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Jan. 5, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
34:41
CIAs War On Democracy with Edward Curtin

Edward Curtin discusses the US Central Intelligence Agency and other topics with RFK Jr in this episode.

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Hey everybody, it's my pleasure to have you as my guest today, Edward Curtin.
Edward Curtin is a sociologist.
He's a professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
He is a widely read writer.
He used to be a newspaper man for the Berkshire Eagle, one of the great local papers in our country.
He is a scholar of the classics of philosophy, literature, and theology, and sociology, and he's been a lifelong promoter of personal freedom and the American justice system and an idealized vision for our country.
Welcome, Ed.
It's a pleasure to have you.
Well, it's my pleasure to be here with you, Robert.
Thank you very much.
And one of the things that Ed has written extensively about is the role of the intelligence agencies in essentially the demolition of the American ideal of American freedoms and democracies.
I wrote an article actually mentioning my book about the role of the intelligence agencies in the COVID crisis that I covered extensively in my book to the response to the pandemic.
I wanted to start by asking you something.
Did you read Dick Russell's article in The Defender this week about the CIA control of Rolling Stone, of Daily Cosmic, I think Daily Beast?
Yes, I did read it.
Yes, I thought it was excellent.
Yeah, and he did some extraordinary research on that.
Yeah, that's true.
You've been a critic of Operation Mockingbird, which of course is the CIA's long, long history of program to control journalism in our country and around the world by essentially compromising journalists.
Yes, I have.
And actually, today, December 16th, I noticed there was a scathing article about you by an associate press writer, which I consider very clearly part of that whole Operation Mockingbird program to attack anyone.
Especially anyone who exposes, as you have in numerous ways in your last book and in the current Fauci book, the operations of the intelligence services, most especially the CIA. And as I've written...
And you know your book about your family and much more American values, which is a fantastic, a beautiful, beautiful book.
When it was published three or four years ago, I believe I was the only person to write a review of that book.
You were the only one to review it.
It was boycotted.
Totally.
By all the mainstream newspapers, the legacy media.
It was the, that book is basically a chronicle of my family's, of the Kennedy family's 60 year fist fight with the CIA.
Yeah, it was, it was, there was airtight wall to wall, like out of that book in the mainstream press, as you pointed out. - Aside from your devastating and, Really well-documented critique of the CIA in that book.
You know, it was just a lovely book as a family story.
It was the kind of family romance book that you would think the mainstream media would gobble up and surely give some great reviews to.
I think they honed in on your essential critique of the CIA. Just as they're doing now with your Fauci book, The Real Fauci, which again is devastating with its analysis of how the intelligence agencies have been involved in the whole germ propaganda and COVID and going back much further than that,
of course, as you document so assiduously in Chapter 12 of that book especially.
One of the reasons I wanted to have you on this show is that you've been an extraordinarily eloquent and articulate critic of that trend in our country.
Of the light brightness of American ideals of democracy that our framers put in motion and the assault on that since World War II by this growing power of the military-industrial complex.
Exactly what Eisenhower warned us of.
You see that not just as a political battle, but ultimately a spiritual war.
Definitely.
I think that We've been subjected for decades now to a materialistic propaganda effort that has tried to reduce the spiritual dimension of human life to nothing,
really, and to, in its place, put a deterministic view of life, life determined by things, by Technology, and it's a very, very dark, dark vision in which people really give up hope and embrace the, how shall I put it, the dark side of life.
And it's no wonder that there are so many people suffering tremendous anxiety and depression, and they're all drugged up on pharmaceutical drugs, which is part of this push to drug people.
And to take from them this sense of idealism and hope and love for other people and replace it with this very, very dark vision.
And the people who are doing this, there's something greatly evil about it.
You know, I know that's a strong word, but I think it is evil.
I know you're a great connoisseur of American literature and literature in general, and it's pretty extraordinary how Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and Robert Heinlein kind of predicted this dystopian embrace of, you know, what's called today transhumanism.
And the use, I remember in And, you know, we're now seeing basically the entire population that's lulled with pharmaceutical products and screens, and nobody's really noticing that, you know, our humanity as well as our democracy are under attack.
