Tag Archives: Banned

Osama bin Laden’s books. They could do you more good than they did him.

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Last week the CIA decided
Crossing the Rubicon, The New Pearl Harbor, Imperial Hubris, Obama's Wars, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy... to declassify the list of books found in Osama bin Laden’s last hideout when Seal Team Six made their raid. There were 39 titles, which the press has categorized as heavy on conspiracy theory. That’s true, untrue, and unsurprising if you consider the official White House line is that the US does not support illegal coups. These authors beg to differ, including the unimpeachable Noam Chomski. Other investigative standouts include William Blum, Greg Palast, John Perkins. The list did not include publication dates or editions, just author and title. A closer inspection of the list is revealing.
 
(This is part one of a continuing series.)

It would be more accurate to describe Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf as history, mostly contemporary with notable exceptions. For example, bin Laden’s reference on Christianity and Islam in Spain 756-1031 was published in 1889 with the full title “The Relations and Mutual Influences of Christianity and Mohammedanism During the Khalifate of Cordova.” In 1889 European perspectives on the Moorish occupation appear dramatically antisemitic.

The history of The US and Vietnam 1787-1941 begins with Thomas Jefferson’s first interests in trading for rice with “Cochinchina”. Written by a former ambassador, it was published in 1990 by the National Defense University Press. The Best Enemy Money Can Buy is about the symbiotic relationship between the US military industrial complex and Russia’s.

Some of bin Laden’s “books” such as Michael O’Hanlon’s Unfinished Business were staple-bound publications from US policy think tanks. I’ll review those and the various intelligence agency exposés in subsequent posts.

Here are the 39 titles listed alphabetically:
The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason; A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim; America’s Strategic Blunders by Willard Matthias; America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ by Michel Chossudovsky; Al-Qaeda’s Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007 by Hanna Rogan; The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast; The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Anthony Sutton; Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris; Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier; Bounding the Global War on Terror by Jeffrey Record; Checking Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions by Henry Sokolski and Patrick Clawson; Christianity and Islam in Spain 756-1031 A.D. by C. R. Haines; Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies by Cheryl Benard; Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins; Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Committee of 300 by John Coleman; Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert; Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance (only the book’s introduction) by C. Christine Fair and Peter Chalk; Guerrilla Air Defense: Antiaircraft Weapons and Techniques for Guerrilla Forces by James Crabtree; Handbook of International Law by Anthony Aust; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky; Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer; In Pursuit of Allah’s Pleasure by Asim Abdul Maajid, Esaam-ud-Deen and Dr. Naahah Ibrahim; International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific by John Ikenberry and Michael Mastandano; Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II by William Blum; Military Intelligence Blunders by John Hughes-Wilson; Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s program of research in behavioral modification. Joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session, August 3, 1977. United States Congress Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky; New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin; New Political Religions, or Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper; Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward; Oxford History of Modern War by Charles Townsend; The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy; Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum; The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Hall (1928); Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins; The Taking of America 1-2-3 by Richard Sprague; Unfinished Business: U.S. Overseas Military Presence in the 21stCentury by Michael O’Hanlon; The U.S. and Vietnam 1787-1941 by Robert Hopkins Miller; “Website Claims Steve Jackson Games Foretold 9/11,” article posted on ICV2.com.

Banned books: the subversive dystopia

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Eugene Zamiatin, We; Jack London, The Iron Heel; Ambrose Bierce, Can Such Things Be?; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ayn Rand, Anthem; Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society; David Karp, One; Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Player Piano; Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.Banned Books, p.2–
I put a lot of faith in an internet resilient enough to remain an unrestricted archive of crowd-sourced human knowledge, even more I hope public data will eventually permeate the proprietary, but continued access to subversive literature I have little doubt will meet the full brunt of digital book burners. If there’s any text not to download unto your Kindle, as an easily vaporized or expurgate-able file, it’s one of these classic oft-censored, perpetually-offense-giving titles. These are the dystopian novels and science fictions which paint a bleak picture of the society we are engineering.

As pictured, here are some notoriously subversive dystopian novels, (as differentiated from commercial drivel which reinforces mainstream dogma, such as Lord of the Flies, or Hunger Games)

Atwood, Margaret, THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Bierce, Ambrose, CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
Bradbury, Ray, FAHRENHEIT 451
Burgess, Anthony, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Ellison, Harlan, THE GLASS TEAT
Huxley, Aldous, BRAVE NEW WORLD
Karp, David, ONE
Lewis, Sinclair, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE
London, Jack, THE IRON HEEL
Orwell, George, NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR
Pohl, Frederick, & C.M. Kornbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS
Rand, Ayn, ANTHEM
Vonnegut, Kurt, PLAYER PIANO
Wiener, Norbert, THE HUMAN USE OF OTHER BEINGS
Zamiatin, Eugene, WE

Haven’t heard of many of these? Curious, don’t you think?

