Some historical figures are lauded as heroes or even saviors, while others are remembered only as a warning of what can happen when human potential goes horribly awry. Yet, more often than not, when the true details of their lives are subjected to close and objective scrutiny, even the lauded heroes of history fall from grace to one degree or another.
There are however, a vanishingly small group of historical figures who, when scrutinized in the same way, provoke precisely the opposite effect; they are revealed to be true, and largely unsung, heroes. This details of their lives, and their deaths, tell a story of their ultimately unrealized potential to not only change human society for the better but to serve as role models for us all.
Michael Collins, JFK, RFK, MLK, Ghandi, Lumumba, Lennon, Moro, Sadat, Palme, Diana, Rafik Hariri, Benazir Bhutto, Anna Lindh, Yasser Arafat...this is a short-list of great or potentially great leaders who were assassinated in the 20th century.
Earlier this year on SOTT Talk Radio, we looked at the lives and deaths of these individuals and others who were 'taken out' simply because they had the power and intent to make our world a better place for all.
Running Time: 02:04:00
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Transcript :
Joe: Hi and welcome to yet another SOTT Talk Radio. I'm Joe Quinn. With me in the studio tonight are Jason Martin,
Niall: And Niall Bradley, myself, and we've got Pierre with us. Pierre Lescaudron.
Pierre: Hello.
Niall: Hello to everyone.
Joe: Jason is apparently mute so we won't hear much from him tonight.
Jason: Well, you know I just got over a sickness. I'm still not feeling too great.
Joe: Yeah. Jason's done that but he's back.
Jason: I'm back.
Joe: Okay. The show this week is about - for those of you who have checked the website - is about, or is titled Assassinated Heroes. We basically figured that we wanted to do a show on individuals from history.
Jason: The suspicious number of individuals from history.
Joe: Yeah. Suspicious number in the sense that they are not - unfortunately there aren't a lot of them, relatively speaking, but they all have certain things in common, in terms of what they tried to do in their lives and also usually how they died, which was that they were assassinated.
Niall: They're few in number but the percentage that died, let's say prematurely, I think that covers all the bases, is, well, it stands out. It begs discussion and answers we think.
Jason: We could go at it from another angle. Can you name like a single person who is undisputedly an international hero who wasn't killed prematurely in some sort of suspicious accident? I mean, ...
Joe: Well it depends ...
Jason: Which one lived to old age?
Joe: That depends what you describe. The problem here is it depends what you describe as a hero, you know, a national hero or international hero. Some people who would say Churchill for example, was a hero...
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: In fact a lot of people would say people like Churchill or ...
Jason: I don't know. I think the image painted of Churchill in Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War was not particularly flattering. It made him look a bit like a war monger, you know.
Joe: Well, that's what he was, but you go and ask the average British person and they're going to tell you that he's a hero.
Jason: They're going to tell you that, you know, the people who play for Arsenal, or whatever they call it, that football teams are heroes too.
Niall: They did a pretty formal poll about ten years ago. It was open for some time, was widely publicized. Apparently they caused an attempt to try and rig the vote so that we were told did not happen. Anyway, Winston Churchill came out as the greatest Briton of all time, followed by Brunel, engineer and architect, I think; and third was Lady Diana.
Joe: So basically the point here is that, just to sum up, there are a small group of historical figures who, when you scrutinize the details of their lives, despite what the history books might say about them, they are revealed to be pretty much true and unsung heroes. That is, the details of their lives and their deaths tell a story of ultimately what are unrealized potential, their unrealized potential to change human society for the better, and to ... maybe not constantly, but they certainly could have served as role models for most people, for everybody, pretty much. But unfortunately, their lives were dramatically cut short by either an assassin's bullet or some other fatality caused by a plot hatched by the established authorities of the day. So there's a long list. I don't know, does anybody have any favourites? Who's your favourite hero?
Niall: Well, when I was making my list, I mean, I think it's your point of reference, you know, so I ended up having most of them from the twentieth century. So they're relatively recent. I think number one in that would be JFK.
Jason: I'm going to have to dispute that one.
Niall: At least in terms of ... like I was trying to think of criteria. There are some on my list that are ... that would be not so well known because they were doing their thing on a relatively local scale, i.e. for their own country or region; and even within that, there are heroes, you know, at maybe different levels. But JFK, there's a guy who finds himself supposedly leader of the free world and he starts doing something he's not supposed to be doing.
The only other comparison I can see with that is the example we've discussed in the past few weeks with Julius Caesar where you have someone who's in control of, or potentially in control of, an empire. Many, many masses of people Therefore the shock of him being done away with just when he was getting into his prime, makes it all the more greater in terms of a bereavement for people who feel like ... who feel the tragedy of it and a sense of loss even now, fifty years later, for me, someone who was born long after, of the potential for good that could have come from him.
Joe: Absolutely. I mean the ... pretty much everybody knows. I think it's even recognized by, even his detractors that he was, he was striving for peace. He aspired to peace for as many people as possible and as little war as was possible, or only war when it was absolutely necessary. He figured that he could ... that even that, even war would be unnecessary, at least in terms of his vision, if he could promote the ... put the infrastructure in place that would still take peace around the world, you know. And I suppose people in positions of power and people at the head of an empire certainly do have a lot of power to do as they will. And one thing they could certainly use that power to effect is a peaceful society. I mean that might involve forcing some people to be peaceful, but so be it. That's better than forcing your will on people and creating more war.
Pierre: Yes, and from Julius Caesar to Yasser Arafat or JFK or the modern day heroes, the modus operandi is always the same and you have literally dozens and dozens of examples where basically you have a leader, someone who gains power, but unlike the other leaders, this person is really trying to serve the good of humanity, is really trying to alleviate the pain of his fellows, which doesn't fit at all with the plan of the elites. And this person, if they don't manage to neutralize him, this hero cannot be neutralized because of bribery, because of threats and other techniques, will end up dead. Sometimes he's an obvious assassination of course; either a legitimate assassination as the elites tried to depict Julius Caesar's assassination, or a lone man crazy act, like for JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, or an accident like for Diana, or a suicide like the French prime minister in the '90s, Pierre Bérégovoy, who suicided with two bullets; that they were found in his head. And after the act, there is a rewriting of history aiming to depict, to demonize the hero. Like all those stories about JFK, womanizer, or the way Julius Caesar is depicted in official history, like a blood-lusting and vicious emperor. And he was the opposite of that.
Niall: Even now, JFK is, I think he's still attributed with having started the Vietnam War, or at least that it started under his watch. It's only when you look at the complexity of how the real decision making process takes place in the U.S. government and any government today, that you realize that it's set up so that the President, the commander-in-chief is not really the commander-in-chief. I think the difference was that JFK got in there and said, "Right, I'm going to actually do all these things on paper that people think the President is supposed to do." And then people around him were like, "No."
Joe: Yeah, he didn't bow down to the, kind of, the back room boys and, "This is the way it works here, so just get in line and do your job," type thing. He figured okay, I'm the President, I have a lot of influence and power; people look up to me. And this is what he understood, you know. In the same way with Caesar, he realized that despite the fact that there were all these forces behind the scenes in the U.S. that were essentially in control, he had a secret weapon essentially, and that was more or less what Niall just described, which was the awareness of the belief among the population that he was the commander-in-chief and he took the decisions. Therefore he had essentially people power as a force that he could use against these other shady elements that were essentially, you might call them the shadow government, or the people who were essentially running things behind the scenes. And that's what he tried to do. He spoke very often; I think he has held some kind of record for the number of public speeches, or something along those lines. He was ... he clearly understood that the way to get ... the way to use his power, the way to get support, was to derive it from the people and then be able to point at people and say, "Look, this is what they want," and then go back to Congress and say, "Look, this is what they want. We're all here about ... we're all servants of the public, right?" It's kind of calling their bluff essentially.
Pierre: And it was not only ... it was not the manipulation, this proximity with the people. Those leaders, those heroes, often displayed this attribute, this true empathy, this proximity with the people.
Joe: Yeah, I mean it was genuine, yeah.
Pierre: And one fundamental difference I think between JFK and Caesar is that Caesar, after the civil war, had total and absolute power. So he could manage quick and efficient reforms and changes. What he did for five years before his assassination, he made fundamental changes and he really improved the life of the poorest of the people. And I think he set a precedent for the elite who realized: "Never more. By now we're going to take the measures for never again to have a true hero, someone who care about the people who is in true power." And one, among the many techniques they implemented, was the dilution of the personal power of the official leader, becoming a puppet. That's why for JFK I think it was ... because the mandate of JFK as President was for several years, '60 to '63. Three years during which he had to fight every step, every law, to implement progress.
Joe: Actually I don't think I really have a favourite among these people that have been assassinated over the past, I don't know, I think we're talking really in the past 100 years, kind of thing, because pretty much they all had an agenda that was similar. They all had a common agenda which was to play fair basically, and to try to use the power that they had for the benefit, at least as much as possible, for the benefit of the people. Certainly to not abuse them, and to not be doing any shady deals or, that would ultimately decrease or diminish the lot of the average person. And certainly for leaders like JFK, or people who had more influence, certainly their agenda in that scope was worldwide, you know.
Pierre: So sometimes it's ... I notice and I'm thinking about this question, who was your favourite hero or what story was the most touching in your opinion, sometimes the dramatic dimension adds to what you feel. I know when I read about Bobby Kennedy's story I found it even more touching than JFK's story although Bobby Kennedy was not elected. He had less power, he had implemented less positive changes, but the fact that he went back to politics after years of grieving and hesitation and he knew it was very likely it would happen to him like it happened to his brother; the dramatic intensity around the Bobby Kennedy case, I find it very heartbreaking.
Niall: Yeah, they could not even let him finish those primaries. I mean that's how ...