Well, I think some people are noticing, and with your help, And your great efforts.
I think more and more people are noticing this.
I see that perhaps it's just the people that I know.
They seem to be waking up to this reality that I noticed that you mentioned the French sociologist and theologian in your Fauci book, Jacques Ellul, who long ago, long ago, the late 40s, then in the late 50s and the early 60s, wrote a series of books One called propaganda, another called the technological society, in which he predicted all of this.
So it's been long in coming.
And that was at the time of Eisenhower's farewell address and the assassination of your uncle, President Kennedy, and then your father.
So This has been a long process and it's, I think, deeply tied in with the development of the CIA, their mind control programs, MKUltra and all of the others.
I guess I'd say there's a worldwide MKUltra program going on now.
To destroy people's ability to think and hope and have faith in the future.
My wife and I recently went to see, I don't go to movies that often, but we went to see West Side Story, the remake.
As a young man of 17, the original West Side Story affected me profoundly.
Even though it's a tragedy, it also It was a story of hope as well.
It seems to me that that feeling of hope, hopefulness, it was in the fall of 1961 when I first saw that film, the original.
I remember feeling a sense of optimism in the country, even though some bad things had already happened that year, the Bay of Pigs, the killing of Dag Hammarskjöld that month.
But I remember as a young person feeling, still feeling hopeful.
And that sense of hopefulness has been diminishing down through the decades.
I mean, it's long ago, and we've arrived now at this dark place where the forces who have been working on people seem to be triumphant, but I don't think they will triumph.
I think the human spirit is stronger than their evil.
Well, you come from a liberal community and a liberal background.
How do you think and how do you explain the fact that it is the people that is liberals like Noam Chomsky and, you know, these iconic figures of resistance, the corporate critics, Naomi Klein, the many, many others who have become most vociferous today.
In supporting these totalitarian lockdowns, all of the other things that accompany it, and forced vaccinations with a zero-liability pharmaceutical product that's experimental and that's made by these companies until recently regarded as criminal enterprises, but now they're embracing as kind of deities and saviors.
How do you explain that?
And you are right in the middle of one of those communities.
So how do you explain it, number one?
Number two, do you think that people will emerge at some point from this past psychosis?
Well, those are really hard questions to answer.
But to go to the first one, I think some of the people who...
Well, let me speak of Noam Chomsky to begin with, because he's sort of the godfather of many of the people on the liberal left and even further to the left.
He's a guy who...
I can't really tell you exactly what has motivated him, because I can only look at what he's done and what he said in recent years.
And I've had some correspondence with him, and I have good friends who have been involved with him going all the way back, Vince Salandria.
But he's had contact with Chomsky going back to the early 60s over the death of President Kennedy.
And Chomsky has, from the start, closed his eyes to President Kennedy's assassination and never really wanted to look at it.
He said he would at one point, but then he just turned away.
And he has some kind of unexplainable hatred for your family, which...
What the source of that hatred is, I don't know.
But he refused to look at the facts of the assassination and even said, well, it doesn't really matter.
It's not very important, which is absurd.
And he said the same thing about the attacks of September 11, 2001.
But what's motivating him?
I don't know.
But he has many acolytes, many people on the left, many prominent people today.
Who rely on him as their so-called godfather, Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky.
And what motivates them, I don't know either, except that perhaps it is their jobs and their careers, and they don't want to be shut out of the mainstream media and access to it.
You know, if you criticize or delve too deeply, Into a lot of these things, you could be fired very easily and your career is over.
So it's hard to understand people's motivations.
I do think there are people out there who really do work for intelligence agencies and not so-called independently, but they project themselves as independent writers.
Who they are?
I wouldn't want to hazard a guess, because it's very difficult to do that kind of thing.
Do I see a change coming among some of them?
Yes, I do see a slight change with some of them, but I don't know how far they will go.
It's not much of a change, for sure.
I also have corresponded with John Chomsky recently, and I'm very My family, I think.
And his kind of oeuvre.
