You Wouldn't Read About It
From Wikipedia
Mein Kampf (German: 'My Struggle') is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germany.
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (German: Das Kapital.), also known as Capital, is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy and critique of political economy written by Karl Marx, published as three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894.
Not on Wikipedia
One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb. This is a book you cannot read about on Wikipedia so I’ll provide you with a quick overview of its 1,100 pages.
One Nation Under Blackmail is an account of the connections between organised crime, USA secret service organisations, owners and senior executives of banks and businesses, civil servants and politicians since the end of WW2 through to today. The book is in two volumes and although there is not a precise demarcation between the volumes, the first volume covers the period from WW2 through to the Clinton presidency whereas the second volume is focused more specifically with the web of connections centred on Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
The scope of the book is enormous covering as it does a period of almost seventy years, sometimes longer when Webb provides the personal history of particular families and across multiple covert operations by US Secret Service agencies that were undertaken in many countries. These operations required and were supported by many companies that were apparently setup just for the purpose of providing cover for the undercover agents.
The purpose of the book as highlighted by its title is to expose the extent that US politics is influenced by the blackmailing of senior government officials and elected representatives. To achieve this purpose it is not enough to cover a single example of secret service agents engaging knowingly and willingly with organised crime figures to breach laws in their own and other countries, doing so with either the knowledge of political leaders or under their direction, and then for any investigation into the whole operation to be limited or shut down through the use of blackmail. No, to achieve her purpose Webb attempts to demonstrate that there have been multiple examples of such activities and she goes further by identifying the connections between the many operations, and operatives that has existed for decades and across the Democrat and Republican political parties.
Unfortunately for Webb her book is in many places very difficult to read, especially Volume 1. To expose that the web of connections between key people was both extensive and not random leads to the overarching theme of many chapters becoming lost as they degenerate into a jumble of names, businesses, locations and activities that spin-off into their own side stories.
A major challenge for Webb that I think she has handled well is overcoming the gaps created by the limited information available publicly, and the information she or other investigators may have access to but cannot reveal, preventing independent validation. In these situations Webb is careful to highlight the limits of her information, and the conclusions she draws from the information available are presented as suggestions rather than conclusive statements, even where it would be tempting to be definitive.
Volume 2 can be read separate from Volume 1 and is easier to read having a clearer focus, and in spite of the occasional diversion into side stories it holds itself closer to its theme. Those seeking salacious details of the Epstein / Maxwell sexual blackmail operation will be disappointed, and the proof of their apparent blackmail rather than prostitution, is difficult to provide without the admission of the victims. Webb does provide evidence of the extensive network held by Epstein & Maxwell and the extent to which, in her own words, much of their activities were ‘hidden in plain sight’.
Although Webb does not mention Julian Assange in her book I was mindful of his situation, given the number of examples where military secrets were not stolen by foreign governments, but allegedly sold to them by members of the US government, with no subsequent consequence for those individuals.
From the start of the book I had an eerie feeling I was being entrapped into a grand conspiracy theory so, relying upon Wikipedia, I started checking various statements made in the book. Did the CIA really purchase LSD and provide it to people without their consent or prior knowledge in order to perform research, including having houses setup with hidden cameras to film the experiments – yes, according to Wikipedia.
The Iran – Contra affair is unbelievable, implausible, yet true. Unbelievable that an operation of such a scale could remain secret, implausible that the USA would sell weapons to its enemy but found to be true by commissions of enquiry setup by the US Congress. The Iran – Contra affair is covered in Webb’s book, almost peripherally as she shows that the operation was one of many that ran semi-continuously.
It is the extensions beyond the known that give rise to conspiracy theories, based as they often are on half-truths rather than myths. Yet to accept the Iran – Contra affair as true requires the acknowledgment that many more people were involved and guilty of crimes than the limited number of people actually tried.
Convergent evolution theory provides a stronger model for assessing Webb’s book than conspiracy theory. Convergent evolution theory suggests that different unrelated species when exposed to similar forces will evolve in similar ways. The continued use of bribery by private companies to win government contracts and the perpetual use of extortion by mafia style crime gangs do not require the belief that each episode was carefully planned and orchestrated by the same small group of people and therefore neither does the use of sexual blackmail by secret service agencies;
What I find annoying as a non-US citizen, is that even though Webb is uncovering and reporting on the wrong doing by US agencies her definition of what is legal is still limited to whether a particular operation was approved by Congress, rather than whether the actions were legal in the countries in which the USA were doing them.
I am not encouraging you to read Whitney Webb’s book One Nation Under Blackmail, and I am certainly not asking you to accept as true all the suppositions that Whitney presents. But I am asking you this; if I can read about Mein Kampf and Das Kapital on Wikipedia, why doesn’t Whitney Webb and her book One Nation Under Blackmail have their own Wikipedia entries?