Joe: Yeah, because they knew the kind of ... that the people wanted him, basically as the President, you know? That's where it was going. They saw him as essentially, as a replacement for JFK. It's actually a good indication of the kind of person that Robert Kennedy was, was when he ... when Martin Luther King was killed, he decided that he wanted to announce it. I think he was still attorney general at the time. And he wanted to announce it to the people. And this was before anybody knew. So he said that he wanted to go out in public. And he went down to ... he went into an area that was basically a black kind of ghetto area. That's the way it was described to him by his assistants, and they warned him that if he went there and told these people that Martin Luther King had been shot, or confirm it for them, that there might be serious civil unrest and that they couldn't assure his safety, but he decided to go ahead and do it anyway. He didn't care. And he did it from the back of a flatbed truck. He just got up and he just, he wrote the speech on the way there and it's a fairly short speech and I just want to play you some of it here because I think it's very, like Pierre said, it's very touching and it's very interesting, just in terms of the kind of approach he took, the kind of guy he was.
I have some very sad news for all of you and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black, considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible, you can be filled with bitterness and with hatred and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization, black people amongst blacks and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love. For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with, be filled with hatred and distrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond or go beyond these rather difficult times. My favourite poem, my favourite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote "even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence. It is not the end of lawlessness and is not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. And want to dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: "To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world." Let us dedicate ourselves to that and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.
Joe: So, I thought that was very interesting because he was in a ghetto, in a black ghetto basically, and these were people who, many of them had probably just completely adored Martin Luther King and looked to him as their saviour basically, and yet Robert Kennedy was able to go down there and get that kind of response from them and him a white guy type thing. And this is in 1968.
Jason: I think that says more about Martin Luther King, and his message was predominantly one of peace and the shunning of any kind of violence or retaliation.
Niall: Yeah, he had to have prepared them for that.
Jason: He received ... he was stabbed once and several bombs were set off at his house and this, that and the other thing. And he was always very, very strongly against any form of retaliation. I mean, I would list Martin Luther King probably at the top of my list of heroes in the last 100 years. I mean, because everyone likes JFK. I don't. I don't really find him to be heroic but that's just me. But if you look at what was done by King; we're talking about at that time a black man doing what he did, it's even ... if he had been white it would be less impressive, but I mean, he was coming from an extremely racist and oppressive area of the country. Also the northern parts were not necessarily less racist, as he wrote and found out, and what he achieved in the message that he gave, I think was very heroic.
Joe: Well that's the thing. Pretty much Bobby Kennedy was saying the same things as him and that was April 4, I think, 1968 and two months later, just about two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed. And you have to ultimately conclude that these men were killed for those kind of things that Robert Kennedy was saying there.
Jason: Yeah.
Joe: That's why they were taken out, because, I mean that's generally all they kind of said publicly, that's pretty much the same things over and over again.
Jason: Peace, to the public.
Niall: Peace, love, compassion, justice.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: It's just words at the end of the day. I mean, Martin Luther King didn't hold any titles within the U.S. governing structure. On paper he should be no threat. But obviously that's not what they're looking ... they're sensing something else, or the system if you want to say, detects something else. That kicks it into force.
Joe: Yeah, it was in 2000 I think where they had a trial by jury. The family organized a trial and investigation into the death of Martin Luther King. And a jury concluded that he was killed by members of the CIA basically, members of the U.S. government. All of the evidence pointed very, very clearly to that. Again, with Robert Kennedy, all the evidence points directly to, as we've talked about in previous shows, points to him being killed by the CIA as well. JFK obviously. Really, when you ... The problem is, it isn't just in America. When you look at events around the world since then, maybe and even before then, you see the fingerprints of the CIA on the murders of other kind of leaders of other nations along with, you know, French ...
Pierre: [inaudible]
Joe: Particularly in Africa, the French, the British.
Niall: In Africa...
Joe: The Belgians even.
Niall: Patrice Lamumba had just become Prime Minister of the newly liberated Congo, from Belgium. He was killed. I mean, he was killed, it wasn't this ... a single bullet to the head. He was shot by a firing squad, but it was a contrived situation where they made it appear he'd been kidnapped, I think, and then tried in secret and eventually shot behind a shed. But here was a guy who was very young, he had so much potential; he'd just become Prime Minister of a just liberated country and the CIA ...
Joe: Who say they weren't involved, but Patrice Lumumba was the very first, like you say, was the very first democratic ... well, the first Prime Minister that was democratically elected of the Republic of Congo after it gained its independence from Belgium. And the Belgians had multi, or many, hundreds of years, colony ... hundreds of year-old colony in the Congo started under one of the Belgian kings, I think his name was ...
Niall: Leopold?
Joe: Leopold, yeah. And it was all about the rubber trade in those days and he ... the Belgians just behaved like complete animals in the Congo, while calling the natives animals. But they basically just set up these rubber plantations and became very rich as a result of extracting the rubber from the Congo. And they forced the natives into essentially slave labour and any of them who tried to run away or for any misdemeanours they usually had their arm ... their hands cut, or their feet cut off. And they were actually - that continued - there are still people alive today who are amputees from that time when that was going on because it was still going on at the beginning of the ... in the first half of the twentieth century. And it was all about enriching themselves from Congolese rubber, and ...
Niall: It is known that there was a CIA hit man in the country at the time.
Joe: Absolutely. The CIA ...
Niall: That was exposed.
Joe: ... and the Brits have even come out and admitted that they were involved I think.
Niall: The Church Committee in the '70s revealed that there had been two plots by the CIA to kill Lamumba, but said it was not directly involved in the actual murder. So they did nicely get a bit of distance, but they were there, they were there.
Joe: And the Brits ...
Jason: They tried but they didn't succeed so, what? You know?
Joe: Well he was actually ... this refers back to one of our previous shows on MK Ultra. One of the researchers, top researchers in MK Ultra was Sidney Gottlieb. We talked about that with Hank Albarelli on the show we did with him and he actually spoke to Gottlieb. It was Gottlieb who the CIA had hatch a plan to kill Lamumba by poison toothpaste. And it was Sidney Gottlieb, of MK Ultra fame, who was tasked with producing the poisoned toothpaste. And he actually flew there with it and gave it to the CIA station chief, in the Republic of Congo, to try and get it onto Lamumba's toothbrush somehow or other. But apparently they decided it wasn't a good plan so they didn't go ahead with it. But the Belgians were directly involved in it.
The Belgians. I mean the Belgians supposedly give - this is what happens with all empires, basically, the British Empire in particular - any colony that they give up, they give up, they prepare the process of giving independence to the colony in the form of making sure that after they give nominal independence and allow some local government to form, they are pretty much still in control economically, or with their people in place. And if it doesn't go that way, that's when you get assassinations, and in this case you get the very first President. He was only there for like twelve weeks or something before they decided he had to go. Because he was giving ... he was not going to allow the Belgians to have access to mines in the Congo. He was going to keep it for the newly created, the newly liberated country. It was going to be for the wealth of the country and Belgium wanted to keep a hold on, essentially, what they had had a hold on, for a hundred or two hundred years beforehand.
And so they were there. I mean, there's evidence that there were, that Lamumba was kidnapped by and held by white guards, not by black people, not locals. And him and a couple of other people were taken out and they were basically shot. He was tortured for, by the Belgians with ... probably the Belgians, the Brits and the CIA were all involved. He was tortured and then he was killed by firing squad out in ... but then they got worried that they were going to be exposed over it so they rushed back and they buried his body, just in, near where he was shot out in the woods, but they got scared that someone had ... there was an allegation or claim that someone had, they had been seen shooting him. So they went back the next day and dug up his body and took it to bury it somewhere else. But then they weren't satisfied with that because they were still a bit concerned about being exposed so eventually they dug him up again and they buried ... I'm sorry, they dissolved his body in sulphuric acid to do the job properly, supposedly, the Belgian way, and there was a Belgian ... there was a member of Belgian police or whoever, who was involved and he apparently kept a couple of mementos. One of them was a tooth because that's pretty much all that was left. And he proudly showed this tooth, and this is from the freedom loving, and oh-so-evolved and democratic western Europe, you know. This is what they're doing.
And the Brits even said, I mean one of the ... what was her name, a former head of the MI6, she actually admitted ... she's a former head of MI6 called Baroness Park. This is just ... I think in this year, April 2013, in a letter to the London review of books, British Parliamentarian Lord David Lea reported that he discussed Lamumba's death with Baroness Park who was the former head of MI6 shortly before she died.
Jason: Good riddance.
Niall: Ding dong.
Joe: She had been an MI6 officer posted to Leopoldville which was the capital at the time. Leopoldville, i.e., the king, they named the capital after the king of their imperial masters. And according to him, this guy who interviewed her, when he mentioned the uproar surrounding Lamumba's abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it, Baroness Park said, "We did it. I organized it." So you have basically competing western intel agencies here all vying for the right to claim that they dissolved the democratically elected leader of the Congo in a bath of acid, you know? They're bitching at each other. "No, I did." "No, we dissolved him." "No, we dissolved him."
Pierre: Yeah, and one important point is that often we focus on the CIA because the CIA, it is the intelligence of the dominating empire right now, the U.S.A. But every empire, every imperialistic group, has its own intelligence service, services that do the dirty job including assassination. To give you an idea of the extent of this kind of actions, between 1963 and 2011, France, a small country, conducted the assassination through its secret services of twenty-one African presidents. Twenty-one African presidents. Only conducted by French secret service. And we should not be mistaken here. When a president is put down, it is because the president is not serving the imperial interests which means he's serving the interests of his people. So twenty-one leaders who tried to do good and who get killed.
The last one, 2011, Muammar Gaddafi. Si bien, two years ago [...] the ones that are coming, the ones that don't agree to follow the imperialistic rules. But the interesting thing is that when you check the General de Gaulle profile, because it gives an idea as well how the government agencies and empires interact, Charles de Gaulle election would be helped by the CIA in 1958. Because at this time there's a lot of interest, unrest in France and socialist powers are about to get elected, through the communist powers. Forme populaire. Progressive and really poor people.
So they push the de Gaulle envelope and as usual, with all the resources they have, they made him elected. It's 1958. And France is going through this huge crisis I was talking about: decolonization. It was losing its colonies in Africa, particularly Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. War is raging. And de Gaulle, first he is adopting the imperialistic stance. He's fighting to keep the Algerian colony. But finally he hears reason and wisdom and he's about to capitulate and negotiate and give freedom to Algeria. And at this time, the CIA realizing that he's changing his political attitude, he's about to give power to the Algerian leader, who is a pro-people leader, had time to assassinate him and his own bodyguard, with the first of forty assassination attempts against de Gaulle in the beginning of the '60s, around the time of the end of the Algerian war.
