Six years later, I find a Parenti title in The Internationalist Bookstore in Chapel Hill, and my excitement is rewarded with another trenchant critique of official stories, this one harkening back to my lessons in tradecraft with Karl and his stories of penetrating Czech society with spies during the Cold War. Inventing Reality was a clear, concise account of the corporate media"s essential ideological function on behalf of organized, concentrated, economic power. It became pivotal in the direction of my political consciousness, guiding me to question every assumption I had carried through my life. I was ripe for an organized analysis of that experience that rang true, and I read Parenti"s book in one sitting. I had long experience with the brutal Realpolitik of US foreign policy, and with the consistently anodyne and myopic reflection of those realities by the press, the punditry, and official histories. My capacity for denial was nearly exhausted, and my thirst to make sense of my own experience was nearly insatiable. I was working as a Special Operations Medical Sergeant with 7th Special Forces. I had just returned from Peru, my fifth conflict area, after Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, and El Salvador. In the same year, 1991, I was browsing in McKay"s Used Books at Fayetteville, North Carolina, and I ran across an interesting title. Much of the success of that septuagenarian campaign can be attributed to the sophisticated ideological war that capital waged, especially in the United States, through hegemonic oversight of learning, scholarship, entertainment, and the news media. Soviets were allowed to absorb the lion"s share of Nazi military power then, in order to help the established imperial nations to squash the upstart, Hitler.īy 1991, after laying siege to socialism for 74 years, transnational capital succeeded against Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It had been part of the war (hot and cold) which the United States waged against socialist nations for most of the century, with a short break during World War II. He had been an agent handler, the supervisor of a spy ring, for eight years along the Czech border with Germany, where he collected information against the Czech government from Czech citizens on his payroll.
It"s the insider term he brought out of Military Intelligence that refers to spying and running spy rings. He was teaching me and some other special operations soldiers in the United States Army a subject called tradecraft.
Book Review Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism City Lights Books, San Francisco 1997
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