‘Knocking from Below’: My Latest ‘Hot Type’ Column in Byline
My weekly Hot Type column in Byline Supplement exposes how an abject failure of prosecuting treason and a history of pardoning traitors has led the US to this dire moment
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Today’s Hot Type column just dropped in Byline Supplement, and I leaned on RadPod’s recent guests Marci Shore — author of The Ukrainian Night — and Craig Unger, whose new book Den of Spies is vital to understanding how a history of pardoning traitors has led to us to this present moment.
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Below is an excerpt from today’s Hot Type:
Hot Type: The Knocking from Below
History shows us that this dark moment for America and the world could be about to get far worse, writes Byline Supplement columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda
In an interview with Dr Marci Shore for my podcast this week, we asked her about the parallels between Ukraine in 2014 and the US in this moment. The author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, said: “I’m completely terrified. I feel like in some ways the past eight years could be subtitled ‘Vindication of a Neurotic Catastrophist’. I did not want to be vindicated in this.”
She said there’s an aphorism in Polish that translates as:
“I found myself at the very bottom, but then I heard knocking from below.”
“I’ve noticed the Russians abbreviate this expression to just ‘knocking from below’ and everyone understands what you mean. You think it couldn’t get any worse and then it does.”
She said historians have an infinite regression problem, because at “any given moment in time, where we are is conditioned by what came before that.”
But as we look at the present moment in America, where a 250-year-old imperfect but ever improving democracy is about to be handed over to an organized crime ring, we have to start somewhere to figure out why it failed.
In a week where much has been made about President Joe Biden pardoning his son Hunter, an addict in recovery who endured the Russian war machine and political ratfucker Roger Stone’s boys’ attempt to destroy him to destroy the father, it has to be viewed in context of a timeline of epic fails.
When did the US become a lawless country for high-level criminals?
I originally thought it occurred when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, a criminal and traitor. Sure, Nixon was lots of things — he founded the Environmental Protection Agency, for example. But he also committed treason when — worried about his 1968 election — he sabotaged peace talks delaying the end of the Vietnam War.
As Den of Spies author Craig Unger told me: “The GOP has been engaged in treasonous assaults on democracy for more than 50 years.”
“Nixon secretly deputized GOP operative Anna Chennault to intervene on his behalf and talk directly to the powers that be in South Vietnam to make sure they would not participate in the Paris Peace Talks,” Unger told Byline Supplement. “Sure enough, South Vietnam withdrew from the peace talks, Nixon won, and the war continued for six more years, resulting in another twenty thousand unnecessary American deaths, not to mention millions of Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese casualties. But it remained a secret until too late. The Dems didn’t fight back.”
And when Nixon ran for reelection in 1972, Unger said he “was petrified that Lyndon Johnson would release documents and tapes regarding the Chennault Affair, so he put together a group of burglars known as The Plumbers to break in and steal the documents from various offices, including the Watergate complex. Even though (Washington Post reporters) Woodward and Bernstein reported on it through the summer of ’72, the Democrats didn’t fight back, Nixon was reelected in a landslide, and was only forced out of office when GOP senators convinced him to resign.”
And then his former Vice President Ford, who had assumed the presidency, pardoned him.
But here, again, is that regression problem.
While Nixon’s pardoning ushered in an era of overt criminalization in the highest levels of power in the US, we have to go back four decades before Nixon’s pardon to show the failure to prosecute traitors behind what became known as the Business Plot.
The Business Plot, also known as the Wall Street Putsch, was a 1933 attempt to overthrow the government of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as a dictator. Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath to a House Committee on Un-American Activities, that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with him as leader and stage a coup d’etat to overthrow Roosevelt.
For their efforts in an attempted overthrow of the US government, zero people were prosecuted — a greenlight for American fascists to keep spreading their seeds of hate.
I then draw on my first report from the book Under Cover, which shows how German American Bund leader Fritz Kuhn was stripped of its citizenship, incarcerated, and deported, and as I type these words, I think, why not do same to the clear and present enemy of the United States Elon Musk?
As my report continues, I am reminded of geopolitical analyst Dr. Michael MacKay’s words: “America is really bad at dealing with actual treason.”
I also return to Unger’s Den of Spies to delineate the high-level prosecutions that did not occur during the Iran-Contra scandal, and the way Americans surrendered in 2000 after the Brooks Brothers riot, and then I return to Ukraine, always to Ukraine.
I write:
In 2014, the people revolted in the Revolution of Dignity, and Yanukovych had to flee his compound for Moscow, leaving behind what Shore describes in The Ukrainian Night as a mansion that embodied “tyranny, ostentation, absurdity.”
Yanukovych was convicted of treason.
“History never tells you what will happen,” Shore said. “History tells you what can happen. You have a sense of the possibilities. We have a natural tendency to normalize the abnormal. We have a natural human tendency to keep going as if everything is okay, until it’s not. What we do learn from history is that people keep going through their daily routine as if everything were okay until basically they’re in the gas chambers, like much longer than you would ever think.”
Forgive me if I am sad today. I see Georgians fighting bravely in the streets against Russification. I see Romania nullifying the first-round of its presidential elections due to Russian interference. I see Poland’s crash rearmament.
I do not care that Joe Biden pardoned his son.
I do care that we pardoned treason, over and over again, and that millions are going through their day as if everything were okay.
The above is just an excerpt from my Hot Type column. As always, I ask those who can afford to support a small global team of investigative reporters to please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement.
I also understand that if you are not able to do so at this moment, the good chaps at Byline allow me to send the column to Bette members upon request, as I noted above. Just zip a request to bettedangerous/gmail. New members will also find they are invited to unlock one report at the Byline site.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Your writing is important for presenting historical facts about our own country others try to bury. Thank you
Thank you for highlighting how the lack of accountability for the domestic and foreign enemies in and outside the U.S. has got We the People and our elected and non-elected officials exactly where we are. And that's despite all recent presidents continually insisting they were the only and best persons to save our county before, during and after they SWORE their sacred oaths of office: https://www.usa.gov/inauguration.
All of their failures are due to either outright treason or ongoing criminal backgrounds in Republicans' cases, or else in Democrats' cases, the horrendous sins of ongoing appeasement that often leads to as much suffering and as many deaths as direct crimes.
We as a Democratic Party must finally "Get mad, and get even" ASAP with the Republican Party and the criminals it serves who are together destroying our society and country and who have made it increasingly harder to overcome them each and every election due to past capitulation. It never gets easier to overcome increasing corruption over time, and Democrats must take the appropriate steps now with any other true patriots in our nation who properly love the United States of America and all its people and our allies who also value democracy and a livable planet. We must ostracize and hold accountable any who continue to join and enable the selfish, homicidal and genocidal whims of sociopathic authoritarians.