So it shows as well how human beings are the tools of those people. You put a person in power, even powers like France, put in power because it serves your interests and you assassinate the same person a few years later because he doesn't serve your interests anymore.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: I'd like to say something in defence of the Belgians. Obviously not all of them were nasty, brutish, psychopathic types. Ten years previously, 1950, yes 1950, the leader of the Belgian communist party, Julien Lahaut, was assassinated, shot dead by two people outside his house. And I mean, he was extremely popular. He would almost certainly have been elected to the new government. I only heard about this because of the extent of the reaction. There were nationwide strikes. Everything shut down. People were not pleased, to say the least. I mean, it had looked at one point there that Belgium, which had been a kingdom, a monarchy until that point, was going to become a republic.
It's also a trend that repeats in Europe throughout post World War II. We can probably get into this in terms of the system of the empire, that's left behind, the stay behind aspect. We see it, and we've talked about it in Africa. What people don't realize in Europe is that a very extensive stay-behind network was left behind when the Allies drew their armies back. So you have in Belgium, almost certainly it was going to become a communist country. Italy almost certainly. Greece was a communist country, and many, many others.
Pierre: Actually the Greek ESA. The name of the unit that was in charge of assassinating de Gaulle was Stay Behind.
Niall: Well it's a concept that's come up again and again and again. It's taken a few decades, but we now have a good idea that the CIA through NATO which was set up in Belgium actually, created and perpetuated ... okay, some of the units fell out, some had to be renewed, some popped up in different areas but more or less created a system in every single western European country, of a covert force which could, when necessary, be pulled up to assassinate, to create mock protests, to create false extreme left terrorist groups that would conduct bombings. Nearly all of the so-called extreme left terrorist incidents in Europe over the past forty-fifty years, when you look at them, they were actually traced back to these stay-behind networks. And they ... some of these operations involved the assassination of leaders.
Pierre: When you think about it from a, just occurred to me now, from an evolutionary perspective, JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, Julius Caesar, to go back further in history, these are exceptional bloodlines. Those persons are extremely gifted. They have this very rare combination of higher intellectual capabilities, working capacities, strategies and this empathy, those emotional, those heart qualities. They have both and very highly of. So these are somehow the best genetic pools and they're systematically killed. So it's a kind of negative genetic selection that is conducted here.
Joe: Absolutely, yeah.
Niall: Well I'm hoping we can get into a discussion about that because I want to try and understand why ... it's almost like in this world, in this realm, there is a threshold above which you cannot pass. It just automatically snuffs you out or automatically something kicks in that the machinery works, starts to work. It might miss you first time, second time, but you're doomed.
Joe: Called psychopaths, pretty much.
Pierre: Yeah, and I think in first analysis, we realize that one of the main reasons why those assassinations are connected is, are political, because the leader is actually serving the people and not serving the agenda of the elite. Okay, fair enough. And that's probably one of the motivators. And sometimes a solid motivator. But I think there's something else going on. As human beings, as soon as we are newborn, we are the models of our parents. We are creatures that are looking at, that are striving permanently for progress, for getting better, getting higher, and we need models to get this inspiration, this deep inspiration to become better, to get hope, to feel love, to make progress. And those leaders on the psychological level, on the deep psychological level, are the ones who give us this true, fundamental positive inspiration. They empower us. They inspire us. They give us cadence and care. They are the true ideal parents who are able to make better children. And so when the PTBs kill heroes, and they kill part of us because we partly identify to them, not only they kill parts of us, but they kill the best part of us. When the assassins kill our heroes, they kill us.
Joe: Yeah, I think they ... I think that's certainly an aspect to it. There's definitely a psychological effect, whether it's intended or not. It's part of the deal when someone that a lot of people love gets killed, it's extremely kind of depressing. It's like a body blow. And it can make people a bit more cynical and depressed and kind of give up hope to a certain extent in anything good happening because that's pretty obvious that that would happen. But ...
Jason: I think ultimately there's a lesson in it for people that they need to learn; we need to learn as a race, which is that it is the responsibility of every single person in the world, you know, every single person whose interests are served by those heroes to make sure that it doesn't happen. And because people don't really take on the responsibility of protecting those who are representing their interests, they conveniently get killed. So until we learn that particular lesson, until we sort of take the responsibility on ourselves to ensure that people who are doing good in the world are not assassinated then it's never going to change. Because ultimately it's our responsibility. Caesar should not, it should not have been possible. I mean he was assassinated in a room full of people by a small group. He was assassinated in public. That should simply not have been possible because if those people had realized and recognized their interests, the minute they saw something bad happening, they should have jumped on those guys and, you know, you just have to do that kind of stuff. And people have to learn to watch situations like that and do something proactive about it.
Pierre: And I think the reason why the elites struggle so much to rewrite history after the death of one of our heroes, although the political agenda is neutralized in the death of the hero, they rewrite because they want to erase the psychological bond. They want to kill the source of inspiration. They want to kill this nascent hope in people. They want to kill this idea in people, this dream, "I had a dream," this dream of a better world. This dream of a just world.
Joe: Well there's that, but there's also the practical example that they would - not the practical example - but the practical policies that they would put in place that would be difficult then to overturn. I mean, if you're some kind of a government leader and you use your power to pass laws that directly benefit the population, and they become kind of entrenched laws that the people get used it, it's going to be difficult if they've been there for a while to suddenly turn those around again, you know. So from the perspective of the people, of the black hats, let's call them, you don't want to even go there. You don't want to even have that kind of a system set up in particular countries because it's easier to stop it, to strangle it in its cradle, type thing, rather than have to deal with it as a fully fledged and ...
Pierre: True. What I mean is that the political consequences of a hero are easier and quicker to cancel than the psychological consequences. Like, let's say Johnson, less than a month after JFK's assassination, he cancelled all the memoranda acting the end of the Vietnam war, bringing the boys back. So the political decisions were quickly neutralized. But during the '70s, the '80s, the '90s, even now, you still have mainstream medias bashing JFK and exposing allegedly his womanizing side and his ties with the mafias because they want also in addition to the political consequences, they want to neutralize the psychological consequences of hero behaviour.
Jason: And they have a pretty standard program for it, which is really easy to detect. When suddenly you find accusations of some sort of immoral sexual behaviour or misappropriated or suspiciously sourced funds, then you know exactly what's happening, right? You know exactly what's happening. That's a snow job right away. I mean you should immediately disbelieve it. They know how to push peoples' moral and ethical buttons and the greed and the sex angle get them every time. And people have to learn to immunize themselves against that. One of the things I always maintain is, it doesn't matter who the president sleeps with because who he sleeps with has no effect on his decisions in a legal presidential capacity. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he's gay, straight, poly-amorous. Who cares? That's his private life. Now, of course, if he's doing something illegal in his political position, that's a different story. If someone comes along and says "So and such and such a president used his political power to have someone assassinated" - uh, like Obama - that's criminal. But if Obama were to like cheat on his wife, I'd say "Well dude that's messed up, but that has nothing to do with you being a President."
Pierre: Yeah, and also the dissymmetry, the disproportion, like for Julius Caesar, he's being accused of being a womanizer. True or false, whatever, it's not a major offence.
Jason: The man was a pimp.
Pierre: But - yeah, but - he was charismatic, obviously. But at the same time the ones who depicted him as a bad person because of his womanizing streak are the ones who passed the law that oppressed and destroyed millions of lives. You see the inversion of laws? The hero is depicted as negative because of a very minor offence and sometimes unfounded, at the same time the accusers present themselves as the good ones while they destroy everything.
Jason: You've got to ask the question which is more immoral? Killing millions of people or sleeping with millions of women. I kind of have to say that, in the balance sheet, the mass murder is worse than sort of like, you know, being a slut.
Niall: There are a couple of seemingly innocuous, if you want to say that, cases where there are people who aren't necessarily particularly popular yet, nor are they particularly powerful. And there's a recent one, 2003, the Swedish, then-Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh, I mean she was actually ...
Jason: Like the chocolate?
Niall: Uh, no, that's Lindt. I think it's pronounced Lindh, L-I-N-D-H. She was out shopping in a store, in a clothes store, no bodyguards because she was just a normal person. I mean, there's no ... I have her on my hero or heroine list because in retrospect we can see things like what she was doing was good and the direction she was taking. But you know, at the time she's another normal person. And she was knifed to death supposedly by an eighteen-year-old Serbian I think, deranged, lone nut. And that is what happened. She was knifed there and then in the store.
Jason: It seems to happen a lot.
Niall: Yeah, that's the thing though. It just ... when you look at who the person was, that it just happened to this person, oops, because she was very much against the war in Iraq. She was very much pro-Palestine. It's just this coincidence of stances they take in favour of ordinary people, against the circumstances of their death. Fifteen years before that the Swedish Prime Minister; was he shot dead on the street?
Joe: Mm-hm.
Niall: And he was in office at the time. There was a similar-ish situation where he was ... it became apparent that he was not following the dictates of either the U.S. or the Russians.
Joe: Well they have such a long track record of doing this kind of thing that in the modern day, in the past ten or fifteen years, they can do it so easily and they're so well versed in how to do it. A person doesn't have to really step out of line that far before they can say "Yeah, let's just take him out because he might do some stuff that we don't like; so best to get rid of him."
Pierre: And we tend to focus our attention on heroes that display an international dimension because they're more mediatized and we know them better, like JFK and the likes. But these techniques, assassinations, are very much widespread and they target only ... they target a lot of people who simply tried to defend ordinary people. You don't have to be a president to be assassinated. It also means that in addition to the international heroes, a lot of national heroes that for us don't mean much, but for the people living in this nation or that nation, mean a lot.
Joe: Mm-hm. Yeah.
Pierre: Who've been put down. So on the national scale, what happened, the same thing happens as the, at the international scales that everybody sees.
