eBook Intervention and Revolution download

The material contained in this book is critically important to balance the garbage we get from our own media. The real historical facts behind the "facts" and other junk thrown at us are put in their proper perspective. I highly recommend a read of this book, and this information come from my recollections of prior reading when this book was first published in the early 1970's.

However the vendors of this product should state whether the edition they have is the large type and large binding size. The book I received is wholly inadequate and I intend on retuning it. In fact, it is so old (I bought used) that a turn of the page after reading and I expect the page to fall out. I read this book some thirty years ago or more when it was first published. Mr. Barnett does indeed have an axe to grind. I suspect he was very close to the facts here, and knows more than what he reveals. I recommend not purchasing from the distributor I did (Peter Schmidt) as he didn't return my phone call regarding the terrible and horribly aged "used" small type Mentor Book edition sent. I do not intend on reading the book this distributor shipped as the condition of it precludes even opening it as it will fall apart. I write in margins and refer to other facts, books, etc. as I may use as a reference to what I may be writing on so I do not recommend buying such a small sized edition nor in "used" condition nor from this distributor.

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Some Excerpts:

p5

Unlike the leaders of developed nations, the enemies which revolutionary leaders see are not at the gate but already inside. Their country is occupied either by a foreign colonial power or by local landlords, generals, or self-serving politicians. As they see it, the issue is liberation. The goal is a radical redistribution of political and economic power to overcome centuries of political oppression and crushing poverty. The means is seizure of political power.

... the revolutionary idea-that radical change is necessary, that it is inevitable, and that it can come only by seizing the machinery of the state-has steadily grown.

p7

Revolutionary movements grow in the soil of exploitation and injustice.

p8

The historic aim of revolution, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, is freedom, the opportunity to participate in the political process.

p8

The United States government has seized upon the moral ambiguity of revolution to justify a global campaign to contain it, to channel it into acceptable paths, or to crush it. In 1938, President Roosevelt had to summon all his political powers to block the Ludlow Resolution for a constitutional amendment forbidding the President to send troops overseas without a national referendum. Less than ten years after its narrow defeat, his successor secured broad congressional support for use of American military power to put down violent revolution abroad. "We cannot allow changes in the status quo," the President declared, "by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration," making clear that it didn't matter whether revolutionaries were natives of the country they wished to change or not. Since violence is the engine of political change over most of the globe, President Truman committed the United States to a prodigious task.

The context of the Truman Doctrine made it perfectly clear that its target was not all "violence" or all "coercion" or all "changes in the status quo," but only those having something to do with "communism." The justification for treating communist revolutions as a unique political phenomenon rested partly on the premise that they were manipulated by the Soviet Union and partly on the dogma that the coming of communism to a society meant the end of its political evolution. It was assumed that once the "iron curtain'' descended upon a country, history stopped. It was lost forever, trapped in an ideological straitjacket. In the twenty years since the war, we have seen the fallacy of this latter assumption. Romania Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself have undergone profound political and social change. They are still communist regimes, but their character has evolved in many important ways, far more radically, certainly, than many right-wing dictatorships that have come to power by military coup but are exempt from the Truman Doctrine.

The word "communist" has been applied so liberally and so loosely to revolutionary or radical regimes that any government risks being so characterized if it adopts one or more of the following policies which the State Department finds distasteful: nationalization of private industry, particularly foreign-owned corporations, radical land reform, autarchic trade policies, acceptance of Soviet or Chinese aid, insistence upon following an anti-American or nonaligned foreign policy, among others. Thus, the American ambassador to Cuba at the time of the brief Grau San Martin government in 1933 found it to be "communistic." In 1937 Cordell Hull privately spoke of the Mexican government, which was nationalizing U.S.-owned oil properties, as "these communists down there," but made no public charge. Since the Second World War, however, the term "communist" has been used to justify U.S. intervention against a variety of regimes with widely differing ideologies and relationships with the Soviet Union, including Arevalo's Guatemala, Mossadeq's Iran Goulart's Brazil, Sukarno's Indonesia, Caamano's Dominican revolutionary junta, as well as insurgent movements in Latin America Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Indeed, from the Truman Doctrine on, the suppression of insurgent movements has remained a principal goal of U.S. foreign policy. It has been the prime target of the U.S. foreign-assistance program, most of the funds for which have gone for civic-action teams, pacification programs, support for local police, and, above all, military aid to the local army. Such expenditures are designed to strengthen the hand of the recognized government to put down the challenge of revolution. Economic aid is extended to Third World countries not only to buy their support on foreign-policy issues but also to lubricate the process of "gradualism" and strengthen the forces of "stability.". In other words, U.S. policy is to support governments that promise to revolutionize their societies from above, although, as the continued support of military dictators and reactionary regimes demonstrates, this is scarcely a requirement. ...

In The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross, published in 1970, biblical scholar John M. Allegro wove the results of more than fourteen years of painstaking research into aa theory that Christianity is based on an ancient fertility mythology; that the early Christians were members of a drug cult, worshippers of the sacred mushrooms, Amanita muscaria; that The Bible and especially the New Testament, was an intricately contrived cover story designed to perpetuate the names and incantations of the illegal cult; that the legend of Jesus is simply that -- a legend.

Such a theory, if true would seem to strike at the very heart of Western philosophy and ethics; small wonder that Mr. Allegro's book aroused passionate feelings, much as Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds of Collision did nearly twenty-five years ago(1945). The validity of the Bible, the status of the Church, the moral foundations of our thought and institutions for the past 2000 years -- all are called into question if Mr. Allegro's argument is to be accepted.

In The End of a Road Mr. Allegro assumes the correctness of his theory and proceeds to build upon the destruction it must inevitably occasion. The result is a frest concept of humanism strong enough to compensate for the lost faith and capable, through reason and technology, of leading mankind down a broader and better road to a more satisfying future. Reeducation, self-disipline, courage and honesty will be required. This companion volume to a startling, disturbing book is reassuring affirmation of a man's ability to transcend his fears and fashion his own destiny.