Northwest Indiana Discussion

HAMMOND -- A few weeks ago prior to his administration’s media blitz of good-feeling in drumming-up support for Hammond’s Festival of the Lakes, Mayor Tom McDermott, Jr., characterized the First Amendment criticisms, views and/or opposition of Hammond citizens utilizing the Times chat/message board, to publicly express their views, as nothing more than “graffiti.”

The mayor’s characterization came upon the heels of a possible government sanctioned suppression of First Amendment rights by members of his city government and/or those of his local political coalition. I say “possible government sanctioned suppression” because of the Times investigation results revealing that Internet Protocol address identified by the news publication was none other than city hall, a building under the direct supervisory authority of the mayor of Hammond.

Of course, Mayor McDermott loudly protested any implication that he either knew or agreed with deleting/suspending political expressions on the chat/message board. Indeed, he protested so much that Times columnist Mark Kiesling, who finally broke the festering situation, reported the Mac went ballistic with vehemence. The problem is that a week or so later, the Times was compelled to post an editorial reminding McDermott that perhaps he was protesting a little too much in lieu of publicly condemning such actions and failing to publicly remedy the suppressions.

Now, nearly three weeks later, the practice of abusing the chatboard’s deletion feature continues unabated and nary a public word from the mayor.

In a thread entitled, The Fallout from Mayor Mac’s Minions, a thread I have had to repeatedly repost because McDermott supporters repeatedly have it deleted, I characterized the psychology of those deleting political threads and postings as anti-American, fascist and ultimately totalitarian. The risks of thought-control did nothing to persuade or alarm those deleting posts and threads - deletions that redound to either the direct or incidental benefit of the current regime in control of Hammond’s city government.

This leaves a person dumbstruck. As I recently wrote to a fellow message-board chatter, the election results of last November must have really shaken the confidence of the McDermott coalition and especially that of its most active and/or interested factions. But I also suspect that most members of Mac’s coalition are completely oblivious to what becoming a totalitarian entails.

Oh, there are plenty of abstract discourses and treatises on the subject, but as practiced here, it might be best to follow the lead of one writer who identifies one form of totalitarism as “soft totalitarianism.” In an article entitled, Meat Cutter Blues: The Soft Totalitarianism of the American Elite, historian Frances Stonor Saunders’ work on the myriad of CIA methods aimed at subverting Western culture are explored.

Some readers will find this most interesting as well as apt in trying to come to grips with the Minions of Mayor Mac and their abuse of free speech, to wit:

“Saunders writes of a seminal document produced in 1951 by the "Psychological Strategy Board," created in that year by a secret directive from President Harry Truman to coordinate the government's broad spectrum of covert "psychological warfare" operations. The creation of the PSB was part of a blizzard of secret orders by Truman that established a second, shadow government of the United States, unaccountable to the people, with a vast secret budget and deliberately vague directives encouraging the widest possible latitude of illegal action while maintaining "plausible deniability" for elected officials: the "National Security State" that supplanted the old American Republic.

“As Saunders relates, the PSB was ordered to "draw up the policy blueprint" for global psy-ops. It produced a strategy paper called PSB D-33/2. Saunders:

The paper itself is still classified, but in a lengthy internal memo, a worried PSB officer, Charles Burton Marshall, quoted freely from the passages that most exercised him. "How [can] a government interpose with a wide doctrinal system of its own without taking on the color of totalitarianism?" he asked. "The paper does not indicate any. Indeed, it accepts uniformity as a substitute for diversity. It postulates a system justifying 'a particular type of social belief and structure,' providing 'a body of principles for human aspirations,' and embracing 'all fields of human thought' -- 'all fields of intellectual interest, from anthropology and artistic creations to sociology and scientific methodology.' Marshall (who was to become a staunch critic of the PSB), went on to criticize the paper's call for 'a machinery' to produce ideas to portray 'the American way of life' on a 'systematic and scientific basis.' It anticipates 'doctrinal production' under a 'coordination mechanism,'" Marshall observed. "It asserts 'a premium on swift and positive action to galvanize the creation and distribution of ideas.'".... [Marshall's] conclusion was adamant: "This is just about as totalitarian as one can get.”

[In the PSB vision], "individuals are relegated to tertiary importance," Marshall continuesd. "The supposed elite emerges as the only group that counts. The elite is defined [in the document] as that numerically 'limited group capable and interested in manipulating doctrinal matters,' the men of ideas who pull the intellectual strings 'in forming, or at least predisposing, the attitudes and opinions' of those who in turn lead public opinion.'

...Mr Marshall's trenchant criticisms struck right at the very fundamentals of America's secret cultural warfare programme....Commenting on [the document], CIA agent Donald Jameson intended no irony when he said: "As far as the attitudes that the Agency wanted to inspire through these activies are concerned, clearly what they would like to have been able to produce were people, who of their own reasoning and conviction, were persuaded that everything the United States government did was right."

"The supposed elite emerges as the only group that counts." The CIA sought to produce "people who of their own reasoning and conviction were persuaded that everything the United States government did was right." These two passages describe perfectly the driving forces behind American society today. And after generations of diligent weeding and breeding, we have indeed produced generation after generation of journalists, politicians, academics, intellectuals, corporate chieftains -- the "great and good" of every description -- who, "by their own reasoning and conviction" believe that everything the U.S. government does is right.

In her introduction, Saunders says that her book challenges what Gore Vidal has described as "those official fictions that have been agreed upon by all together too many too interested parties, each with his own thousand says in which to set up his own misleading pyramids and obelisks that purport to tell sun time.' Any history which sets out to interrogate these "agreed-upon facts" must, in Tsvetan Todorov's words, become "an act of profanity. It is not about contributing to the cult of heroes and saints. It's about coming as close as possible to the truth. It participates in what Max Weber calls the 'disenchantment of the world'; it exists at the other end of the spectrum from idolatry. It's about redeeming the truth for the truth's sake, not retrieving images that are deemed useful for the present."

Admittedly, although Mayor Mac was a tad kinder, gentler, in later calling our posts and threads mere “graffiti”, judging from his ballistic reaction to Kiesling, it’s a good bet that if not he then most certainly his minions, likely deem our postings profane.