The Kennedys...
Or when my uncle was killed, he was incapable of adjusting his thinking and his narrative.
And that's probably one of the reasons that he didn't want to look into it.
But I've always overlooked that part of him, you know, the extreme kind of poisonous, venomous hostility that he has toward my family, because he has such an interesting mind.
And he has this brilliant take on historical events that I think that I wouldn't want to miss, you know, even if he doesn't, even if he differs with me.
Very personal stuff.
The clarity of thought in which he views other parts of history and America's role in history is very interesting to me.
I don't accept it as received knowledge, but I want to hear what he has to say because he's brilliant.
Sometimes these little flashes of lightning that are very, very reliable in his His thoughts and his narratives and his writing are just things that I don't want to miss, despite the fact that he doesn't like my family a lot.
So I've had him when I was running my show at Air America.
I had him as a frequent guest on that show, and I had very, very congenial discussions.
Let me put it this way.
He's a curmudgeon, I think, to anybody.
He's a difficult, prickly kind of know-it-all character.
And that's just part of who he is.
He's smarter than anybody in the room.
And he acts like he knows that.
And he wants everybody to kind of recognize that.
So if you're put off by those kind of things, you wouldn't want to hang out with him.
But I have always been able to overlook those kind of things.
And I see the brilliance of the way that his mind burns.
And I always enjoyed having him on my show.
And so I had this little kind of weird side friendship with him where we didn't talk about the other stuff.
But recently I corresponded with him on email.
I invited him to come on this podcast to talk to me and he ultimately refused.
I directly refuse because he's always prided himself on being willing to debate in any forum.
I don't think that he wanted to have this debate with me.
And so he began, you know, kind of gratuitously insulting me and basically telling me I was a dangerous person and that I was stopping people from vaccinating and that this was going to kill people and, you know, all these kind of things.
And he became, in the end, he cut off the conversation in a very abrupt way, indicating that he didn't want to have anything more to do with things.
So it's interesting, though, because he is such an influential figure and there's other people like Naomi Klein, who I've always admired, whose books are, you know, again, brilliant.
Her analysis of history has a clarity to it and a truth to it that is just like a gut punch reading her books.
Yeah.
I've had a friendship with her, too, that appears to be over because, you know, she's part of this kind of liberal orthodoxy that has brought down Canada, that has transformed Canada into, you know, really a template for a ruthless kind of totalitarianism.
It's very, very strange.
Yeah, with Chomsky, for example, I've learned a lot from him over the years.
I agree with you.
He's very brilliant.
He's written some wonderful, great things.
I think he's taught a lot of people, a lot.
I do think something you said about his institutional analysis was, He does have a problem, I think, with understanding that history, to understand history and social issues and society, institutional and structural analysis is very important.
But people are people too.
And individuals do count.
And everyone isn't totally determined By their place within the social order and their institutional affiliations, people are able to rise above them.
For example, a lot of critiques are thrown at you, I've seen them at least, and I'm sure you have, to say, well, look, you're from this rich family and you're just in it to make a buck and to make your name and, you know, really the Kennedys are just this old line or new line.
Kind of new old Irish American wealthy families who all wanted to be kings and queens.
And, you know, that's the story with them.
This new AP piece out on you is, you know, you're making so much money.
And I mean, it's just, it's a ridiculous piece of garbage, a hit piece.
But going back to Chomsky...
I don't think, and I know you're very well aware of Jim Douglas's great book, JFK and the Unspeakable, where Jim very, very clearly shows how President Kennedy was transformed as a human being, as a person, in his years in office, and how he underwent a profound spiritual awakening that allowed him to almost...
Serve as a martyr for the cause of peace.
I think your father was very, very similar.
And there was something in their persons, in their background, of course, but in their persons, people can change.
People can change.
As President Kennedy said to a group of Quakers when they visited him in the White House, you believe in redemption, don't you?
And that was when he took a real radical turning towards peace.
So I think a lot of sociologists, a lot of scholars, intellectuals, don't get the personal part, the existential part.
The part that people can change, they do change.
