Tag: CIA

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Chile

September 11, 1973 – CIA coup topples Chilean democracy

Fifty years ago, on this day, September 11, 1973, the planes started bombing the Parliament, the troops started shooting, and the elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, was killed.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 329ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Allende had been in the rifle sites for a while. “Make the economy scream”, Nixon had said. Meanwhile, various theorists of technology were trying to figure out how you could have the advantages of automation computers feedback loops without creating a dictatorship of the higher order. So how could technology be used to make smarter more democratic decisions? One of the people thinking in these terms was Stafford Beer who was trying to get a program around this going in in Chile. Would it have worked? Almost certainly not. But it would have been nice to learn from the failures and try again and again until there were ways it could succeed? Yes.

What I think we can learn from this is that in general socialist democracy scared the s*** out of Nixon, Kissinger ITT etc. The threat of a good example and all that… And it reminds me of that anecdote from Carl Rogers about the experimental factory where profits remain high but managers realise they would have to give up a lot of their power and they don’t want to.

What happened next is that Pinochet ruled until 1990. He made the mistake of holding a referendum, believing he was popular… He was then pursued legally and and of course the Blair government was never going to let him be extradited to Spain because they were doing what the Americans wanted. Pinochet would have blown the gaff and put the spotlight on Nixon who by this time was dead but also on Kissinger who was still very much alive. There would have been teachable moments about  the CIA and its behaviour. 

Stafford Beer, well he died in 2002. Cybersyn never took off.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..

References

See also https://www.academia.edu/23198933/A_critique_of_pure_cybernetic_reason_the_Chilean_experience_with_cybernetics

Categories
Australia Denial

August 18, 1996, Ex-CSIRO #climate boss shows he has lost the plot

On this day, August 18 in 1996, Brian Tucker, who had headed up the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research, and attended some important scientific meetings, reveals himself incapable of understanding that the world does not conform to how you would wish it to be.

[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 361.55 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]

“Brian Tucker, previous Chief of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research, is now  a Senior Fellow at the IPA where he trades on his scientific credentials to push an ideological agenda. In 1996 in a talk on ABC’s Ockham’s Razor he stated that ‘unchallenged climatic disaster hyperbole has induced something akin to a panic reaction from policy makers both national and international”

[From a Sharon Beder article in 1999]

Tucker, B. 1996. A Rational Consideration of Global Warming. Ockham’s Razor, ABC Radio National, 18 August.

Tucker was also busy writing screeds in the IPA’s magazine that, looking back, were frankly an embarrassment

Why this matters. 

Beder notes that

Tucker’s article The Greenhouse Panic was reprinted in Engineering World a magazine aimed at engineers. The article, introduced by the magazine editor as “a balanced assessment,” argues that “alarmist prejudices of insecure people have been boosted by those who have something to gain from widespread public concern.”[42] This article, which would have been more easily dismissed as an IPA publication, has been quoted by Australian engineers at conferences as if it was an authoritative source.”

And thus is a counter-common sense “engineered.” Once bullshit is republished in other venues, it gains a halo effect from those other places, and gets repeated again, until finally it seems a solid piece of fact.

The CIA used to call it ‘surfacing’ (maybe still do?). Plant stories in local newspapers in the countries you’re trying to subvert, then quote those as “evidence” when trying to get more money out of the US government…

What happened next?

We kept digging up and exporting coal. Of course we did.

Categories
United States of America

April 15, 1974 – Kissinger cites climate concerns…

On April 15 1974, US Secretary of State and all-round mass-murdering prick, Henry Kissinger gave a speech at a special session of the UN General Assembly. In the speech he suggested that further research into climate change(by which was meant weather patterns) was necessary because of its implications for food security, which was and of course remains the hot issue. 

This was at the same time the CIA were researching a report on food security. And it’s a good example of how issues come together. Stephen Schneider had been talking about food security as had a lot of other people at the same time. The consequences of Kissinger’s speech were multifold. In the language of Multiple Streams, the speech was added to the policy stream and the politics stream and the problem stream because Kissinger was a heavyweight. 

What happened next

Kissinger’s speech was used by legendary Australian civil servant Nugget Coombs to get the Minister of Science to commission a report on climate change from the Australian Academy of Science (it wasn’t released until 1976, and sank without trace).

Kissinger committed more war crimes, including permission to the Indonesian military to invade East Timor. About a third of the population of 600,000 died between 75 and 78. It was proportionately a bigger massacre than the much more famous Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia. 

Interest in climate and its implications for food production continued to be very high. So you have Reid Bryson’s Climate and Hunger book published in I think 1977. And of course, you’ve got Stephen Schneider’s the Genesis strategy, also published in 1976. And by the late 70s our lords and masters knew enough to start taking action. They did not. And here we are.