Niall: Yeah, that's what I was trying to keep in mind when I was coming up with my list. The extent of the grief for those people, although to us it would be like ... we've mentioned Lamumba. He had a similarity with Gaddafi in that there was kind of a visionary aspect; for them it was a Pan-Africanism. They were not just about, "Help my people, oh then I'll feel good." They really, really sought to ... they had a global outlook. And I think it's that as well. That's another aspect, I mean if we're talking about psychopaths who feel no empathy, they can't gauge, "Oh this person must be taken out because they're too empathic," but if they get too big for their boots, if they're thinking of others on this kind of, on a continental scale and it doesn't fit with the world as they want to see it.
Joe: They don't even have to, they don't have to think about it in terms of empathy or this leader showing empathy. It's on a practical level. If they don't fall in line with the idea of funnelling resources and wealth upwards to the apex of the pyramid, if they start to spread it down towards the bottom and start to make noises that that's what they want to do and that's what should happen, etcetera, etcetera, then by definition they have more empathy than the average banker or ...
Niall: Or in practical terms, the corporate plan of Gaddafi's to launch a new Pan-African currency, I mean that right there was an absolute no-no.
Jason: But the thing is ...
Joe: It was independence. Economic independence from the World Bank and the IMF and stuff and that's ...
Jason: An African union has to be excruciatingly frightening to Europe, a Europe which doesn't really have much in the way of resources anymore and does quite a bit of importing. Not having ... it's sort of like it's a George Orwell 1984 thing with the African countries being sort of used for resources and things like that. They have to exist; if they get united and get control of their resources, I mean that would be devastating politically to Europe.
Pierre: Yeah, at the same time I think a lot of those power struggles transcend national borders and ultimately it's not really U.S. versus Europe and China. At some level there are struggles between nations, but by the effects, we have elites, multinational companies, big banks that pull the strings. And nations aren't really; and their interests don't have much to do with nations. De Gaulle example is a good example. The CIA is about, tried 40 times to assassinate de Gaulle because he was about to give independence to Algeria. So you could think but they shouldn't have assassinated him. They let Algeria get independent and then they get the control of the resources. And they expel the French embassies. No, they wanted to keep the western embassies that transcend borders. When you see the shareholders, shares repartition, it's the big wealthy westerner shareholders that control whatever the citizenship.
Joe: De Gaulle also wasn't too interested in cozying up to NATO though.
Pierre: Absolutely.
Joe: And that was a problem.
Pierre: They went together.
Joe: They wanted a foothold in Europe, you know. I mean France is a major European country and if it went against this North Atlantic alliance, i.e., the Americans having their boots all over Europe, and they saw that as instrumental and fundamental to their kind of global policy and they needed to have a bulwark in Europe and as much of Europe as possible to keep back the commie threat, you know. So the fact that he was not playing that game was also a reason, you know.
Pierre: Yeah, you have several leaders like that. This scenario replays again and again, where the PTBs, be it CIA or other agencies, put in power a puppet. But eventually the puppet stops playing the scenario he's supposed to play, i.e., serving the interests of the elites.
Jason: That's what happened with Saddam Hussein. He was put into power by George Bush Sr. back in the '60s it was?
Niall: Not Bush senior but yeah he was helped into power for sure, by the CIA.
Jason: Yeah maybe it was, it was with CIA or something like that.
Niall: '60s though, yeah.
Jason: Sixty. But Bush was involved with the CIA in the '60s.
Niall: Yeah, he could have been there. That would make it even more _______.
Jason: The head of the CIA at - what time was he there?
Niall: I don't remember the dates. I think in the '70s, before he became Vice President and then in the '80s. So '70s. Yeah, well Saddam Hussein, I didn't include him in my list.
Joe: No.
Jason: He was definitely not a hero.
Niall: Because, I mean, he did good things, the country did become secular, they did ... there was social uplift.
Jason: Secularism isn't necessarily a good thing.
Niall: But, well, in the broad sweep of things, it is. I mean, the contrast is ...
Joe: Fundie Islam.
Niall: Fundie Islam, although that's not black and white either because look at the Iranian revolution. That was a fundie revolution. But actually it softened into a relatively secular ...
Joe: It's when the western version of fundie Islam that is imposed that is the option, you know, it's either ... there has been a variety of western fundamentalist Islam which is basically a bunch of actual nut jobs, Moslem radical nut jobs who are given money and given weapons and pushed into power. I mean, that option is not a good option.
Jason: Don't ever forget that America is under the control of fundamentalist Christianity. I mean George W. Bush was a fundamentalist Christian.
Joe: Yeah.
Jason: And he even stood up in front of the people and said that god had called him to do certain things.
Niall: Well he said that about Iraq.
Jason: America is a fundamentalist Christian country.
Joe: Well yeah, but that's the problem. That's what I'm saying. They find ideological commonality with the fundie Muslims, because it's just fundamentalist. It's just extremist, controlling, dominating outlook on life. But, I don't know, Saddam Hussein, the problem with Saddam Hussein is that he's been demonized for so long for a good fifteen years. But the other problem with him is that for a long time he was actually supported by western governments.
Jason: Yeah.
Joe: So that kind of tends to ... well it tends to put him in the not-so-heroic box. Anybody that they actually, for any length of time actually like and support suggests that he's not exactly the best guy to have. But he did - I mean, Iraq was, before the sanctions, before the first Gulf war, Iraq was the most advanced Moslem, or Arab ...
Niall: Arab country.
Joe: ... country in the Middle East. And there was a lot of, comparatively to other countries there was a lot of freedom for women, women held positions in all aspects of life and there was no real, there was no veiling and all that kind of stuff. So in that sense, Iraq was a good place for anybody to live until they decided to bomb the crap out of it and starve it with sanctions.
Niall: Yeah. The thing they lynched him on, figuratively speaking, was that he gassed his own people. But the part they left out is that the gas was sold to him by [...].
Joe: The other part they left out was that it was the Iranians who did it, it wasn't the Iraqis.
Jason: I don't know, I find myself less and less interested.
Joe: According to, that's one thing, but that's an important point because that is the one thing that ... when they couldn't pin 911, and they couldn't pin weapons of mass destruction, they fell back on: "He's a bad man. He gassed his own people." That is why they invaded Iraq. It wasn't for Operation Iraqi Freedom? "There's a bad guy there and he gassed his own people." And the gas; he's a bad guy is a personal opinion and the only piece of fact is he gassed his own people and that has been proven, or at least stated to be, to have been false by a CIA operative who was there at the time in the region who said that they knew what type of gas was, who had what because the Americans sold it to them, and that the gas that they used was a certain type of blood agent or there was some technical detail to it, and he said that was a gas that the Iranians had, not that the Iraqis had. And there's also other reasons why the Iranians would have bombed that town as opposed to Saddam.
Pierre: And I think ...
Niall: And then it's interesting - sorry Pierre - that this week they're falling back on this with respect to Syria.
Pierre: Exactly.
Niall: A chemical gas attack. Oh he got ... that means that the only gas attack of any serious ... that anyone should be talking
seriously about, we need to go back 100 years when the Brits...
Joe: 1919 or 1920.
Niall: The Brits were gassing ...
Joe: They were the first ones to do it. Gassing the Arabs.
Niall: Yup.
Pierre: And ...
Joe: The Arab gassers are the Brits, not the Arabs themselves.
Pierre: Yeah, and often this pseudo duality in degrees of religious government this is like secular, Muslim versus Christian, are brought up but they hide the only real duality, a regime is either serving its people or it's serving the empire. When the regime is serving the empire, it's labelled bad ... it's labelled good although it's bad and when it's serving the people, it's labelled good although it's bad. And usually it's destituted and isolated. This simple somehow.
Niall: Seeing as we're in the Middle East at the moment, what about Rafic Hariri? Hero?
Joe: I would say you could call Rafic Hariri a hero, yeah. Valentine's Day, 2005 the Israelis planted a massive bomb in a truck, left a 30 or 40 foot crater in the road that blew up his car. Rafic Hariri was a former Lebanese Prime Minster who at the time was not, but was a major player and his focus was on Lebanese society and keeping it kind of independent and keeping it wealthy and he was, he had a kind of construction empire, if you want to call it that. He was a very rich man. He was a billionaire, but despite that, because most people that are billionaires aren't that truly philanthropic, he actually was and did a lot for Lebanese society and he was a kind of binding force between all the different factions and also with the west because he was well respected. Jacques Chirac, actually he was a good friend of Jacques Chirac and stuff.
And so the Israelis saw him as the wrong kind of person, they want to keep it factional and religious orientated in the countries that surround Israel. They want fundies all around them because they say: "Look, we're surrounded by fundies. We need to attack these people. They're crazy fundies." You can't have any kind of ... that's one of the reasons for the secularism, particularly in the Middle East, that secularism, any leader that comes up with: "Listen, we're not going to have religion, Islam as the main focus of life here." If that's a big country in the Middle East, that's bad for the West, because the West has pitched their stake on, "We need to be the police of the world because of the Moslem terrorist threat," and you have to have Moslem countries, and as fundie as possible, to justify that threat and justify the expansion around the world and the invasions and all that kind of stuff.
So he was killed most likely by Israelis because the piece of evidence; a guy actually wrote a book on it or an article, but I think he wrote a book on it as well, was that they had a ... in his car he actually, part of the protection system in his car was a ... I think it was a radio signal or cell phone signal jamming device, specifically to stop the most common type of bombs which were the bombs that were activated by cell phone. But that was somehow overcome. There was another device that could cancel that out and the people who made ... the only people in the region, or I think actually in the world, who made that particular type of device ... because they found this out by tracking cell phone or microwave communications between cell phone towers and they realized that there was some kind of interference or jamming going on. And the jamming was being done ... the jamming of the jammer was being done by a kind of code or microwave signal that had been developed by Israeli intelligence.
Niall: I see.
Joe: We have a call here. Should we go ahead and take it?
Niall: Yeah.
Gary: Hello?
Joe: Hi caller. Hi, what's your name and where are you calling from?
Gary: Hi, I'm Gary. I'm calling from like the deserts just outside of Tuscon, Arizona.
Joe: Hi Gary.
Niall: Hello. Welcome to the show.
