Everybody loves Jimmy Carter. A lot of people who are old enough to remember the Carter years love Jimmy Carter. Frankly, if I were a religious man, I would worry for their souls. As it is, I am greatly troubled by the poverty of their character and the their apparently endless capacity for doublethink. Is it because Carter is a Democrat that his crimes against humanity go mis/unremembered? Yes, I think so. It’s a matter of party over principle, in this case a warmongering party serving the interests of the corporate state and the transnationalist agenda.
Doublethink is a concept that George Orwell explored extensively in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, punished in 1949. Doublethink is the ability to hold in one’s head two contradictory beliefs or ideas simultaneously and believe them both to be true. But it is more than this. It’s not just the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time; it’s the ability to switch between them as needed without acknowledging the contradiction. It involves the conscious act of suppressing one’s own thoughts while accepting whatever the ruling party tells the individual to believe, even if it contradicts what the person previously believed.
Doublethink is the ability to say, for example, that one opposes war while voting for warmongers. Beyond the dystopian fiction of Orwell, in the real here and now, it’s your Democrat friends adorning their social media profiles with the Ukrainian flag.
President Carter talks with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Oval Office 1977
The purpose of doublethink is to create a sense of cognitive dissonance in the people, which in turn makes it easier for the ruling party to control them. By forcing or inducing people to accept contradictory ideas as true, the party is able to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of the masses, and ultimately, to steer their behavior and command their emotions.
Do folks not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who organized Islamists—the mujahideen—to destabilize the socialist government in Kabul to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan? The war Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski contrived lasted a decade. As many as two million Afghans were killed, the majority of whom were civilians. If you didn’t know about this, now that you do, does it change your mind? No? That’s doublethink.
The official story is that the Carter administration began providing covert aid to the mujahideen in 1979 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Did the Soviet Union even invade Afghanistan? Or was it something else?
In 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a socialist political party, overthrew the government of President Mohammed Daoud Khan in a revolutionary moment characterized by Western media as a coup d’état. The new government was led by Nur Mohammad Taraki and the country became the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The new government’s policies included land reform, social and economic changes, and a break with traditional Islamic practices.
The Soviet Union negotiated a mutual defense pact with Taraki government. By funding the jihadists before the Soviet Union entered the country, Carter and Brzezinski forced the Soviet Union to honor that pact in order to drag the Soviet Union into what Brzezinski characterized as their Vietnam War. Brzezinski and the Carter administration saw an opportunity to undermine what they characterized Soviet influence in the region. They provided covert support to anti-government mujahideen groups to draw the Soviet Union into a quagmire.
Brzezinski later admitted that the strategy was to provide support to the mujahideen in order to provoke a Soviet military intervention, which he believed would be a costly and draining conflict for the Soviet Union. This, in turn, would weaken the Soviet Union’s hold on Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. He confessed this in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski described the strategy and admitted to the crime: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”
The US government provided weapons, training, and other support to the mujahideen through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other channels. The goal was to destabilize the Afghan government and force the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan. The CIA and other US agencies worked with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to funnel weapons and money to the mujahideen. The US also encouraged other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, to provide support to the Afghan resistance.
The US support for the mujahideen helped to create a culture of violence and extremism in Afghanistan, as well as a generation of fighters who would go on to fight in conflicts around the world, including against the US. The conflict and US backing of oppressive and terroristic forces contributed to the growth of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The state the war left Afghanistan in allowed for the establishment of theocratic tyranny where women, who enjoyed under the socialist government great freedom, participation in politics, and careers in academia, engineering and science, and medicine, including as physicians, were brutally repressed by an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam. This remains true to this day and it’s because of Jimmy Carter’s actions in 1979. I probably don’t need to remind readers that it was from Afghanistan that al-Qaeda launched its multi-pronged attack against the United States on September 11, 2001. See my blog Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan for an in-depth exposé on this subject.
Remember how Carter pretended the invasion wasn’t of his doing and punished our athletes by boycotting the 1980 Olympics? He also imposed restrictions on trade with the Soviet Union, including an embargo on the export of grain and high-technology goods; suspending arms control talks (including the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT II, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe); and provided military and economic aid to Pakistan, aid that included weapons, military personnel, and training.
Do people not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who provided military assistance to Indonesia during the period of its invasion and occupation of East Timor and the genocide perpetrated on the Timorese people? In 1978, the US government lifted an arms embargo that had been in place for more than a decade. He then provided Indonesia with millions of dollars in military aid, including weapons and training.
With Carter’s weapons and training, the Indonesian military committed extensive human rights abuses in East Timor, including extrajudicial killings, torture, forced relocation and birth controlled. Girls were used by Indonesian forces as sex slaves. During the occupation, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 East Timorese, or about a third of the population, died due to the conflict, including killings, starvation, and disease.
Have people forgotten that the negation of Persia that came with the establishment of the Islamic republic in Iran in April 1979 came under Carter’s watch? Carter not only watched it unfold—he stood by while dozens of Americans were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days.
Long ago, I wondered whether Carter’s actions after his presidency—pounding nails into boards and promoting election integrity around the world (if that was what he was indeed doing)—came from the deep shame he must have felt at having betrayed so many people during his presidency, for being not merely one of the worst presidents in American history, but in actively participating in oppression and genocide.
Then I reflect on the fact that he was groomed for the job by David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission, the cabal that also staffed his administration, and I realize that all his actions post-presidency are designed to obscure his associations with and machinations in the service of corporate state power. See my recent blog Jimmy Carter, Trilateralist, Entering Hospice for details.
There is no atoning for the sins Carter committed. If there is a hell, he is destined to spend all of eternity there. But there is no hell. So he will die an old and broken man with blood on his hands.
freedom and reason 