullins, who is cited as merely an
"author." Marrs does not tell us that Mullins is a partisan of the
neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby and a leading light of their Spotlight
newspaper. In the '50s, before becoming Liberty Lobby's top theorist
of the Federal Reserve system as the tool of a Jewish plot to destroy
America, Mullins authored a less subtle tome entitled "Adolf Hitler:
An Appreciation"-which he has never repudiated. (See Martin Lee, The
Beast Reawakens, Little, Brown 1997, p. 347.)
Marrs has been going from wacky to wackier throughout his career. His
1990 book Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, was a
comparatively legitimate work, and provided much of the source
material for Oliver Stone's movie JFK. But he followed it with 1997's
Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us,
which opened: "The controversy over the existence of UFOs is over.
UFOs are real... The questions now are 'What are they?' and 'What do
they want?' What is the alien agenda?"
The question for WBAI listeners may well be "What is the Utrice Leid
agenda?"
Was Lied put in power by a right-drifting and increasingly corporate
Pacifica National Board to discredit and destabilize the
intransigently radical-left WBAI? Under the leadership of Samori
Marksman, a Pan-Africanist and Marxist who died at the helm in 1999,
nearly every management position at the station was held by a person
of color, and the station was committed to a radical
multiculturalism. The general manager and program director who were
ousted in the December coup were both Black. Yet Leid portrays the
struggle over WBAI as a "race war," and portrays all opposition as a
white racism.
This seems to be part of a pattern. In her early '90s tenure as
editor of The City Sun, New York's now-defunct African-American
weekly, Leid frequently printed commentary on local Jewish affairs by
Jon Kalish, a veteran of the New York Post and Daily News tabloids
whose journalistic raison d'etre was to root out supposed "black
anti-Semitism," vigorously covering every Jewish fringe-group protest
against Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton. Jewish reporters with an
emphasis on building Black-Jewish solidarity were bypassed by Leid.
Some of Leid's new team are continuing in this tradition. On June 4,
Lied-appointed morning-news anchor Paul DeRienzo got into a physical
altercation with a reporter from the Independent Media Center
covering a protest at the station. IMC reporter Kevin Prichard
suffered a broken finger, and is pressing charges. Immediately after
the incident, DeRienzo went on the air to give his version of the
event. He embellished that the IMC (actually the autonomous network
of Web sites that emerged from the Seattle anti-WTO protests) is
funded by international financier George Soros--"the right-wing guy
who says he's for all of these positive causes, but is really
financing an attack on a public radio station and trying to take it
over."
DeRienzo went out of his way to emphasize Soros' ethnicity, stating
that the IMC is controlled by "one rich man in Hungary." Soros, who
actually lives in New York (and only provided the Los Angeles IMC
local with a one-time $10,000 grant to cover the Democratic
Convention last year), is a Hungarian Jew.
###
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