You read banned books, but by whom?

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The Ginger Man, J P Donleavy; Howl, Allen Ginsberg; Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov; Ulysses, James Joyce; Lady Chatterley's Lover, D H Lawrence, Fanny Hill, John Cleland; The Arabian Nights, Richard Burton; Candide, Voltaire; Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman; Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe; The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio; The Canterbury Tales, Chancer; Lysistrata, AristophanesBy which I mean: BANNED by whom? Looking online for a definitive listing of most-often banned or censored books yields a panoply of titles not necessarily candidates for a pantheon. At right I’ve stacked the heavyweights most often resisted for being obscene, here a quality strangely inseparable from being subversive. Many of these titles have been intercepted through the ages by the US Post Office for being indecent under the Comstock Law, but how does that really inform readers of today?

These days the issue of censorship conjures images of Nazi bonfires, and petty bureaucrats like Sarah Palin calling her public library to inquire about pulling objectionable material from public circulation. The ACLU helps celebrate an annual Banned Books Week, and there’s even a t-shirt popular in elementary school circles which declaims “I read banned book.”

Sexual themes aside, isn’t good literature by definition subversive? “Banned books” of note show themselves by who’s trying to limit their circulation. Solzhenitsyn for example, was silenced by the USSR, not by authorities fretting over you. On the other hand, what the Nazis burned shared themes the US has sought to censor before and since, but the big whoop we make about banned books instead obsesses on lascivious or politically incorrect vocabulary. While literary publicists revel in the notoriety of inconsequential attacks on the ilk of Harry Potters, the digital and mass media age has meant sophisticated advancements in real book burning. I’d like to present an illustrated series about literary works which have threatened authoritarian rule in the past, your access to which is quietly receding.

Dial-a-BabyKiller service offered by Craigslist

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Actually, it was a post offering Body Armor published against C.L. rules (weapons are supposedly prohibited, and according to the Pig Establishment, body armor is an offensive weapon if used by a non-Police criminal, as opposed to the Criminals who make up the Pig Establishment) said he had been a Contractor (Probably a jail guard at one of the Torture errr… “Detention” Centers) aka Mercenary Baby Killer in Iraq.
Let’s make this abundantly clear, the ones who provide the Support for the Baby-Killing machine are every bit as guilty as the Terroristic Thugs who kick down peoples doors and murder them in their own homes for refusing, at least allegedly, to bow down and worship the U.S. Occupation with much bootlicking and ass-kissing. And every bit as guilty of Torture as the Perverted Uniformed Sex-offenders who run the Torture errr… “Enhanced Interrogation and detention centers”.
Every Contractor is just as guilty as the Blackwater Goons and the Wackenhut Goons who get their sexual giggles from directing violence against people. The Blackwater and Wackenhut goons get SEXUALLY turned on by Killing Babies and, in my opinion, so does every Cop in the world.
And this one, before his posting got flagged, left his Phone Number. This apparently happens a lot. The Arrogant Pig Sons-of-Whores leave a trail whereby Resistance Fighters can trace their Cowardly Bitch Asses.

I was going to publish the Puke-ass PIGS phone number but he got flagged too quickly, by the time I thought of publishing, it was gone.

Who knows, though, the Retarded Pig might have put it back up.

The Right Wing Extremist “Keyboard warriors” will flag down any comment even in the Rants and Raves comment section which criticizes their Patron Racist Saints like Limbaugh or Beck or Palin, but leave up posts screaming that “Niggers, Fags, Mexicans, Ay-rabs, Liberals” etc.. should be rounded up and at least imprisoned.

Nazi shit like that stays up, criticism of their Bitch-Masters gets flagged.

But here’s a little thought, goad some of the stupider ones to actually reply to your comments with a threatening e-mail filled with violent fantasies on their part, misspelled words, curses, Death Threats against you and your entire family… IDENTIFYING INFORMATION TO BUILD A DATABASE OF SOME OF THE WEAKER LINKS IN THEIR FASCIST RACIST ORGANIZATIONS like the Minutemen and TeaBags and other extremist terrorists

Stupid bastards love the thought of being anonymous, because they can make themselves into Superhero-status Terrorists on the Level of Osama-been-deceased-for-8-years, rather than pathetic 30 year old chickenhawks who live (hide) in their moms’ basements.