Gary: So I was thinking about regicide lately.
Niall: Yeah.
Gary: And how it seems like more and more we're told that we have these artificial kings, like the king of pop or the king of rock and roll and how there seems to always be some kind of conspiracy about their deaths. They've got to kill these various kings. But if you then take a look at history, how the deaths of real kings seems to always lead to these sea changes in history itself, like the death of Julius Caesar takes the Roman republic from a tiny little republic to a major, almost worldwide network, from their point of view. Or you have the death of the king of France and all of a sudden now we have a change to democracies all over the world. So is there something about the killing of a king, even if it's just like a popular king, even like to the point now where they're going through so many new kings, like just the death of the guy who played Tony Soprano or the kid from Glee. They just keep going through these popular kings that they have to kill for some strange, possibly occult significance.
Pierre: There's a lot of ... there are two things that pop in my mind after listening to your comments. First, I think that deep inside human beings there is this need for idols and kings and models. And actually one way the elites use to divert us from a true inspiration coming from a true hero like Julius Caesar or Kennedy, is to create false idols like the pop, TV idols that don't really carry the true inspiring values. And the second point is that there is a ... in the dynastic cycle, the sacrifice... For millennia in human history, you have this dynastic cycle where the kings, where the rulers are sacrificed when things turn bad. So maybe by sacrificing false kings, they try to reduce in human beings this desire coming from the unconscious mind to appease the gods by sacrificing but this time not the people that are really in power, the elites, but scapegoats, i.e., fake kings. Those are my two ideas.
Jason: I have a slight idea. It's a little bit different.
Gary: Yeah.
Jason: I would say that kings in general ... I mean, the thing is, okay, king is a term and emperor is a term and all these different terms that we have, but the truth of the matter is, is the President is a king. Okay? It's a single person who all of the people think is in charge. Right? And all of their energy and beliefs are focused on that person as their representative on earth. Right?
Gary: Mm-hm.
Jason: And even when you talk about the king of pop or you talk about even Elvis or Michael Jackson or John Lennon or even Kurt Cobain, Kurt Cobain was kind of a king for the youthful generation. These people are kind of focal points of belief and energy and hope even, for whatever people put into them. It could be everybody in the world or it could be just a large population. And the idea of then taking that person and killing them is ... it seems to be less about the sacrifice but it seems more like a controlling aspect. It's sort of like a loss of hope. It's preventing people from getting forward. Because ultimately Martin Luther King was a king for the black community at that time. And in a certain sense maybe even JFK, maybe even RFK, were kind of kings in the making for people. And killing them was all about everybody puts their hope into a single person. And that's the intrinsic behaviour of human beings as sort of like a network. They elect a representative to speak for them and killing that person then disturbs and keeps them down. It's like, really like keeping people in slavery by killing their kings or killing their representatives so that they can never really go forward because in a certain sense, that person is kind of like, it's kind of like the engine on a train. And all of the people are everything behind the train. And in order for the human race to move forward, the king has to be good and whatever, and he goes in a direction and he takes the entire people with him. And so ensuring that the king is a bad person or is going to move the race in the direction that whatever force is doing this, we're talking very abstract and very, very mystical, hypothetically too here.
It's all about controlling the direction of humanity. If Caesar had been successful and continued to live, he would have pulled the entire Roman race and probably all of the surrounding races, the Greeks and everybody, into a certain direction. The same thing with JFK. The same thing with Martin Luther King. The same thing even with John Lennon. He would have pulled the youthful generation in a very specific direction and killing them off then kind of leaves everyone in disarray and then someone else comes along and if he's good and pulls them in the right direction, but if it's like Kylie Minogue or Britney Spears or something like that, then they're "Okay yeah, cool." Well I mean kind of you know, because for a while, Justin Bieber. They are kings in a certain sense. There's a large number of people who have pictures of them on their wall,
Joe: The problem with ....
Jason: Think about them daily.
Joe: The problem with specifics Gary, though, in terms of your question, it's whether there's any evidence that any of these particular pop idols, let's say, or music idols or movie idols, have actually been, or if there's any evidence that they've been assassinated.
Gary: Oh well, yeah.
Joe: You know what I mean?
Gary: Yeah, if they were assassinated. Is it more like a matter of they kill the pop idol as just a sort of maintenance, that they just have to go through these people, just as a way of maintaining the status quo. And then when they really want to change things, they've got to kill a genuine leader, like a JFK or a Julius Caesar.
Joe: Yeah, that's a good point and I think that's pretty much on song with what we're saying, that it does have a psychological effect and when that happens somebody else steps in and puts on a show of being the new idol or the new leader, but they're not. They don't have any substance to them.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: It's all appearance and no substance.
Niall: There's a saying you know, you build people up to knock them down. It's kind of the peoples' fault as well, in a way, because we kind of agree to partake in the contract of, in some cases making an idol of someone who was not really deserving of it and then they're knocked down. So they're sort of sacrificed, so to speak.
Pierre: There's a saying that goes like that. In the new Roman empire the saying goes like, "The Tarpeian Rock is close to the capital." Tarpeian Rock is where there was this cliff where they were throwing rulers from, to sacrifice them. And the capital was where the rulers ruling. It means it was intrinsically part of the cycle and of the rules, that the rulers eventually would be sacrificed. That is the dynastic cycle. I think people, and this dynastic cycle ended when the mandate of heaven, when the divine rights of the rule of the king was ending and the end of the mandate of heaven was shown by the cosmic wrath, the gods' wrath. Cosmic calamities. I think right now people... Since the elites have put in power only fake kings, they are bad kings. The world is going really bad and they probably trigger some negative cosmic reactions. People sense that we are reaching the end of the dynastic cycle and the logical conclusion to a dynastic cycle is the sacrifice of the kings. So since they don't have an elite with kings anymore to sacrifice, since they replaced all of them with their evil purpose, they have to sacrifice fake kings. So pop kings, soccer players.
I recently checked a top ten of the most popular contemporary people in the world and the list is pathetic. Those people have no substance when you compare with true heroes, they give no inspiration, no love, no empathy, no intelligence. They don't bring you up. They don't inspire you.
Joe: Okay Gary. Thanks for your call.
Gary: Yeah, thanks for your time and love your show. Keep on. Rock on.
Joe: Alright, thank you Gary.
Niall: Thank you.
Pierre: Thank you Gary.
Gary: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Niall: I think he brings in an interesting point, well an interesting few other things to look at because although you're saying there are all these people who are, that they've been lionized, they've been made into heroes who are not deserving of it. Well, at the end of the day, they draw their source from the people. So if you take Michael Jackson, for example, it's not so much that "Oh, he's a fake hero put on the people". His popularity must come from the people.
Pierre: I think that it's not black and white this [...]. There are John Lennon, there are very good figures ...
Niall: John Lennon, there's an explicit case where he was taken out.
Pierre: Yeah.
Joe: But he wasn't taken out because he was a popular hero necessarily. It was ...
Pierre: Political stance.
Joe: It was because he was similar to Michael Jackson, but then later because of what he was using ... he was politicizing and using his ...
Niall: Yeah but what he was using his popularity for.
Pierre: Exactly. So it's not black and white. You have some true heroes in this pop world, or this entertainment world. Or some heroes that display some genuine hero qualities. At the same time a lot of heroes are manufactured artificially by medias. And people, they adopt heroes that they cannot access to. If you have an individual "star", permanently displayed on TV shows and the radio waves and this person will become heroic. I think there's another quality.
Jason: First of all I think there's no real metaphysical distinction between a hero or a president or a king in the political sense and then a hero or a king of stardom. I don't think that there's a metaphysical difference between them because being a hero and being - what would be the word? - politically influential is all about your ability to persuade and motivate the minds of people with what you say. So if you're a big star, if you're like John Lennon for example, John Lennon was basically, he was the king of pop in a certain sense. He was the king of popular music at the time, but his rhetoric was also very positive and very people-oriented. Right? And so in a certain sense, without being a politician he was still able to be politically motivating to the people. He was able to tell them things about how they should think about the world and peace and blah, blah, blah, such and such. And so he was the equivalent of a political leader in a certain sense because he ... he didn't control the mind but he influenced or had the ability with his words to influence the mind. And so does any other star. If a movie star came up and he played in a whole bunch of movies, a box office draw, everybody loved him, great. And then all of a sudden he went on TV and said "You know what people, we need to start thinking about peace and your leaders are lying to you", you'd be like "Oh, this guy is awesome. He's great." Because they don't do that, they're just like Obama. Obama's an asshole.
Joe: Exactly. They're not ...
Jason: He's the President but he is an evil bastard.
Joe: Well, it's like I was saying about the Pope's visit to Brazil a few months ago and all those screaming hordes of young people. When I first saw it I said "Is that a Justin Bieber concert? And Justin Bieber looks old. Did he age recently?" Why is he wearing that white ... oh shit, it's the Pope." John Lennon was taken out because he was ... because of what he was saying and because he cared enough about these issues to actually ... and he figured, "Hey, people listen to me. I've got something I want to say but I'm not going to shut up about it." So many other people are in a similar position as he in terms of influence as he was, and greater influence, but they just don't ...
Jason: They don't have anything to say.
Joe: Well they don't have anything to say. They care more about their ... for example, a small example like the Dixie Chicks. Look at the Dixie Chicks. They weren't worldwide popular but they were quite popular in the U.S. and still are. And they came out in 2003 against the Iraq war and said they were ashamed that Bush was from Texas, even though he's not really.
Jason: He's not from Texas. He's from Martha's Vineyard.
Joe: Exactly, but they: "We're ashamed that he lives here. Get him out of here." And they got so much shit for that. They got ...
Pierre: Death threats.
Joe: They got death threats. And a lot of it was manufactured. All the radio stations were out against them and stuff and wouldn't play their music and totally unpatriotic and stuff. So you can see that maybe times were different in John Lennon's time compared to today. Maybe in those 30 years or more things have changed a lot. And trying to do what he did today, you just won't get the exposure. They'll say: "Okay listen, you have a lot of exposure. You're popular. You get on the radio stations and you're on all the TV shows. Guess what. You're not anymore." Or maybe they just make you disappear.
