Sunday Talking Points: Espionage
When is Spying considered the Greater Good for Many?
1. Gossip about the FedEx shipment of thousands of body bags
2. Conversation should debut with a quote from Sun Tzu’s book “The Art of War”, Chapter 13.
Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes:
Local spies;
Inward spies;
Converted spies;
Doomed spies;
Surviving spies
3. A little bit of history about the art of Espionage and of Assassins
· Respectively talk about:
· the Sicariis,
· the Hashahins
· the Thugees.
· And Signature Reduction or the Operational Security unit, an American sanctioned assassin organization of 60,000 recruits. It is government funded: 900 million dollar budget yearly.
4. Introduction to the Cold War
The Cold War was and is no more than a power play between the West (Imperialism and Capitalism) and the East (Marxism and Power Dominance).
· Extract from Joseph Stalin speech at the Meeting for Voters of Stalin Electoral District, February 9th, 1946: “Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in conformity with their economic weight by means of concerted and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development. As a result of the first crisis of the capitalist system of world economy, the First World War broke out; and as a result of the second crisis, the Second World War broke out.”
This extract was part of the infamous Stalin speech that ignited the Cold War mainly between the United States and the USSR.
· 2123 atomic bombs have been tested from July 1945 to September 1992 between Western and Eastern countries. If we account for the ones tested after the Cold War, in total 2147 nuclear bombs have detonated across the globe from July 1945 to September 2017: 1121 by the United States, 715 by the USSR, 210 by France, 45 by the United Kingdom, 45 by Republic of China, 6 by North Korea, and 4 between India and Pakistan (CTBTO).
· The Star Bomba was tested in the Artic, in the Novaya Zemlya Island, on October 30th, 1961. “Tsar Bomba,” nicknamed the “King of Bombs,” a 57-megaton (57,000 Kilotons) RDS-220monster, 4,385 times insanely more powerful than Hiroshima (Atomic Heritage).
· The tension with the Persian nation became more vitriolic in 2005, when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the remark that Israel, “this origin of corruption will soon be wiped off of the Earth’s face,” and that the United States was “a satanic power that with God’s will would be annihilated” (Associated Press).
5. Collaterals of the Cold War
Yuri Bezmenov, The Four Stages of Subversion: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis and Normalization
· The Black Panthers
· Thomas Sankara and Burkina Faso
· Maurice Bishop and Grenada
· 30 years of embargo on China
· 50 years of embargo on Cuba, Iran and North Korea
· The Vietnam War – The execution of 1000 Vietnamese by the Communist army believing that they were collaborating with the Americans.
· The Mujahedin, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan
· And Ghassan Kanafani
The weakness of a righteous man is his idealism. Your enemies knowing that, will bait you just with that, to bring your downfall. Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian activist, an author and a progressive journalist vindicating the rights of the Palestinians and informing the world about the oppressive hold of Israel on the Palestinians. Kanafani’s father was also an activist and lawyer who opposed the British occupation and forcing migration of the European Jews. He had to exile his own country at the age of 12 and flee to find refuge in Damascus.
This is where he started shaping the world. He would write short stories to his student to educate them in their situation in exile. Here is the kicker: he spent a good portion of his time reading Russian literature in Kuwait. He was murdered in 1972. So, I am wondering if his assassination by Mossad was backed by the CIA in the midst of the Cold War. Because his political views were influenced by Marxist philosophy. The thing is that Mossad claimed his assassination as a payback for the terrorist attack on Lod Airport, in Tel Aviv, where 26 people were killed and 80 more were injured.
Some quotes by Kanafani
“The history of the world is always the history of weak people fighting strong people; of weak people who has a correct case, fighting strong people who use their strength to exploit the weak.”
This is an interview he had in 1970. Everything the white devil (he sounded like a white devil) asked Kanafani, that man had a 1,2,3 punch come back (like “What the fuck you are talking about Devil?). In this interview Kanafani was like, “Today, I got time cuz.”
Why won’t your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis?
You don’t mean exactly peace talks. You mean capitulation surrendering.
Why not just talk to the Israeli leaders?
That kind of conversation is between the sword and the neck union.
Well, if there are no swords and no guns in the room, you could still talk?
No, I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and the national liberation movement?
But despite this, why not talk?
Talk about what?
The possibility of not fighting?
Not fighting for what?
Not fighting at all, no matter what for.
Young people usually fight for something and they stopped fighting for something. So you can’t tell me even why should we speak about stop fighting.
Stop fighting to stop the death and the misery, the destruction.
The pain, the misery and the destruction of whom?
Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs.
Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for 20 years, and forbidden to use even the name “Palestinians”?
But better that way then dead though.
Maybe to you, but to us, liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights is something as essential as life itself?
It does seem that the war the civil war has been quite fruitless.
It’s people defending themselves against a fascist government which you are defending.
Well, whatever it might be best called.
It’s not just whatever. It’s not a civil war or a conflict. It’s a liberation movement fighting for justice.
Well, whatever it might be best called.
But it’s not whatever because this is where the problem starts. This is what makes your answer all your question. This is a people who is people who is discriminated is fighting for its rights. This is the story: if you will say it’s a civil war, then your questions will be justified. If you say it’s a conflict, then of course, it’s a surprise to know what’s happening.
It’s your organization that’s been one side of the fight. What has it achieved?
We achieved teaching every single person in this world that we are a small brave nation who are going to fight to the last drop of blood to put justice for ourselves after the world failed in giving it to us.
Then, you have the indiscriminate use of Nuclear Weapons:
In November 1951, during the Korea War, the U.S. government nearly had a Bomber-29 dropping a Plutonium bomb on North Korean territory. The conclusive deterrent from this decision was the realization that using a Plutonium bomb would not help winning the war, first because the Chinese were unimpressed and had covertly sent in 200,000 troops from Manchuria, and second because the Soviet Union had also the capability of dropping Hydrogen bombs itself (Posey).
This week, we learned that in 1958, the United States government again almost dropped a nuclear bomb in China.
