
              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9  Num. 64
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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MEESTER VEELSON
===============
 
The one-dimensional Woodrow Wilson shown  on the PBS series, "The
Great  War,"  is  typical  of  supposed  highbrow  entertainments
offered by "public" television:  academicist subject  matter  but
without  depth  or  disagreement, sprinkled (naturally) with blab
from various hired hands of the federal "truth" factories.
 
(Lest any say, "Ah hah.  A  white  male with too much time on his
hands.  Why isn't he watching endless sports?  Hey  you!   Get  a
life,"  note that I only watched the Woodrow Wilson part, not the
entire 8-hour series.)
 
Funding  for "The Great War" came from the National Endowment for
the Humanities, i.e. from the federal government.  So, of course,
Woodrow Wilson  appeared  without  blemishes  and  like all other
noble beings who somehow invariably gravitate to Washington, D.C.
This marvelous circumstance is echoed by  another  "coincidence":
somehow the "truth" and federal funds for "scholars" always occur
together;  rarely does a "scholar" not find lucky federal dollars
along the road as he journeys toward the "truth."
 
(The modern Rome on  the  Potomac does another interesting trick:
it takes  the  money  from  a  continental  nation,  its  various
functionaries rake off and/or steal their percentage, much of the
loot gets distributed as largesse to corporate swine, and finally
it does its big magic trick -- makes it appear as if a beneficent
Washington,  D.C.  is  generously  giving  money to its citizens.
Many are fooled by  this  sleight-of-hand prestidigitated by Rome
on the Potomac.)
 
As my personal protest against  the  cartoonization  of  history,
here  is  information  on  Woodrow  Wilson of a counter-sainthood
nature.
 
John  Dos  Passos,  in  his  book  *Nineteen  Nineteen*  (usually
included with two other of his books in a volume called *U.S.A.*,
a.k.a.  "The U.S.A. Trilogy"),  gives  his  own sketch of Woodrow
Wilson in a  section  he  calls,  "Meester  Veelson."   Here  are
excerpts:
 
  When  he  got  his  Ph.D.  from Johns Hopkins he moved to a
  professorship  at  Wesleyan,   wrote  articles,  started  a
  History of the United States.
 
  ...in 1901  the  trustees  of  Princeton  offered  him  the
  presidency...
 
  ...and  in  1910  the  democratic  bosses  of  New  Jersey,
  hardpressed  by  muckrakers  and  reformers, got the bright
  idea  of  offering  the  nomination  for  governor  to  the
  stainless college president...
 
  ...so he left Princeton  only  half reformed to be Governor
  of New Jersey...
 
  He was introduced to Colonel House, that amateur Merlin  of
  politics  who  was  spinning  his webs at the Hotel Gotham.
  And at the convention in Baltimore the next July the upshot
  of the puppetshow staged  for  sweating delegates by Hearst
  and House behind the scenes... was that Woodrow Wilson  was
  nominated for the presidency.
 
  ...he  left  the  State  of New Jersey half reformed... and
  went to the White House our twenty-eighth president.
 
  While Woodrow Wilson  drove  up  Pennsylvania Avenue beside
  Taft  the  great  buttertub,  who  as  president  had  been
  genially undoing  T.R.'s  [Teddy  Roosevelt's]  reactionary
  efforts   to   put   business  under  the  control  of  the
  government, J. Pierpont Morgan sat playing solitaire in his
  back office on Wall  Street,  smoking twenty black cigars a
  day, cursing the follies of democracy.
 
  First it was "neutrality in thought and  deed,"  then  "too
  proud  to  fight" when the Lusitania sinking and the danger
  to the Morgan  loans  and  the  stories  of the British and
  French propagandists set all the financial centers  in  the
  East  bawling  for war, but the suction of the drumbeat and
  the  guns  was  too  strong;  the  best  people  took their
  fashions from Paris and their broad "a's" from London,  and
  T.R. and the House of Morgan.
 
  Wilson  became  the state (war is the health of the state),
  Washington his Versailles, manned the socialized government
  with dollar a year  men  out  of the great corporations and
  ran the big parade.
 
  If you objected to making the  world  safe  for  cost  plus
  democracy you went to jail with [Eugene] Debs.
 
  With  the  help  of  Almighty  God,  Right, Truth, Justice,
  Freedom, Democracy,  the  Selfdetermination  of Nations, No
  indemnities no annexations,
 
  and Cuban sugar and Caucasian  manganese  and  Northwestern
  wheat  and  Dixie  cotton,  the  British  blockade, General
  Pershing, the taxicabs of Paris and the seventyfive gun
 
  we won the war.
 