Jason: The machine has been built up...
Niall: Yes.
Jason: ...and controls it.
Niall: Yes. That's what's changed I think. You'll still find a significant, well I don't know, a majority, hopefully a large chunk of people who would have been behind their statements and cheered it on.
Jason: And that's why there's such a work to get control of things like YouTube and Vimeo and stuff like that right now, because all of a sudden it becomes a distribution medium that anybody can say to because say for instance, the Dixie Chicks were to come out and say a bunch of stuff and people are saying "We won't play you on the radio." They say "That's okay, with YouTube videos people can still watch us."
Pierre: And there are several processes going on to make sure that the heroes, legitimate or not, don't say anything that doesn't serve the agenda of the elites. And remember in these top ten of the most popular living persons in the world, you have three or four soccer players. Soccer, the most mediatized sport. Those "heroes" don't even talk. Today, the most popular heroes in our degenerating civilizations do not talk.
Joe: They run around...
Pierre: They have no message.
Joe: They run around a field in their underwear kicking a pig's bladder.
Niall: And then they start hugging each other and taking their shirt off. It's a bit ...
Jason: Well, obviously you have to realize that there's a large section of the population which are completely devoid of any political thought whatsoever. Adolph Hitler could come back to life and take over the entire world and these people would say, "Hmm. Sieg Heil. Excellent. When's the next football game?" Because they have no political thought. It just would never occur to them to even think that there's an ethical question or a moral question about some political thing. They're incapable of it.
Pierre: That's an important point. I think a lot of people are like empty vessels. It's not negative, just they don't have made up their minds and they can be influenced and that's why ...
Joe: Yeah, and that actually creates a need for leaders because you don't have the leaders of this type or heroes or people who have that substance, whatever it is, that led these people to rise up to positions of power and to want to do something beneficial. Not everybody has that. There are a few. Most people don't have that but they look to ... but they can be swayed by people like that. And that's why it's all the worse when they're taken out because there's so few of them. And what they're left with is soccer players and people who will follow soccer players until the day they die. And cry about them when they don't score goals.
Pierre: Heroes have the potential to control the [inaudible], the thoughts and the behaviour, of maybe 90% of the population. People who are receptive, I say let's put it in this way. If they are subjected to positive inspiration, positive heroes, they will suck in, pump in this inspiration and conform partly to this model. But today, they are confronted to negative or empty heroes, psychopathic heroes and they suck in, they get inspiration from those heroes that don't make them better.
Jason: Humanity is a social animal and I sometimes think that we don't really think about the repercussions of that, especially because we have this kind of philosophy of individualism. But ultimately humanity is predominantly a social animal and the great trend of all social animals in the animal kingdom, which is that the large body of them are kind of like worker bees, in a certain sense, and that's not a negative thing. The large body of people are, for all intents and purposes, the proletariat. They are a kind of a working class of human. And they need and do require leadership, or people to go out and work in the field of leadership, and they need the queen bee in a certain sense.
Pierre: And Julius Caesar is a good example showing how a good leader can transcend human beings for the best. When you see the deepness of his legions, they were made of normal human beings and surely after years of bonding, exchange, learning from this great example ...
Jason: They were united by a cohesive religion, Mithraism as well.
Pierre: And all that added, led to a synergetic social body, group, where the total impact was much more than the sum of its parts.
Jason: And this kind of thing is the great fear that they have today. I would say right now the great fear in Africa and especially the Middle East is the possibility of someone like a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King kind of raising up. Someone who would speak with a peaceful philosophy; it would be very, very difficult for them.
Joe: Yeah, they actively and have been for many years actively subverting anybody who showed any hint of coming to the forefront. And ...
Jason: Well this is why they do false flag operations too.
Joe: Yeah, and they have it so locked down at this stage, but they have to maintain it all the time. They have to keep up with it and keep tinkering away and assassinating here and there and inciting violence here, planting bombs there, that kind of thing. They have to manage it. It takes a lot of energy and effort but they're - but it's worth - for some reason they're willing to put the effort into it. And it is an awful lot of effort, you know. They're putting so much effort into stopping a natural function of human society which is generally speaking for most of the populations to live in peace. To just get on with your life and live in peace. There's more than enough stuff going on for any group of people in a small society or whatever size society in terms of interaction and stimulation and stuff, to keep them happy. The average person of which, let's say it's 99% or something like that, or maybe a bit less, let's say 94% ala Lobaczewski, but the vast majority of people have more than enough in terms of normal human life and normal human interactions, to keep them happy. And that can be quite a broad scope of things. But who among them want to go and invade other countries and stuff?
Jason: Right.
Joe: "Let's all go and invade that other town over there. Yeah sure, half of us might not come back, and you might come back with a few limbs less, but do you fancy it?" "No I want to watch TV tonight. What's wrong with you? You want me to go and get my leg chopped off? For what?"
Jason: Yeah, there's an inherent ridiculousness; because if you think about it, with natural disasters and disease and just every day accidents, there are so many ways right now in the world to die, getting hit by a car, falling off a roof while you're cleaning some gutters or something, falling in the bathtub. So many ways, diseases, whatever. And to add to that is just completely and totally insane. It is such a useless and futile exercise.
Joe: But then we're faced also with the problem, with the evidence, the fact that throughout even just modern history, someone has been able to whip up large numbers of people to run off and fight against some enemy and die in their millions and think it was a good thing.
Jason: Right.
Joe: So, like what I've just said, obviously it's not the full story. There is some mechanism within human beings that you can whip them up to get out of their nice comfortable lives and take off and maybe not come back. So maybe that's for another discussion but it's obviously a part of it, it's whipping up emotions and fear mainly.
Jason: It's changing though. It's becoming more dangerous. That's why ...
Pierre: Manipulation.
Jason: That's why they have these drones now, because it really is becoming a little bit more difficult because the globalization of the world with the internet and all these different forms of communication is bringing people a lot closer. It's making the world a lot smaller than it used to be. And people are starting to see kind of the ridiculousness of nationalism and national borders. Because you go online and you talk to people from ten different countries and you have them on your Facebook and oh, and you see pictures of what their house is like and everything. You start to get a real feeling that there is this gigantic global community that despite a great physical distance is actually immediately close because of the internet.
Joe: Yeah. And it breaks down stereotypes and lies and disinformation about other races and all that kind of stuff.
Jason: Yeah, you start to realize that they're people.
Joe: And they want the same thing as you.
Jason: And they want the same thing as you. And so that's why they have like these drones and this more mechanized army and sort of satellites and Star Wars program because they need to find those few people, that six percent of the population who will be happy jockeying a chair with a joystick and going around killing lots and lots of people. And they need that kind of thing because there's just ... nobody really wants to kill anybody anymore because they start to realize that it's more fun to sit at home and play Xbox. As banal as that sounds, it's people actually. Xbox is kind of fun and there are probably some people where that's a great expression of their existence. There's a guy apparently who now gets paid money, he gets paid like £60,000 a year to beat record scores on like Xbox 360 or something like that. And he makes money. It's a job for this guy to play video games. So it's really quite cool. And that is perfectly fine. But that's what people want to do. And it's not a bread and circuses kind of thing. It's not a denigrating thing. There's nothing wrong with that. People just want to live their lives, like Joe was saying. They just want to live their lives.
Joe: Although kids should get out and play in the fields now and again.
Jason: Well, that's from our generation and maybe there's nothing wrong this new generation.
Joe: But in nature.
Jason: No.
Pierre: And a ... what's tricky, I understand your excellent point and I agree. But what is tricky is when you see that video games on the rise, particularly first person shooter, that are a way to desensitize human beings as far as a killing active concern. To some extent.
Jason: Yeah, yeah. Except first person shooters are my favourite type of game and the one that I've played the most, so you must saying here that I'm going to turn out to be some sort of mass murderer.
Pierre: No, I ended my sentence with "to some extent."
Jason: To some extent.
Joe: The military does finance those things though, as a way to kind of ...
Pierre: Recruitment.
Joe: As a recruitment, as a ...
Jason: Right.
Joe: I'm not saying it's going to turn people into assassins or whatever, but that it's going to play ...
Jason: Okay, and you could do this with cowboy and Indians with arrows and stuff like that.
Joe: Yeah, but they come along, they use it ...
Jason: Like paintball.
Joe: They use it, they promote them, they actually fund them and then they keep track of people who buy them and their ages and stuff and then go to them and say "Hey, I see...", and they slip in the idea that, "You like games and stuff. You like first person shooters. Have you played this game?" stuff. "You know you can do that?" and then say, "You can do that in real life you know. You know how much you enjoy playing first person shooters? You can actually have that fun but with the extra bonus of it being real life..."
Jason: I don't think so.
Joe: That's what they say to them.
Jason: I'm sure.
Joe: That's what these recruiters go around and say to them. It's not true, but that's what they say.
Jason: I'm sure, but a person who wants to shoot people for real, wants to shoot people for real because they're messed up, not because they play video games.
Joe: Well, they don't know. But if they find out, like 35 or 40% of them that come back from Iraq find out too late.
Jason: Yeah. They don't really want to be shooting.
Pierre: Exactly.
Joe: But too late.
Pierre: Maybe I have a little history for you. It relates to French history. Contemporary. So we are in 1986. 1986 is more than twenty years ago. In 1986 in France you have a hero, a genuine hero called Coluche. This guy is a humorist, an actor.
Joe: A comedian?
Pierre: A comedian, yeah. He is extremely popular. He's the most popular person in France according to polls. He's the most loved person. And he gets the Oscar, the French Oscar for best actor. He's doing concerts and they are full, the concert rooms are full and his TV shows are super popular. And back in 1981 as a joke he says, "Well, I'm going to go for Presidential elections." And the polls gave him 16% vote for the intentions. Then he started to receive death threats, bullets in mail and so he removed his candidacy. So fast forward 1986, Coluche, seeing that France, like other western countries, had more and more poor people, opened what he called "heart restaurants", restaurants for free, for the poor people. In three months he fed one million people. The problem is that Coluche, like the other heroes we're talking about, like John Lennon was very popular and in addition and was a very good/bad combination if you want to live long, in addition to being popular, you're started to become politic; politicking in the social sense of the term. So he started those heart restaurants; and in addition he was starting to expose the politician corruptions. The nonsense. He was showing that, "You can feed all the poor people. Look, in three months, we're feeding all of them. We're not funding with the public funding. What have the politicians been doing for decades?"
