Dylan still knows how to make his old fans happy.
Like going on Tik Tok. Just as it is about to be ripped away from the American user.
Tik Tok has been banned, much to the satisfaction of Lincoln project Republicans and Biden Democrats. Apparently, you can shut down a platform for the free speech of 178 million Americans because fuck them, and we hate China, which is spyin’ on us.
Always China.
The McCarthy era, of course, didn’t end with McCarthy. It is a good time to bring up a trial that happened in 1959, which also involved Communist China. And a little thing called the Korean War.
It all started in 1956, when the U.S. Attorney General, under Eisenhower, accused the editors and writers of the China Monthly Bulletin of sedition. They were seditious because, during the Korean war (which the judge in the case ruled was a war even though it was not declared a war through the constitutional process – showing how, in a Security State, the constitution that legitimated the Security State was actually written on silly putty), they published the outrageous statement that the Americans were suffering “staggering casualties” and the accusation that the U.S. used biological warfare in Korea.
The editors and writers of this small journal consisted of John W. Powell, his wife Sylvia, and Julius Schulman, a writer and assistant.
They were called before Congress, of course, one of the usual witchhunting committees, and then in 1956 the Eisenhower Justice department charged them with sedition.
Let’s repeat this: they were charged in 1956 and tried in 1959 for publishing stories that said the U.S. was suffering staggering casualties and that the U.S. was using bioweapons.
The case was tried in San Francisco. The Judge was a certain Louis E. Goodman. The defendents lawyer, Charles Garry, dominated the news stories the first day with his strategy, which was to concentrate on the bioweapons charge by saying that, actually, it was true.
The trial went on for four days. On the second day the Judge made a curious statement: that the defendents should have been charged with treason, which has a broader meaning under the statutes, then with sedition. The Judge said that much of the Attorney General’s case was bent on proving treason, and alas, that had to be tossed out.
On the fourth day the Judge declared a mistrial, on account of the fact that his comments had been “exaggerated’ in the press and blown out of proportion.
It was all an oddness. Thomas Powell, who has written about the bioweapons in the 90s and 00s, as the controversy about them continued, maintains that the government did not want to have the bioweapon issue brought into court, where they would have to lie.
The prosecutors did indeed submit a case for treason latter, but it was so badly formed (out of the accusation that the Chinese Monthly News had a “depressing effect” on the drafted soldiers) that the U.S. commissioner threw it out in June, 1959.
Of course, this trial was followed by one of those long satyr plays common in the U.S. security state system, where various rightwing types have spent quality time “proving” that the biowarfare charge is lyin’ Communist propaganda. That charge always finds newspaper space, especially with the NYT and the Washington Post – the latter a notoriously friendly place for the whole Spitzel establishment – many of its finest alumni having worked at one time or another for the Company.
In the late 90s, at the height of anti-communist triumphalism, ten documents supposedly from the Soviet archives (nobody yet has said precisely where and from what archive) supposedly showed that the Russkies, Stalin’s henchmen (even though Stalin at this point was dead) were convinced that the biowarfare thing was a hoax, and thus they planned on ways to perpetuate the fraud. This was all worked up by a man named Milton Leitenberg, who tends to pop up any time the issue is raised. To my mind, the hoax accusation is refuted and confuted by an analysis penned by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman – but while Leitenberg’s charges were heralded in a Washington Post story, oddly, the Endicott and Hagerman refutation remained, well, unheadlined.
As a footnote, in the seventies, when the Senate was actually seeking to take back some American freedom by questioning the CIA about their activities, the then director, William Colby, was asked about biowar and the CIA. He acknowledged that the CIA contracted in 1952 – that Korean war harried year! – to develop BW material at the U.S. Army Bacteriological Warfare Laboratory at Fort Dietrich, Mayrland. Due to a “paucity of written records, some of which were destroyed in 1973, he could not rule out that BW materials had been used for aggressive operations.” Ah, the non-denial non-denial – a rare species of Bureau-speak!
In the 70s, America developed a sudden case of being sensitive to our freedoms being ripped away from us. But in the 2020s, we are totally used to it. Down with it. Watch TikTok being banned and make with the jokes.
Joke joke joke, taking us right into the farce of King Bunkem, starging January 21st.
What a world – I like to sigh. My old man’s sigh.
No comments:
Post a Comment