Bizarre Theorist Lauded by Reagan | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Jewish Advocate, Oct 4, 1984

 

Media attention was drawn this week to an April, 1982 laudatory letter from President Ronald Reagan to Roger Pearson, a London born academician and editor whose 30-year career has been devoted to writings on Nordic and Aryan superiority and the “science” of selective breeding known as eugenics.

The Administration contends that it was unaware of Pearson’s theories when the President signed a letter thanking the 57-year-old extremist for “valuable service in bringing to a wide audience the work of leading [scholars?*] who are supportive of a free enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy and a strong national defense.”

For over two years Pearson has been soliciting new subscriptions to his publications – the Mankind Quarterly and Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies – with the help of the President’s written appreciation for Pearson’s “substantial contributions to promoting those ideals and principles we value.”

On Sept. 28, assistant presidential press secretary Anson Franklin, referring to the letter, told The Wall Street Journal: “The President has long held views opposing discrimination in any form, and he would never condone anything to the contrary. But that’s a general statement; I’m not addressing Dr. Pearson specifically.” The White House added that the letter was written after Reagan had received an issue of one of Pearson’s journals that contained none of his controversial racial theories.

Justin Finger, civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai Brith, told the Journal, “The White House ought to repudiate this bird.” Finger became aware of the letter this summer. He has protested to the White House but received no reply.

Robert Schuetzinger, who now works at the Pentagon, is reported to have written the letter for Mr. Reagan while on the White House staff. Schuetzinger was formerly affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has prepared research reports for the Reagan administration in a variety of governmental areas. He has also served on the editorial board of one of Pearson’s journals. In 1977, Pearson served on the editorial board of Policy Review, which is published by the Heritage Foundation. He was reportedly asked to resign when the foundation learned of his past.

Pearson was born in London but spent much of his youth in India. He served in the British Indian Army after the war and went on to a successful career in business. By the mid-1960’s he had become the chairman of the Pakistan Tea Association as well as the managing director of a Pakistani steel company. He then moved to the United States, changing careers to become an academician in the field of anthropology. He taught at a number of universities before becoming dean of academic affairs at Montana College in Butte.

As early as 1956 Pearson was the editor of a magazine on racial hierarchies known as Northern World. Though published in Calcutta it was cited here in the United States in the magazine Right, which wrote in its September 1957 issue:

“Every once in a while something truly unusual turns up and this month honors go to Northern World.”

According to Danger on the Right, a 1964 study by Arnold Foster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Right featured “blatant anti-Semitism” and served as a “clearing-house for news and information about anti-Semitic activities.”

The Wall Street Journal referred to an issue of Northern World in which Pearson promoted the use of artificial insemination as a means of preserving “pure healthy stock” and “breeding back the ‘ideal’ types.” Pearson told the Journal he is ashamed of nothing he has said or written.

Around 1958 Pearson helped found the “Northern League,” whose avowed purpose was to promote “the interests, friendship and solidarity of al Teutonic nations.” Among the League’s co-founders was Hans Günther, a pre-war Nazi philosopher whose anti-Semitic study, Rassenkinde des Deutschen Volkes, was revered by high-standing Nazi officials.

Günther’s readers included the chief Nazi party theoretician, Alfred Rosenberg, who became Hitler’s minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. A National Socialist before Hitler, Rosenberg was one of the select few who were tried and executed at Nuremburg. In 1941 he honored Günther with the Goethe prize and an invitation to the first conference on Research into the Jewish Question.

Besides Northern World, Pearson has edited and written for Western Destiny, a magazine published by the extreme rightwing Liberty Lobby, which is known for its anti-Semitic literature. Pearson’s books, including Race and Civilization (on Aryan racial history) and Eugenics and Race, were published by the same group.

In addition, Pearson has been a leader of the far right umbrella organization known as the World Anti-Communist League, which was founded in Seoul, South Korea in 1966. He chaired the 1978 WACL conference in Washington, D.C. Four years earlier, the British WACL delegation had resigned, citing among its reasons the growing penetration of the League by anti-Semitic organizations. They referred specifically to the Mexican branch of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (Spanish acronym CAL).

Earlier this year columnist Jack Anderson charged that CAL’s Mexico City office was coordinating death squads in a number of Latin American nations including El Salvador. This led to the Mexican group’s expulsion from WACL. Pearson had himself resigned following the earlier charges that he had encouraged membership in the WACL of anti-Semitic organizations.

The recently elected chairman of the WACL, former Major General John Singlaub (who had been relieved of his command in South Korea following his criticism of President Jimmy Carter) described Roger Pearson to The Wall Street Journal as an “embarrassment … not at all welcome in any activity” of the WACL.

