Ignoring the right-wing link to the narcotics trade | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Globe, November 17, 1984

 

Echoing the late, discredited Narcotics Bureau chief Henry Anslinger, conservatives on the trail of drug traffickers have been shouting Red. Oblivious to the narcotics trade that finances right-wing extremists – like the eight nabbed by the FBI earlier this month in a plot to assassinate the president of Honduras – the Republicans in their campaign platform asserted:

            “Communist dictators – Cuba, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and now the Sandinistas in Nicaragua – are international pushers, selling slow death to young Americans in an effort to undermine our free society.”

            In the 1960s, Anslinger’s bete noire was Communist China. When he retired, the Narcotics Bureau repudiated Anslinger with a report that China had wiped out the illicit production of opium (from which morphine and heroin are derived) by the mid-1950s. A bureau agent told Al McCoy, the author of “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,” that “Anslinger … always said the same thing – the [Communist Chinese] are flooding the world with dope to corrupt the youth of America. … There was no evidence for Anslinger’s accusations, but that never stopped him.”

            Today’s Republicans are certainly not getting their information from the Drug Enforcement Administration, or its director, Francis Mullen. In September, Mullen and other DEA officials told the New York Times there was no concrete evidence linking the Soviets to the drug trade, or Communist-run governments to more than a trickle in the narcotics flood.

            No, the Republicans seem to be quoting such conservative journalists as Michael Ledeen. In a Times article last spring, Ledeen asked: “Are [the Sandinistas] within their rights when they organize a vast drug and arms-smuggling network to finance their terrorists and guerrillas, flooding our country with narcotics?”

            Preoccupied with this perceived Communist conspiracy, journalists on the right seem unaware of the escapades of the right-wing terrorist/traffickers, like those who recently planned to overthrow the Honduran government with the help of 760 pounds of cocaine.

            Then there is the case of Eduardo Arocena, head of the Anti-Castro Cuban exile terrorist group “Omega 7.” On Nov. 9, Arocena was sentenced in New York City to life plus 35 years for a decade of bombing Cuban embassies and ordering the assassination of a Cuban diplomat. He has also been charged with arranging contract murders for drug dealers. Such experience must have qualified Arocena, as he claimed on the witness stand, to assist “intelligence” groups in Central America investigating Communist involvement in drugs coming out of Cuba.

            Stefano Delle Chiaie has also lived in a conservative blind spot. Known by the nickname “Il Caccola” (Shorty), Delle Chiaie is an intriguing right-wing terrorist because he masterminded the August 1980 bombing of the main railway station in Bologna, Italy.

            The Bologna bombing left 85 dead and 185 maimed. It drove Il Caccola and his neo-Nazi cohort, Jochen Fiebelkorn, to Bolivia. There the two joined the “Bridegrooms of Death,” a paramilitary death squad under the aegis of Gestapo war criminal Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyons,” formerly of US intelligence. The gang doubled as a goon squad for the Bolivian military dictators and as enforces for cocaine billionaire Roberto Suarez.

            In 1982 democracy returned to Bolivia. Barbie was extradited to France, and the authorities raided the Bridegroom headquarters. But Il Caccola, apparently tipped off, was out, and Fiebelkorn had turned himself in when a warrant for his arrest was issued in Bologna.

            Fiebelkorn did not surrender to the Italians, who sought him for the train station massacre. He went instead to West German authorities, who indicted him on narcotics charges. That led the tale to its most bizarre twist. On trial that spring in Hamburg, Fiebelkorn revealed that while a Bridegroom in Bolivia, he was a paid agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration – until 1981, when the DEA, told of the Bologna blast, farmed him out to West German intelligence.

            Unbeknown to the Republican Party platform committee, the narcotics business transpires in a netherworld habituated by extremists of all shades, financing nefarious activities with tiny cuts of an annual take in excess of $100 billion.

            Conservatives would have us believe the Reds alone are drugging us. To convince us, they must distort the truth.

 

 

Bizarre Theorist Lauded by Reagan | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Jewish Advocate, Oct 4, 1984

 

Media attention was drawn this week to an April, 1982 laudatory letter from President Ronald Reagan to Roger Pearson, a London born academician and editor whose 30-year career has been devoted to writings on Nordic and Aryan superiority and the “science” of selective breeding known as eugenics.

The Administration contends that it was unaware of Pearson’s theories when the President signed a letter thanking the 57-year-old extremist for “valuable service in bringing to a wide audience the work of leading [scholars?*] who are supportive of a free enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy and a strong national defense.”

