Edward Curtin - Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

PRAISE FOR

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issuespolitical, philosophical, and personalthat should concern us all. Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

A powerful expos of the CIA and our secret state... Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.

OLIVER STONE, filmmaker, writer, and director

Grappling with the truth requires a very sensitive intelligence, the moral courage to explore forbidden territory, and learning of the sort thats now pass, and even actively discouraged, in higher education. Ed Curtin has those gifts, or virtues, in abundance, as these exquisite essays clearly demonstrate. With extraordinary erudition, mordant wit, and an all-too-rare commitment to the affirmation of humanity, he helps us see through the U.S. governments vast tapestry of lies, see over the hypnotic prison-walls of cyberspace, and see our way toward rediscovering not just the awful truths of our own history, but those far deeper truths, expressed in poetry and music, philosophy and art, that finally make our lives worth living.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER, Professor of Media Studies, NYU

Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woodsfrom inferno to paradiso. Walk with Ed and his friendsDaniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many othersthrough the darkest, mostfirefly-filled woods on this earth.

JAMES W. DOUGLASS, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

Ed Curtin is a subversive writer in the classic literary sense. Unlike other writers in his field, Curtin brings a liberating poetic sensibility to history and politics. Deeply personal and vast in scope, his work challenges the false assumptions upon which so many treasured beliefs are based. Curtin offers readers a chance to examine how they think about themselves, and thus a path to positive political and social change.

DOUGLAS VALENTINE, author, TDY and The CIA as Organized Crime

Ed Curtin invites us to go deep sea divingbeyond the shallows of U.S. political and spiritual life where most researchers and writers paddle, into the dark realms of intelligence operatives, paid killers, and institutions of deception. It is a disturbing journey but a necessary one, and he is a brilliant guide.

GRAEME MACQUEEN, author, The 2001 Anthrax Deception

The world is a terrible and terrifying place. There are few who possess both the artistry and political understanding to see and describe the depths of the deceptions practiced upon us. Ed Curtin is one of these few. His powerful and beautiful essays will give us reasons to look the truth in the eye, and to have hope.

EMANUEL E. GARCIA, author, Manhattan Stardust and Venetian Rogues

This is an amazingly good book. Curtin seeks to unearth the present eras massive fraudhe agrees with Harold Pinter that America has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal goodwhile Curtins book is also celebrating the beauty of life.

DAVID RAY GRIFFIN, author, The Christian Gospel for Americans

Edward Curtin is one of the few people on the planet today who sees the intersectionalism of his own experience, the broader culture, politics, and the world of intelligence operations. These essays, constructed over a broad swath of time that encompasses some of the most significant events in world history, give insights guaranteed to expand your mind.

LISA PEASE, author, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Edward Curtin

Clarity Press, Inc.

2020 Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-1-949762-26-6

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-949762-27-3

In-house editor: Diana G. Collier

Cover design: R. Jordan Santos

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: Except for purposes of review, this book may not be copied, or stored in any information retrieval system, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942666

Clarity Press, Inc.

2625 Piedmont Rd. NE, Ste. 56

Atlanta, GA 30324, USA

https://www.claritypress.com

To Jeanne, my wife, and to my father,
who gave me far more than his name.
Deep gratitude to both.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Jeanne for urging me to do this book, and for her editorial and computer skills along the way. I would have been lost without her. Thanks to friends, Gary Corseri, Emanuel Garcia, and Graeme MacQueen for their encouragement. And to a wonderful editor, Diana Collier, thank you. For those who took the time to read the book and comment publicly on its merits, I will always be grateful. Lastly, to the invisible and unnamed ones who have inspired me Bless you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

Theodore Roethke, In A Dark Time

INTRODUCTION

In putting together this selection of essays, I was reminded of what Albert Camus once wrote: A mans work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

While I do not claim that all these essays are art, they are my efforts to say in the most eloquent way I can what really has mattered to me in recent years, not just politically but personally, since they are entwined. Upon reflection, I see that what matters to me now is what mattered to me when I was young. Although the issues have changed in certain ways as they must, I have notunless, or because, my wanderings through life with all its changes have paradoxically meant, in Nietzsches words, that I have been becoming who I am.

This seems true to me, and the essaying of the words that follow are part of that becoming. Ortega y Gassett once said that whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself. I agree. While a book of essays is not a novel, if read in its entirety, it does tell a story that reveals the times and the man who tells them; it expresses two stories simultaneously. And each story, if told well, always has a double dimension, the old and the new. Every life and every event is disclosed in an historical context, now and then and all the time in between.

While hoping I am an original, I know that I have learned and borrowed from many others. My greater hope is that what I say here is said in a way no other could, that it bears my original stamp. That it is novel. For I am convinced that we cannot grasp the unique nature of our current era simply by repeating straightforward political analyses. That approach is necessary but not enough. For it leaves out the hidden heart of a world that seems to be spinning madly toward some kind of denouement. It omits all the little thoughts, secrets, fears, and desires of so many people who wish to speak but cant find the words to express their thoughts.

From a young age, I have been obsessed with truth, death, and freedom. As I recall, those words have been synonymous for God for many thinkers. So I suppose you could say that I have always been intoxicated with God or for God, or maybe God has been intoxicated with me. I dont know, nor do I care to: knowledge is overrated. I know what I feel. My concerns have been those of many writers throughout the agespoets, rebels, journalists, philosophers, passionate writers of every stripe, desperados for truth and a peaceful world of love and kindness. Those I have admired the most, believers or unbelieversit is often hard to tell the difference, nor does it matterwere those who dismissed categories, distinctions, or labels, but who wrote freely because for them to write freely was to live freely and not to be caged by anyones restrictions as to what they should be saying or how they were saying it. For them truth was their God, and through the weaving of words down a page they were always seeking to disclose what was hidden from common sight. They used language to open up cracks in the consensus reality that the great poet and writer Kenneth Rexroth called the social lie: Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.