  On December 4th, 1918,  Woodrow Wilson, the first president
  to leave the territory of  the  United  States  during  his
  presidency, sailed for France.
 
  On  June 28th the Treaty of Versailles was ready and Wilson
  had to go back  home  to  explain  to the politicians who'd
  been ganging up on him meanwhile in the  Senate  and  House
  and  to  sober  public  opinion and to his father's God how
  he'd let himself be trimmed...
 
  From the day he landed  in  Hoboken  he had his back to the
  wall of the White House, trying to save his faith in words,
  talking to save his faith in the League of Nations, talking
  to save his faith in himself, in his father's God.
 
  He strained every nerve of his body and brain, every agency
  of the government he had under  his  control;  (if  anybody
  disagreed he was a crook or a red; no pardon for Debs).
 
  In Seattle the  wobblies  whose  leaders  were  in jail, in
  Seattle the wobblies whose leaders had been lynched,  who'd
  been  shot  down  like  dogs, in Seattle the wobblies lined
  four blocks as Wilson passed,  stood silent with their arms
  folded staring at the great liberal as he was hurried  past
  in  his car, huddled in his overcoat, haggard with fatigue,
  one side of his face  twitching.   The men in overalls, the
  workingstiffs let him pass in silence after all  the  other
  blocks of handclapping and patriotic cheers.
 
  ...on the train to Wichita he had a stroke.  He gave up the
  speaking  tour that was to sweep the country for the League
  of Nations.   After  that  he  was  a  ruined paralysed man
  barely able to speak.
 
 
The book, *Lies My Teacher Told Me* by James W. Loewen has a  few
tidbits on "Meester Veelson," such as.....
 
  ** The Wilson administration hired two Japanese-Mexicans to
  try to poison Pancho Villa.
 
  **  "Textbooks  might  begin  discussing  the  influence of
  multinational corporations on U.S.  foreign policy with the
  administration of  Woodrow  Wilson.   Pressure  from  First
  National   Bank   of   New   York  helped  prompt  Wilson's
  intervention in Haiti.  U.S. interests owned more of Mexico
  than interests from anywhere else, including Mexico itself,
  which helps  explain  Wilson's  repeated  invasions of that
  country.   In  Russia,   the   new   communist   government
  nationalized   all  petroleum  assets;  as  a  consequence,
  Standard Oil of New  Jersey  was 'the major impetus' behind
  American opposition to the Bolsheviks."
 
  ** "J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the FBI  got
  their  start  investigating  alleged  communists during the
  Woodrow  Wilson  administration.   Although  the  last four
  years of that administration saw more antiblack race  riots
  than any other time in our history, Wilson had agents focus
  on  gathering  intelligence  on  African  Americans, not on
  white Americans who were violating blacks' civil rights."
 
  ** Says Woodrow Wilson:  "We  want  one class of persons to
  have a liberal education, and  we  want  another  class  of
  persons,  a  very  much  larger class of necessity in every
  society, to forgo the privilege  of a liberal education and
  fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
 
  ** Under Wilson, the  United  States  intervened  in  Latin
  America more often than at any other time in our history.
 
  **   "The  filmmaker  David  W.  Griffith  quoted  Wilson's
  two-volume history of the  United States, now notorious for
  its  racist  view  of  Reconstruction,  in   his   infamous
  masterpiece "The Clansman," a paean to the Ku Klux Klan for
  its role in putting down "black-dominated" Republican state
  governments  during  Reconstruction.   Griffith  based  the
  movie on a book by Wilson's former classmate, Thomas Dixon,
  whose  obsession  with  race  was  "unrivaled  until  *Mein
  Kampf*."   At a private White House showing, Wilson saw the
  movie, now  retitled  "Birth  of  a  Nation,"  and returned
  Griffith's compliment:  'It is like  writing  history  with
  lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true.'"
 
  ** "Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone
  whose  opinions  differed from his own.  But textbooks take
  pains to  insulate  him  from  wrongdoing.  'Congress,' not
  Wilson, is credited with having passed the Espionage Act of
  June 1917 and the  Sedition  Act  of  the  following  year,
  probably the most serious attacks on the civil liberties of
  Americans  since the short-lived Alien and Sedition Acts of
  1798."
 
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