For over two years Pearson has been soliciting new subscriptions to his publications – the Mankind Quarterly and Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies – with the help of the President’s written appreciation for Pearson’s “substantial contributions to promoting those ideals and principles we value.”

On Sept. 28, assistant presidential press secretary Anson Franklin, referring to the letter, told The Wall Street Journal: “The President has long held views opposing discrimination in any form, and he would never condone anything to the contrary. But that’s a general statement; I’m not addressing Dr. Pearson specifically.” The White House added that the letter was written after Reagan had received an issue of one of Pearson’s journals that contained none of his controversial racial theories.

Justin Finger, civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai Brith, told the Journal, “The White House ought to repudiate this bird.” Finger became aware of the letter this summer. He has protested to the White House but received no reply.

Robert Schuetzinger, who now works at the Pentagon, is reported to have written the letter for Mr. Reagan while on the White House staff. Schuetzinger was formerly affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has prepared research reports for the Reagan administration in a variety of governmental areas. He has also served on the editorial board of one of Pearson’s journals. In 1977, Pearson served on the editorial board of Policy Review, which is published by the Heritage Foundation. He was reportedly asked to resign when the foundation learned of his past.

Pearson was born in London but spent much of his youth in India. He served in the British Indian Army after the war and went on to a successful career in business. By the mid-1960’s he had become the chairman of the Pakistan Tea Association as well as the managing director of a Pakistani steel company. He then moved to the United States, changing careers to become an academician in the field of anthropology. He taught at a number of universities before becoming dean of academic affairs at Montana College in Butte.

As early as 1956 Pearson was the editor of a magazine on racial hierarchies known as Northern World. Though published in Calcutta it was cited here in the United States in the magazine Right, which wrote in its September 1957 issue:

“Every once in a while something truly unusual turns up and this month honors go to Northern World.”

According to Danger on the Right, a 1964 study by Arnold Foster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Right featured “blatant anti-Semitism” and served as a “clearing-house for news and information about anti-Semitic activities.”

The Wall Street Journal referred to an issue of Northern World in which Pearson promoted the use of artificial insemination as a means of preserving “pure healthy stock” and “breeding back the ‘ideal’ types.” Pearson told the Journal he is ashamed of nothing he has said or written.

Around 1958 Pearson helped found the “Northern League,” whose avowed purpose was to promote “the interests, friendship and solidarity of al Teutonic nations.” Among the League’s co-founders was Hans Günther, a pre-war Nazi philosopher whose anti-Semitic study, Rassenkinde des Deutschen Volkes, was revered by high-standing Nazi officials.

Günther’s readers included the chief Nazi party theoretician, Alfred Rosenberg, who became Hitler’s minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. A National Socialist before Hitler, Rosenberg was one of the select few who were tried and executed at Nuremburg. In 1941 he honored Günther with the Goethe prize and an invitation to the first conference on Research into the Jewish Question.

Besides Northern World, Pearson has edited and written for Western Destiny, a magazine published by the extreme rightwing Liberty Lobby, which is known for its anti-Semitic literature. Pearson’s books, including Race and Civilization (on Aryan racial history) and Eugenics and Race, were published by the same group.

In addition, Pearson has been a leader of the far right umbrella organization known as the World Anti-Communist League, which was founded in Seoul, South Korea in 1966. He chaired the 1978 WACL conference in Washington, D.C. Four years earlier, the British WACL delegation had resigned, citing among its reasons the growing penetration of the League by anti-Semitic organizations. They referred specifically to the Mexican branch of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (Spanish acronym CAL).

Earlier this year columnist Jack Anderson charged that CAL’s Mexico City office was coordinating death squads in a number of Latin American nations including El Salvador. This led to the Mexican group’s expulsion from WACL. Pearson had himself resigned following the earlier charges that he had encouraged membership in the WACL of anti-Semitic organizations.

The recently elected chairman of the WACL, former Major General John Singlaub (who had been relieved of his command in South Korea following his criticism of President Jimmy Carter) described Roger Pearson to The Wall Street Journal as an “embarrassment … not at all welcome in any activity” of the WACL.

Robert Schuetzinger, composer of the President’s letter to Pearson, told the Journal “there was absolutely no valid grounds to accuse [Pearson] of racism,” though he might have been “a little naïve” in his choice of company.