The other day I recommended Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism by Ronald Rychlak and Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa.
Now I want to recommend it warmly. (UK link HERE)
Rychlak has written about the smearing of Pius XII (e.g., Hitler, the War, and the Pope). He is a law professor who teaches about evidence. In this book he teamed up with the guy who ran intelligence for Romanian despot and Soviet thug Nicolae Ceaucescu. Pacepa fled to the West when he was asked to start killing people. He is an expert on the Soviet technique of framing, disinformation, creating false narratives and history. The book exposes the Communist background of seemingly-benign organizations and explains the treatment received by Cardinals Stepinak, Mindszenty and Wysznski and, of course, Pius XII.
As I write, I have finished the section on the way the KGB and Communist agents worked to make sure that the disinformation play to smear Pius XII, The Deputy, was staged on Broadway.
There was a fascinating description of the involvement of the once-Catholic and future-Communist publication Ramparts. I quote:
While it no longer claimed a Catholic identity, until at least 1969 Ramparts devoted special attention to the Catholic Church. According to former communist and onetime Ramparts editor Peter Collier, Hinckle encouraged articles on “the new spirit of dissent within the Catholic Church being.” Articles from this era opposed Church teaching on sexuality (especially Pope Paul VI’s teaching on birth control in Humanae Vitae), complained about abuse of authority by the Catholic hierarchy, and promoted leftist “liberation” theology. Ramparts religion editor James F. Colaianni identified priestly celibacy, authoritarianism, suppression of socially aware priests, lack of communication, absence of grievance procedures, and summary disciplinary actions as some of the greatest structural problems with the Church. (pp. 145-146 Kindle).
Sound familiar?
This book is a real eye-opener. The deep connections of one well-known name and publication and organization after another with the KGB and other Communist block intelligence agencies are amazing. Their methods of infiltration and distortion of truth are astonishing.
You can see how the Left has worked for decades, and how the catholic Left has been influenced.
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UK HERE
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“Disinformation” is also available as a 2 hour documentary dvd.
HERE
I have not finished the book yet…but it has certainly reinforced my skepticism of “news” reports and certain methods of “research”.
Just manufacture the evidence to “prove” your point. And now with the internet…sigh.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of “useful idiots” out there.
A liberal “Catholic” explained to me on Twitter a few days ago that you can be Catholic and pro-abortion (“pro-choice”) provided you aren’t a simpleton and can think for yourself.
I countered that Catholics aren’t allowed to make up their own moral codes. He explained that the Catholic moral code was corrupt because of the abuse scandal.
We live in different worlds.
It is hard not to think of Alinsky and Bernardin while reading that.
The Church has had an enemy from the beginning and that enemy has worked through various groups of people to form an anti-Church in the world: in the early centuries it was the Jews (I know we don’t talk that way since the Holocaust but in those first few hundred years the Jews were constantly trying to undermine the Church for obvious reasons), then it moved on to Islam which expanded into Protestantism (there are so many similarities between the Islamic and Protestant worldviews, from teetotaling to the way that Protestants treat the Scriptures like Muslims do the Qur’an, it is frightening) in the 16th century, then onto the movements of the so called Enlightenment and the Masonic movements (Masons really were trying to bring down the Church it is not some whacked out conspiracy theory; read Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus), and then in the 20th century it morphed into full blown Communism. But it has always been the same movement under many different guises and its master and its goal has always been the same: to weaken and/or destroy the Catholic Church and Catholic civilization.
In the year 2000, I began a study on mis, not dis, information in American history books. The ideologies crept into print at the high school and junior high level starting in the 1980s. Parents were not paying attention. I suggest seeing “America” for a quick view of what some of us have known for a long time…the manipulation of information in this country.
@Supertradmum The ’80s were a tricky decade. A lot of Americans felt good because of Reagan, because of the improving economy after the general economic disaster of the 1970s, and because the Soviet Union was beginning to show weakness and weren’t paying attention anymore. I was in elementary school and junior high back in those days and, looking back now at my own personal experience, it seems like that was the decade when the Left ideas that burst out in the ’60s started to become institutionalized in the public schools. The enemies of civilization staged a successful guerilla campaign in the education system and managed in relatively short order to create a generation of people who collectively can’t put two and two together, think abortion is a sacred right, that birth control somehow equals “women’s health,” and that men marrying men and women marrying women is cool.
Supertradmum says: American history books. The ideologies crept into print at the high school and junior high level starting in the 1980s. Parents were not paying attention. I suggest seeing “America”…
That’s right. D’Souza does a great job of exposing the twisted purpose of Howard Zinn’s book, which has been standard.
How does, or might, George Wiegel’s latest First Things contribution, “An Eminent Distortion of History”, fit into this picture?