Robert Schuetzinger, composer of the President’s letter to Pearson, told the Journal “there was absolutely no valid grounds to accuse [Pearson] of racism,” though he might have been “a little naïve” in his choice of company.

 

Three Players on the Team | by Jerry Meldon | Published in Tufts Journal, February 25, 1982

 

This is about three of the individuals who make up the Reagan team. They are not stars. They are lesser players on a team regarded outside the Moral Majority and cold war/defense establishment as a band of incompetents and Robin Hoods in reverse. They fit in neither of the latter categories, but their presence on the team is ominous.

            The three are Thomas Enders, Marvin Liebman and Vernon Walters, and each is interesting in light of his past. The first, a U.S. ambassador to Phnom Penh, directed and kept Congress ignorant of the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. The second is a Madison Avenue publicist with ties to the extreme right, who ran afoul of the Justice Department while representing the interests of the Chilean oligarchy. The third is a retired CIA official linked to the 1964 coup that brought military dictatorship to Brazil.

            Thomas Enders is the one who has been in the headlines. The assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Enders has been telling Congress and the nation of the Salvadoran junta’s progress on human rights – with a straight face. He also has disputed the figures of church and other relief groups on civilian casualties in massacres carried out by Salvadoran government troops.

            If it sounds like the “Big Lie” approach to propaganda, we should recall that Enders learned the art from the master, Henry Kissinger. While the number two and later number one man at the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh from 1970 to 1973, Enders, on order from the Nobel Bomber, directed the aerial bombing of Cambodia. He also kept it secret from reporters, from congressmen who visited Cambodia, and even from Secretary of State William Rogers. Maps Enders used for target selection were too old and lacked the detail to show whether civilians were likely to be hit. When they were, which was often, Enders distorted the number of casualties. And, according to Nation magazine, Enders described the rigged election of General Lon Nol as “a step forward for Cambodian democracy.”

            Marvin Liebman, a leading lobbyist for right wing causes, co-founded the Young Americans for Freedom. In 1975 he was hired by Nena Rossa of the Consejo Chileno-Norteamericano for $3,000 per month plus expenses to improve U.S.-Chilean relations.

            In December 1978 the justice department [sic] filed a civil fraud suit against Liebman and his brainchild, the American Chilean Council (ACC), for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration act. The justice department charged that the sole purpose of the ACC was to “disguise the business relationship that exists between the Chilean government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and its American public relations representatives.” In documents obtained by the justice department, Liebman referred to the ACC as “a front” and to its members as “letterhead names.”

            Today Marvin Liebman is a consultant to the U.S. Department of Education. His appointment appears aimed at appeasing Reagan’s far right supporters who are disappointed with the administration’s pace in dismantling the welfare state. They’d like to see the education department dissolved.

            General Vernon Walters’ interesting career reached its peak when Richard Nixon named him Deputy Director of the CIA in the spring of 1972. That was just in time for Walters to play a role in the Watergate cover-up. Six weeks after his appointment, Walters visited FBI director L. Patrick Gray on behalf of the White House to tell Gray to limit the bureau’s investigation of the Watergate burglars lest it expose a CIA operation.

            Eight years earlier, Walters was the military attache at the U.S. embassy in Rio de Janeiro when the Goulart regime was overthrown by the Brazilian military. In his autobiography and elsewhere Walters has denied his or CIA involvement in the plot. However, government documents show that four days before the coup, Walters informed the state department: “It is now clear that General Castelo Branco finally accepted leadership of the forces determined to resist Goulart coup or Communist takeover … Mar. 13 meeting and tremendous response to Sao Paolo March for God and Freedom have instilled new vigor into plotters.” Our ambassador had promised the generals U.S. recognition if they held Sao Paolo for 48 hours.

            What is Walters up to now? He’s Ronald Reagan’s man for all dictators, representing the U.S. government on visits to our friends, the rulers of Argentina, Chile and Guatemala. He preceded Al Haig to Morocco, where last week the secretary of state renewed U.S. military cooperation with King Hassan. Little does it matter that political prisoners in Morocco are regularly left in total isolation, chained to the ground, suspended head down or beaten on the soles of their feet until they lose consciousness. Just what Walters discusses on his trips is not exactly clear, but for one 1981 deal alone he received $300,000 from a company specializing in the sale of advanced weaponry to foreign governments.

            Why be concerned about three players on the Reagan team? I am not sure of the answer. But is it not possible to learn something of the true intentions of the current administration by looking closely at whom it chooses to execute its policies?