And well, you can expect concerning the end of the story, on the thirtieth of June, 1986, Coluche was riding his motorbike, slowly on a small road in southern France at fifty kilometres an hour. He was about to cross a truck and just when he crossed the truck, the truck changed lanes and there was a collision face-to-face and he died during this collision, this crash. And the medias covered up and invoked and started to treat the story that he was riding very fast and that the driver was going to deliver some stuff.
Joe: So you're suggesting it was a deliberate ...
Pierre: Oh yeah, I can give more data, that since it's not a very well known case, I didn't want to elaborate. After some inquiries they discovered that the ... the official story was saying he was riding very fast and that the truck was about ... after curve was about to turn to cross the road and to enter in a camping, to make a delivery. It was somewhere in southern France. And actually when the inquiry was properly done they discovered that the truck didn't use the indicator, that Coluche was not riding fast because his two colleagues showed he was not a ... and said, testified he was not riding fast. There was no braking marks. The road was not curvy. It was a straight line. And the truck was not delivering anything at the camping. His load was full of waste that he picked up from the local gendarmerie, from the police station, and where he turned actually is not a dump area for waste. It's not a camping. It's agricultural field, farming field. And actually to reach this field you have to drive over a pipe that doesn't resist to five tonnes, or five tonnes maximum, and the truck was forty tonnes. So he was not turning. So once again it shows how the elites are afraid of those people who are human, that other people love and that have a message, a positive message, a social message, to communicate. And those heroes don't live long.
Joe: But for many years during the cold war that social message that ... using him as an example of, for example feeding poor people, that ... repeatedly all over the world, examples of that type of attitude by any one person or one group or a political party, anyone in the world, particularly obviously outside of the Soviet Union, but in Europe and in Asia, that was called communism by the Americans and the Brits, etcetera. And it had to be fought against and a leader or political party that was proposing those kind of things were denounced as the evil, commie, red threat that had to be extinguished. And it kind of gets back to what Niall was saying earlier on about those stay-behind groups in Europe that were left. That's that they did. For example in Italy, there was a political - a President - President or Prime Minister? Aldo Moro.
Niall: He actually was out of power at the time.
Joe: He had been ...
Niall: He had been the longest serving Prime Minister. At the time he was sort of like an elder statesman and he was the inspiration for a big move that would have changed the landscape in the country.
Joe: Yeah, he wanted to basically integrate all of the political parties.
Niall: Well, what he had already done a few years earlier was bring in the Italian Socialist Party. His background, he was the Prime Minister and head of the Christian Democrats. So they were a mainstream centre party. But ...
Joe: He realized because of the political environment of the day that he had to ...
Niall: Italy couldn't get a government going for more than 12 months. It was ridiculous. And they'd had recent elections. A third of the voting population voted for the communist party, something that happened again and again in post-war Italy. And this time you had leaders said: "You know what, we really need to just bring them onboard."
Joe: So he was going to bring the communist party into power.
Niall: Yeah, basically.
Joe: Actually there's something I was reading about him. Five years, I think four years before his death, his murder, he was in the U.S. I think this was when he was Prime Minister and he met with then U.S. Secretary of State ....
Niall: Kissinger.
Joe: Henry Kissinger, your friend and mine. And apparently Kissinger told him, "You must abandon your policy of bringing all political forces in your country into direct collaboration or you will pay dearly for it." Four years later he was murdered. So it gets back to what you were saying about the stay behind networks. They called themselves the Red Brigades in Italy. But it basically was ... they were nominally communist but they were infiltrated very quickly and leaders were actually ... I think the leaders were kicked out by some ... a CIA gang infiltrated.
Niall: Yeah. The original group was ideological.
Joe: Yes.
Niall: The intelligence, the actual people who were behind their ideology were all rounded up and arrested. What you were left with were the militants, nearly all of whom were police informants or working directly for Italian intelligence.
Pierre: And there's a double twist in the Aldo Moro story. First they removed Aldo Moro who was a progressive socialist and at the same time, they blamed the Red Brigade, a communist or extreme left group [...] as the ally and thus depicted the leftist forces in a negative way.
Niall: Yeah, it was absurd on the face of it.
Pierre: It was.
Niall: And I'm surprised that they managed to fly this one at the time because what was going on, they were trying to bring in the so-called extreme left and then what, an extreme left faction sabotages the whole thing.
Joe: Exactly.
Pierre: They rationalized it saying, "Yeah, there was dissention with it, the leftist movement and Aldo Moro was not colinear with the ideology of the Red Brigade." It was total BS but people, some people believed it.
Joe: And at the time ...
Pierre: Official story.
Joe: At the time the U.S. denounced his attempts to bring the communists into a power sharing government, but the Soviet Union denounced him as well.
Niall: Also for doing that.
Joe: So, where does that leave you? The commies?
Niall: Yeah, because the Italian communist party had broken links at this time with Moscow.
Joe: Because they weren't really communists either.
Niall: Exactly. They weren't.
Joe: The word communist means nothing. Communist simply means no fascism basically, no corporatocracy, no elite...
Niall: They had a program of social reform.
Joe: That's pretty much all, social reform.
Niall: The same demands they've had since the end of the second world war.
Joe: And this is what the U.S. throughout the whole cold war was fighting against, was people all over the world, much of which was colonized either by the U.S. or the Brits or the French, in those countries, in those colonies saying, "Hang on a minute..."
Niall: "We want some of that peace and freedom too."
Joe: "We want some ... a piece of the pie basically. We want some wealth, etcetera. but you're stealing". In Vietnam and in that part of Asia, in Malaysia throughout the '50s, '60s, '70s, all of that was about resources, was about tin, rubber, you know, in some cases oil. But it was all about raw materials, access to raw materials. But the former colonial masters had been having, had access to for in some cases hundreds of years and because of ... generally a lot of it started with the communist revolution, or the revolution in Russia. Because that actually inspired the whole ... Marxism inspired people all over the world, kind of just after the turn of the twentieth century, inspired people with this idea. The idea that there was this communist threat, this communist ideology that was infecting the minds of all these people and the west had to stand against it because it was just evil and horrible was just nonsense. People were just picking up ideas and forming groups that held to this idea of social equality. That's all it was. They wanted social equality. And they wanted ... but they were labelled as communists across the board and stamped out with that really childish kind of a description of what they were doing.
There's a guy actually I was researching as well. His name's Allen Lawrence Pope and he's still alive. He's a retired U.S. military aviator and he was involved in ... he basically dropped bombs in Asia from a CIA plane. He was a kind of ... he worked for the CIA; he was originally an aviator and then he got drafted into the CIA on covert missions and stuff. Allen Lawrence Pope. And he dropped bombs on lots of different parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, etcetera. In later life he actually said ... because he was caught and the Americans actually got him out of there by putting on pressure because he was going to be ... because he'd just been flying around dropping bombs on innocent people and villages and stuff, and he said: "I enjoyed killing communists." And he lamented; he said that Indonesia was a failure, but he said: "We knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of communists even though half of them probably didn't know what a communist meant." And that kind of sums up the Cold War in terms of the U.S. and the western powers and the invasions of other countries. They were dropping bombs on people who had no idea what communism meant.
Niall: Well the leader of the revolution in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, so he's the big bad guy in the Vietnamese war. I mean, if you read what he was saying, he said "I want to set up in Vietnam, I want to follow the model set by the United States of America". He drafted a declaration of independence that basically copied the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Joe: Damn commie!
Niall: And he's portrayed as a communist. And of course most of the Vietnamese have no idea what he's talking about.
Joe: He's not even allowed to replicate western ... those "natives", those lesser "untermensch" in those colonies were not even allowed to try and replicate what was, societies and structures, political structure and social structure in the west. Their job was to be colonies and client states and do what they were told, which was just open your natural resources and everything else to the west and shut up.
Pierre: And the '50s, and to a lesser extent the '60s, was a very interesting period politically. Especially in Europe and colonies because while in Russia the socialist train had been derailed with Stalin, those ideas were very much alive in Europe, Asia and Africa, because the concept is appealing to any human beings with a conscience. Equality. And the '50s was an opportunity because during the Second World War in Europe in particular, the leaders had been exposed because of collaboration with the Nazi forces. So they lost all legitimacy. So political vacuum appeared then. Opportunities arise for true leaders who have shown their values during the war by joining and leading the resistance movement. So on one side you have the renewal of leaders with a lot of potentially good leaders and on the peoples' side you have the shock of the war where people realized all the horror of war and went back to the basics and realized how important it was to share. How important it was to help the weaker ones, the poor ones. And that's during those few years that most of the social reforms were conducted in Europe and where true communist or true socialist movements started to emerge, but soon, too soon, those movements started to be infiltrated, co-opted, assassinations were conducted, and finally didn't lead to the reforms and to the peaceful positive revolution that we could have hoped for.
Joe: Someone else that comes on my radar when talking about this topic is Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated in Pakistan in 2007. She was the former Prime Minister of Pakistan on two occasions and then she got kind of booted out.
Niall: She was booted out in a coup d'état by Musharraf.
Joe: Pretty much, yeah. But her father was, he was the founder of the Pakistan, PPP, the Pakistan Political Party I think it was called. The Pakistan Peoples' Party. And he was a...
Niall: Basically he was a reformer.
Joe: They were a kind of dynasty of reformers basically. And he was removed from his position as Prime Minister on trumped-up charges, and he was killed, he was hung, by a kind of Western-backed military dictatorship that came in. That was in 1979, right around the time of the whole Afghanistan-Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Taliban and the creation of Al Qaeda and stuff. And Pakistan was right on Afghanistan's border. So when he was home with his family and all his children were put under house arrest, including Benazir, and that's when General Zia, who looks like a baddy out of a James Bond movie, and he really was an evil person. He was basically the West's man as well. And in the following years she got released from house arrest after six years, her and her family. Then they in 1985 ... and then, I think '85 and '86, her two brothers were assassinated, essentially by the Pakistani elite as well. And she had just and, after ... she went into exile, after her last term, in Dubai, which was the leader of the opposition, and her ticket was basically reform of Pakistan - get rid of the kind of the corrupt elite, give more rights to women, etcetera. The normal stuff that ordinary people would appreciate in any society.