There is redemption.
It's not easy, but it happens.
You know, in the piece I recently wrote, you know, Anthony Fauci wrote, Who knows?
I mean, it's possible that he could dramatically change.
But as I said, I'm not counting on it.
I'm not holding my breath.
Jim Douglas' book is an extraordinary book.
To me, it's the best book written on our family.
It's called The Odd J.F. Canyon's Fico.
He makes these really wonderful connections between that ultimate kind That my uncle had.
It really began during his experiences in World War II when his PT boat was cut in two in the blackened straits.
When it was in a fog, it was run over by a Japanese destroyer.
The captain, the commander of that destroyer, who my uncle invited to his inaugural ceremonies.
And my uncle was stranded with his men, one of whom was badly burned and would be rescued by towing him through the water with a allured in his teeth on a six-mile swim in the middle of the night.
And they were hiding for days from the Japanese who were looking for them.
They thought they were He was almost certainly dead.
And he had, at the beginning, I think, a lot of his, as Jim Douglas shows, a lot of his, the way that he subsequently interacted with the world.
And there were two Solomon Islanders, who ultimately were searching for confidence.
His coordinates on a coconut, which an islander is hid in the bottom of the canoe beneath a big vial of coconuts, and then they did the 11-mile paddle to the British naval base and gave the companion that coconut, and that resulted in my uncle being rescued.
During that period, during that period of the war, he developed this very important skepticism The upper brass came very handy to him during the Cuban Missile Crisis, during the Bay of Pigs, where he was always skeptical of the advice that he was getting from the upper brass, always insistent on doing independent investigations,
but also the affinity that he had for people from developing countries and colonial countries and their right to be free, which but also the affinity that he had for people from developing countries and colonial countries and their right to be free, which was part of his central thrust of his administration, which I think Jim Douglas
Solomon Islanders who were under colonial rule, first by the British and then later by the Japanese, and who were fighting side by side alongside the Americans and who rescued my uncle, that they deserved sovereignty and dignity and respect.
That had a profound impact on his life.
One of the things that I would mention with going back to Chomsky, the irony with Chomsky is that he really does not see the CIA as a menace to our country.
He sees it as a menace in In developing countries.
But he never saw the minutes that it was to our country.
And one of the things that I talk about in the book is that the CIA had a project for 30 years to blacken my family's name.
And it was run by a guy called Sam Halpern, who had been a New York Times bureau chief in Miami and Havana.
But he was really the entire time he was a CIA agent.
He later became a deputy director of the CIA. And it was his job for 30 years at the CIA to start rumors about my family.
He was the one who promoted the rumor that my uncle and my father had been involved in the Castro assassination and had spent I had no knowledge of the CIA's project to assassinate Katz from the CIA, was very nervous that they would find out about it.
He also was the one who promoted this affirmation that is now widely believed that my grandfather made money from bootlegging.
And if you talk to almost any American, they'll say, yeah, Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger.
And of course, he was never a bootlegger.
That was a CIA planted defamation or libel that took root and many, many other things.
And I show this in the book how they did.
Many of the other things that people believe about my family were originally sourced to Sam Albert and the CIA. But Noam Chomsky just believes that stuff, swallows all of those things, hook line and sinker,
I think because they were convenient to his worldview that the Kennedys were part of this aristocracy, part of this kind of deep state American imperialist aristocracy that is manipulating people all over the world.
And he was never able to acknowledge to himself that it was our family who essentially was battling that plutocracy.
Yeah, so they just flipped it.
You're so right that he was never really concerned about the CIA's activity within the United States, but always over there, over there, over there.
You know, coup d'etats, assassinations, all of that kind of stuff, which of course is true.
You know, Guatemala and Iran and all these other places.
But he wouldn't look at how they were operating here.
And one of the ironies of all of this is that your uncle...
President Kennedy was a true anti-colonialist even before he became President of the United States.
He made that famous 57 Senate speech.
He said some things that would shock the socks off a lot of people today.
The speech you're talking about.
It's a speech in which my uncle made this famous speech in the Senate, which completely isolated him from liberals and conservatives.