 

 

 

On Deane Hinton, Reagan’s Nominee for Ambassador to El Salvador | by Jerry Meldon | Unpublished manuscript, April 1981

 

A career foreign service officer who graduated from Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1952, Deane Hinton has long been identified with that group of US diplomats whose role it is to protect [deletion] US business overseas, the copper industry in particular. Prior to his first embassy leadership role, he was a major figure in the Agency for International Development (AID), whose Office of Public Safety is now recognized to have been a front for CIA collaboration with the police apparatuses of US client dictators. The major Central American hotspot of the sixties was Guatemala, one of whose exports is copper. In the peak period of the civil war that has bloodied Guatemala since the United Fruit/CIA coup of 1954, Hinton was the local AID director from 1967 to 1969. (US ambassador Mein was assassinated in 1968, escalating the reign of terror waged by the military government and its paramilitary death squads trained by the Green Berets and European neo-fascist mercenaries.) In a 1971 staff memorandum prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, the US police training program in Guatemala was described as a failure that had resulted in the US becoming “politically identified with police terrorism.”

            Having proven his worth in Guatemala, Hinton was moved in 1969 to Chile, where he remained AID chief until 1971. Part of his role there, of course, was to regularly monitor the actions of the Allende government and the Chilean Copper Corporation, and to pass on such information to Anaconda, Kennecott and other US copper companies fearful of the eventual nationalization of their vast holdings. In 1971 Hinton was named Deputy Director of the National Security Council’s Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, whose mission it was to recommend policy towards countries which expropriated the holdings of US corporations.

            It is interesting to note the parallels between the careers of Hinton and Nathaniel Davis, another Fletcher graduate who became the ambassador to Guatemala in the wake of Mein’s 1968 assassination. Davis, who gained a reputation for stuffing the pockets of grateful Guatemalan generals during the reign of terror, followed Hinton to Chile, where he became the US ambassador in 1971 and remained so until one month after the CIA-sponsored coup of September 1973.  

            In the summer of 1974 Hinton became the US ambassador to Zaire, another of the world’s major copper producers. Shortly thereafter, at the start of 1975, Kissinger also named Nathaniel Davis Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Davis replaced Donald Easum, whose removal from office followed shortly after his statement on Zambian TV that US support for “continued South African participation in the UN is continuously under/review [sic]. It is not concrete and forever.” Easum had been widely respected throughout black Africa and hailed by Zaire’s dictator Mobutu – no enemy of the US – as a “great diplomat” with “accurate knowledge of decolonization and apartheid problems”. By contrast Davis came to Africa with no background in the region’s affairs and the ominous reputation he’d gained in Latin America.

            Before long the CIA had the United States supporting South Africa’s client army in Angola’s civil war, with neighboring Zaire serving as a base for CIA operations. In a surprise move, Davis resigned his State Department post, apparently uneager to have one more Chile under his belt. Hinton, for his part, found himself expelled from Zaire in the aftermath of an alleged CIA coup attempt against Mobutu.

            Davis briefly assumed the ambassadorship of Switzerland, which evoked the vehement protests of the Swiss and Italian lefts. Any suspicions of foul play were, if anything, magnified by the simultaneous opening in Geneva of the European headquarters of Chile’s notorious secret police, DINA. Davis soon found himself relegated to foreign service burial ground at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

            Hinton, meanwhile, has avoided the limelight since 1975, first as US emissary to the Common Market, and more recently as the Assistant Secretary of State for Business and Economic Affairs. He’s ripe for action, and that, no doubt, awaits him in El Salvador.

 

ISRAEL, TOO, SELLS WEAPONS ABROAD | Letter to the editor from Jerry Meldon | published in the New York Times Feb. 21, 1981

 

To the Editor:

Irving Schechtman admonishes France for its shipment of arms to Iraq and for supplying Arab countries with material that might lead to an ''Islamic'' A-bomb aimed at Israel (letter Feb. 11). But such words from an American are like the pot calling the frying pan black.

The world's premier merchant of death is the United States.

Moreover, are we to judge Israel -as Mr. Schechtman judges France -by the clients for its armaments? Israeli arms sales to the third world exceed $1 billion annually. Somoza of Nicaragua continued receiving Israeli arms and using them on his own citizens until they chased him to Paraguay. In earlier conflicts between the dictatorships of El Salvador and Honduras and between those of Chile and Argentina, Israeli arms were the common denominator. Argentina's rampant anti-Semitism proved no bar to the purchase from Israel of guided missiles and French-made Mirage fighters.

When generals bankrolled by cocaine traffickers short-circuited Bolivia's recent steps toward democracy, Israel was part of the rush to recognize the brutal new regime. This was history repeating itself: Israel had been second in line, behind the U.S., to recognize the Pinochet-led junta in Chile in 1973.

Yes, France's amoral policies are reprehensible. But are Israel's any more virtuous? JERRY MELDON, Watertown, Mass., Feb. 12, 1981