And so she was in Dubai but then she came back in 2006, or 2004, 2005 she came back from Dubai and she kind of began to have negotiations with Musharraf for a power sharing kind of government because elections were coming up. And then in 2007 as she was kind of campaigning, in December 2007 when she was campaigning, she was on top of a car, you know, it was an open-top kind of car. Her car with that platform on top of it. And there was a crowd of people ... crowds of people had been following her around for a long time. And somebody stepped out of the crowd and fired two or three shots, shot her, and then a bomb went off. They claimed it was a suicide bomber but there's no evidence for it being a suicide bomber. Any bomb that goes off anywhere in the Middle East or anywhere else, almost, in that side of the world, is a suicide bomber. It has to be some guy blowing himself up. It's kind of ridiculous at this stage, but apparently they don't have the ability to put a bomb down on the road.
Jason: And go.
Joe: They have to strap it to themselves. But that fits into again, ...
Jason: (whispering) Crazy Arab, Moslem terrorists.
Joe: They just want to blow themselves up too. And they don't know how to plant a bomb as opposed to be a bomb. So the bomb was as a kind of cover to let the guy escape, because that was, the bomb killed twenty people. So she was assassinated. But there's a little audio I want to play you a clip of here, to give you, apart from her social reform, etcetera, and her history, as a kind of family dynasty of reformers in Pakistan, here's a little clip here that I want to play for you that might give you another idea of why she was an enemy, particularly of the west.
[Interviewer]: "There was one report that said that you had arranged to send President Musharraf a letter to be sent in the event of your death by assassination, urging him to investigate certain individuals in his government. Is that true?
[Benazir Bhutto]: "Yes it is true that I wrote to General Musharraf. I received information from General Musharraf that a friendly country had passed on to them the information that I could be attacked by a gang from the Afghan war lords, Baitullah Mehsud or by Hamza Bin Laden, the son of Osama Bin Laden, or by the Pakistan Taliban in Islamabad, or by a group in Karachi. So I sent back a letter saying that while these groups may be used, I thought it was more important to go after the people who supported them, who organized them, who could possibly be the financers or the organizers of the finance, for those groups. And I named three individuals who I thought were their sympathizers. Now I understand that I could be wrong and my suspicions could be misplaced, but these are the people that I suspect want to stop the restoration of democracy. They want to stop my return because they know in 1993 when Pakistan was on the brink of being declared a terrorist state, I stopped the rise of terrorism. And they know that I can do it again. So I see that these are the forces that really want to stop not just me, but the democratic process and the will of the people from triumphing.
[Interviewer]: "And in terms of these three people that you mentioned, were they members of, or associated with, the government?
[Benazir Bhutto]: "Yes, well one of them is a very key figure in security. He's a former military officer. He is someone that has had dealings with Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of the band groups of Maulana Azhar, who was in an Indian jail for decapitating three British tourists and three American tourists. And he also had dealings with Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden. Now I know that having dealings with people does not necessarily mean direct evidence, but I also know that internal security has totally collapsed in Pakistan and that internal security cannot collapse without there being some blind eye, if not collusion being turned to the right, the militants and militancy. Not only are our tribal areas out of our control, but even the beautiful valley of Swat is now under takeover by Islamists. So I would like to see a Pak-led police inquiry assisted by Scotland Yard or the FBI, come in, use their forensic and scientific explanation to find out not only the perpetrators but the financers and the organizers of this heinous crime that killed 158 innocent people."
Joe: So there are a few things there, one of them being that she wanted to get rid of terrorism and terrorists. In Pakistan that's a big no-no. But there was also a little comment in the middle that she kind of let ... let slip. Actually I have a little clip of it here.
[Benazir Bhutto]: "And he also had dealings with Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden."
Joe: Hang on a minute. This is 2007, five months before she was assassinated.
Niall: I thought Obama, through those navy seals, murdered Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
Pierre: Four years later.
Niall: And then they threw his body into the sea for the fishes.
Joe: Yeah, so that's an interesting little piece of information that she gave out there, that this guy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was implicated in 911, is the guy who was water-boarded 279 times and said that he was born in a purple dinosaur afterwards.
Niall: He literally confessed to every conspiracy ... member of Al Qaeda.
Joe: Well wouldn't you if you'd been water-boarded 279 times? But, so he says that he killed him and he was arrested not long after, in 2003 I think, in Pakistan. So ... and then he was in custody.
Niall: Who?
Joe: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in custody. And this is the guy that she says killed Osama Bin Laden.
Niall: No, she said Omar Sheikh, but that's Omar Sharif.
Joe: Omar Sheikh ...
Niall: Or Omar Sharif.
Joe: Not Omar Sharif. That's the guy out of ...
Pierre: The actor.
Joe: That's the actor.
Niall: Omar Sheikh. Is that who she's referring to?
Joe: I think so, yeah.
Jason: I thought she was saying Omar Sharif. I was like, "Omar Sharif killed Osama Bin Laden? No way!"
Joe: I'm pretty sure she's saying the guy who's known as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Niall: Yeah, it's him.
Joe: But anyway, the point being that she's saying this is part of history in 2007, is that Osama Bin Laden was dead. And she was then ... I mean this was the year that she had already been campaigning for, essentially she was going to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan. So there are many different reasons there why, apart from just social, as we've been talking about, the kind of social progressive nature of her attitude.
Niall: Well, she spelled it out. She said, "The forces I am up against do not want democracy." And she ... that's another thing that, it's not just that she had the will to try and change things, she had been obviously involved for decades, so she knew the names and faces. She was able to hone it down to three oligarchs or optimates, let's call them. She's aware that, "Yeah okay, there are lots of groups and groups, but when it comes down to it, we're talking about a few people." I wonder if the former military officer she was referring to was the General Gul, the guy who's supposed to have wired a hundred grand to ...
Joe: Hamid Gul?
Jason: He could have been.
Niall: Mohammed Ata.
Joe: But recently ...
Niall: On the morning of 911 he was meeting in the Pentagon.
Joe: Absolutely yeah. He could have been one of them but just recently, this week I think, in news from Pakistan, Musharraf has been officially charged with her assassination.
Niall: I think he's been hung out to dry. It sounds like she ...
Joe: Well they're saying that ...
Niall: ... and he were actually allies.
Joe: Well not really.
Niall: Against ...
Joe: Well Musharraf was like a western ...
Jason: She sounds very naïve.
Joe: Well, all these people who get assassinated are ultimately naïve in one way or another because they walk into assassinations. I mean, JFK and, "You forgot the hardtop on my car? Oh, whatever. I like to see people."
Niall: Well, there's also an element of, a lot of them shared the philosophy of: "To hell with it. I want to be able to walk among the people." I don't know how many of them are on record as saying, "No, I don't want bodyguards."
Joe: It's a very difficult situation. If you really take the assassination threat seriously, you're going to stay in your house all the time and you're not going to be a popular leader then. You can't do...
Niall: I think it's part of what makes them heroic. They are aware of this at some level and they say, "Well, the hell with it. I'm going to die trying."
Pierre: Yeah, and I think those heroes, those true heroes, realize that the good, the well-being of the people, is more important than their whole life. JFK said something to the effect when he was told about the threats that were looming around him. He said that, I'm paraphrasing here, "I can live in permanent fear to meet people so, hell with these threats and if it happens, it happens". I wanted to mention an anecdote that might explain why the elites are so cautious about covering their tracks and giving some scapegoats or patsies or suicides to cover up their assassinations. When Julius Caesar was killed, a few days after the assassination, you had thousands and thousands of Romans demonstrating in the streets, grieving, crying and being angry. And among the people there was one Roman individual who had the same name as a notorious anti-Caesarian. Well the people were probably blinded by anger and they mixed up the name. They mixed up the individuals. And they thought, "This man in the crowd was an anti-Caesarian". And the reaction was so violent that after the fact, after the murder of this allegedly anti-Caesarian, authorities were not able to find one single part of the body. It had been reduced into literally, to dust, to pieces. And I think the elites know that the bond between the people and a true leader is very strong. That's why they want to reduce it post mortem and that's why they want to carefully cover their tracks.
Niall: And that's why they won't just do it in broad daylight, although you could argue that it was for JFK, but there was a carefully constructed plan with a cover up in place.
Pierre: A patsy. And remember the reaction of the people to Oswald's assassination by Ruby, that a lot of people were acknowledging, "Well frankly I won't shed a tear. It's a good thing Oswald died." A lot of people were thinking this way. It can be the trigger for major social movements, an assassination, for which the cover doesn't work.
Jason: But you know, that's why Oswald was there and that's why he was killed. So ...
Pierre: Exactly.
Jason: To appease people, you know. They put up the ...
Niall: Sacrificial lamb.
Pierre: Focus the anger, focus the anger of the people on the patsy.
Niall: We haven't talked about Lady Diana.
Joe: Well, we have an article on SOTT so anybody that wants to read about it can do that and watch the video. All of the information is really there and it's pretty clear cut. I think we're going to leave it there for this week. We've pretty much used up all our time. I don't know ... in terms of the topic of our show, I think people should just read about the people we've discussed. Do a bit of reading on them and even though they're dead, they've been assassinated, taken out of the game, the stuff they did and what they wanted to do, an example that they set, can and obviously do still live on and can serve as an example of what the world could be like compared to what it is today, and as Jason was saying earlier on in the show, it's really ultimately because they keep assassinating them, it's really down to us, the ordinary people to do something about it. And if that means trying to live in a different way or creating a different society, then that's what has to be done. So anyway, we hope you've enjoyed the show. We will be back next week. I'm going to leave you with another little snippet from RFK and then we'll just go to our outro. So thanks to Gary our caller and to our chat room chatters. We will see you, or hear you, maybe, next week.
[RFK]: "My favourite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forge, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another. A feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country."
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