Ray Tour d’horizons

28 min, plus 90 in Q&A
By Ray McGovern, August 11, 2021
https://youtu.be/K_KXBZYWcws

Prepared remarks, with slides, focus on Julian Assange, the MICIMATT, “William Casey’s Dream” cum in-person Exhibits for the “Academia-Think-Tank” part of the MICIMATT; Aquinas on courage, the “virtue of anger”, and the pitfall of “unreasoned patience”; plus wisdom from Ben Ferencz, Cesar Chavez, Albrecht Haushofer, and Noah. Slides from prepared remarks below.


1 — Julian Assange is a human being:
What come to mind are the desperate words of Linda, Willy Loman’s wife in “Death of a Salesman”: 
“He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”


2 — Julian’s partner and their sons Gabriel and Max are also human beings. And a terrible thing is happening to Julian.


3 — The MICIMATT (think Mickey Mouse; easy to remember; easier to forget)


4 — Ex-CIA Director William Casey’s Dream. His successors — like his fellow Fordham alumnus John Brennan — openly revel at having helped bring that dream to reality. Ex-CIA Director John Brennan is — get this — “Distinguished Fellow for Global Security” at Fordham University Law School.


5 — An email from then-LA Times “journalist” Ken Dilanian shows how he gave the CIA the opportunity to “push back” on the contents of his articles IN DRAFT. He is now with NBC News.


6 — At Fordham Law School, Dilanian appears in this photo with his mentor Brennan, putting visual flesh on the “…Academia-Think-Tank” part of the MICIMATT.  (And, yes, on torture, the president of Fordham is quoted correctly, by a shocked student who was protesting the invitation of torture-tainted Brennan to give the commencement address in 2012. The student, who was graduating with highest honors, had been schooled in the now-“quaint and obsolete” moral-theology designation of torture as an “intrinsic evil” — ALWAYS evil, like rape and slavery.)

It is not as though the Jesuits had not been warned by one of their own prophets.  In To Dwell in Peace, published 34 years ago, Daniel Berrigan, SJ, wrote of “the fall of a great enterprise,” the Jesuit university. He recorded his “hunch” that the university would end up “among those structures whose moral decline and political servitude signalize a larger falling away of the culture itself.”
Berrigan lamented that “highly placed” churchmen [violated] “the Christian tradition of nonviolence, as well as the secular boast of disinterested pursuit of truth. These are reduced to bombast, hauled out for formal occasions, believed by no one, practiced by no one.”  (See:
https://raymcgovern.com/2017/09/19/ray-on-his-fellow-fordham-alumnus-john-brennan-and-just-how-distinguished-he-really-is/ )


7 — … and not only “the Jesuit university”; add Stanford, with the likes of McFaul.



8 — Julian’s father on Julian’s unrelenting sense of Justice.  And Aquinas: on “COURAGE” as the necessary underpinning for ALL virtue; the (unnamed) VIRTUE OF ANGER; and a prescient warning about “unreasoned patience”.


9 — Ben Ferencz: You just have to remember three things.


10 — The Noah Principle. And, “Without ACTION, nothing is going to happen”, Cesar Chavez. Finally, from Albrecht Haushofer: a too-late warning about being “too late”.