I am shocked and disappointed at this attack on Jim Marrs. Marrs' work not
only provided a foundation for COPA (since Crossfire was one basis for
Stone's JFK movie, which led to the formation of COPA). He also has come up
against mainstream corporate news puppets time and again to present
parapolitical scholarship that would otherwise be ignored. If you want an
example, read the transcript of his exchange with the obnoxious Bill
O'Reilly in the essay I wrote for the book You Are Being Lied To. It is a
coup for the cause of parapolitical study that Marrs' book was made
available as a premium for WBAI, especially over a Pentagon paid-for
"institutional" critic like Noam Chomsky. I thought these efforts to smear
points of view that do not narrowly conform to a few researchers' idea of
what constitutes "valid" conspiracy theory had long been discredited by the
exaggerated meanderings of Dave Emory.
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Constantine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 2:22 PM
To: Kris
Cc: CloudRider; Cynthia; Jaye C. Beldo; Joe; John Judge; John B.; Harry;
Austin Kelley; Tim; Lynn; Linda
Subject: FW: Conspiracist Jim Marrs Revealed
From: Eileen Sutton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Conspiracist Jim Marrs Revealed
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
....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.
###