He said Africa should be ruled by Africans.
And even today, when I travel, I've run into hundreds and hundreds of people from Africa and from the Mideast whose name is Kennedy.
Because of that speech that he made, he's remembered in all these capitals.
It was very unpopular in our country at the time, because in our country we were trying to fortify NATO as a bulwark against communism.
And the NATO countries, France and Great Britain, were completely still dependent on their colonial possessions.
And there was a terror that if they were forced to relinquish Kenya and Tanzania and Libya, et cetera, that the United States would be left fighting communism alone because all the European nations would financially collapse.
So he was not only attacked on that speech by the right, by Rockefeller, Goldwater, Reagan, Nixon, et cetera, but by Adlai Stevenson on the left.
And all the kind of liberal infrastructure went after them, but he stuck with it.
And that became the theme of his administration.
He ruled from outside.
And that was another thing that alienated him from the CIA because, of course, Alan Dulles' project was to try to bring the entire globe under U.S. hegemony.
And, you know, to have the CIA operating, my uncle refused to go into Laos, despite the CIA's He's from the brass.
He refused to send combat troops to Vietnam.
and they were begging him for a quarter million and said it would collapse.
And he kept saying, "It's their war, it's not our war." He didn't believe in the domino theory.
He believed that people wanted to rule themselves and they had a right to do it.
And they had a right to experiment with all kinds of government.
In fact, he told Castro, if you want to experiment with Marxism, we have nothing to say.
That's you and your country's choice.
The only problem we have is if you let him fight the Soviets, to use your country for a staging ground or a military base in our hemisphere, But he was very, very much against colonialism and he ended up sending 16,000 advisors who were basically Green Berets to Vietnam We were not officially authorized to take part in combat activities.
He sent more people, he sent more troops than that, 20,000 troops, to Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, to get one black man, James Meredith, registered.
And as you point out, a month before he died, my uncle found out that 75 Americans had been killed in Vietnam and he said, we're getting out and this is not worth another American life.
And he signed the national security order.
He was out of Vietnam by the end of 1964, with the first thousand out by December 63.
And he was then killed on November 22nd.
And one of the first things Lyndon Johnson did was to reverse that order.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And he was killed.
I don't hesitate in saying it.
He was killed by the CIA. And to take it back To something else you were just saying, when President Kennedy was first in office in the same year, in that 1961 that I referred to before, Patrice Lumumba was killed by the CIA, and he was an up-and-coming anti-colonialist leader in Africa.
And then in December of the same year, and I don't hesitate to say, a CIA assisted, if not run, assassination by a plane crash Also, Dag Hammarskjold wanted the same thing my uncle wanted, which was her developing world to be able to run itself at an end of colonialism.
Patrice Lumumba, people should understand who he was.
The Congo, which was the richest country on earth, based upon its mineral resources and its forests and all the other natural resources that it had, he was the only leader with the charisma and the credibility to unite all the diverse tribes of the Congo as the Belgians left.
And so the Belgians wanted to kill him, and the big multinational mining corporations and financial powers wanted him dead because they wanted to encourage war between all these little tribes and break the Congo down into bite-sized bits that I could say,
no, we are going to keep the resources for our country and manage them for the people of the Congo.
And my uncle loved Patrice.
And Alan Dulles knew that.
Alan Dulles wanted to make sure that he was killed before my uncle took office.
I remember he was murdered.
Dulles sent poison toothpaste to try to kill him that way.
But eventually he worked with the Belgian Secret Service to capture Lumumba and then execute him.
And then they put in Mobudo, who just pillaged that country and became one of the richest people in the world for the next, I don't know, 35 years.
Yeah.
So, you know, to me, the interesting part, I agree with everything you said, every word, and that's all accurate.
So you have this whole history of anti-colonialism in your family with your uncle and your father.
Ed, it's a pleasure to have you.
It's good you have thick skin.
I do too, but there's something in the Irish blood that makes us fight is too.
Well, Edward, thank you very much for joining me today.
As always, it's wonderful to spend time with you.
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