Notes; Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia by Francis Wheen

 'The only thing Capote and I have in common was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim'

- Gore Vidal

p.13

'All my life I have been fighting in defence of the Left and of sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics'

- I.F. Stone, Oct.1964

p.15

'just let the students go on a tear for a couple of weeks, then move in and clobber them'

- Kissinger to Nixon

p.25

'many White House correspondents felt that he might go bats in front of them any time'

- John Osborne of the New Republic

p.29

'none of the Jews in Congress had supported his invasion of Cambodia'

so Nixon railed against them

p.30

Warner and Zanuck donated to Nixon in his early election campaigns in California

p.31

Enoch Powell's monetarist theories were at first not adapted by The TImes, The Economist and the Conservative Party

p.46

Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped the province's labour minister, and when PM Pierre Trudeau rebuffed the ransom demand, they strangled him

p.71

'Theatre is defined by its limits'

- Paul Berman, 'A Tale of Two Utopias: The political journey of the generation of 1968'

'Since paranoids always attribute their own characteristics to their enemis, Nixon and his accomplices..'

p.110

'As Garry Wills noted, many of Nixon's rat-fuckers were devout Christians' ; "This was an administration with an equal fondness for Billy Graham and for break-ins"

Nixon also complained about IRS investigation of his friend, Graham

p.111-2

'There has always been a war between the generations. It is the one war in which, as I think Cyril Connolly said, everyone changes sides'

- Tom Dribreg, British politician

p.131

Roe vs Wade was decided by the issue on women's right to privacy, not her right to choose.

NYT's premature verdict; on the decision;  'As with the division over Vietnam, the country will be healthier with that division ended'

p.135

'During the supposedly swinging Sixties the marriage rate in America actually rose; after 1972 it plummeted. Divorce rose.

'Interviewing returnees for his study Voices of the VIetnam POWs, Craig Howes, found that many regarded failure in Vietnam, social unrest and their own family upheaval as "related symptoms of a moral collapse represented by..woman." '

'Many, like Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver, trasmuted their  personal incompetence or misfortune into a universal malaise'

p.137

'Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every had appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one'

- Christopher Lach, 'The Culture of Narcissism(1979)'

In December 1973 the American Psychiatric Association striked homosexuality from the examples of mental illness.

..'but social control was just what some people wanted'. Examples; Rev. Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland, Anita Bryant..

Reagan was the 1st divorcee to become a President.

Ex cop Dan White killed Harvey Milk, fellow SF supervisor, and the mayor, George Moscone.

'Like Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Nixon, Macias of Equatorial Guinea(who killed 50,000 out of population of 300,000, including 18 of his Cabinet ministers) had a pathological mistrust of "intellectuals" '

p.144

Frederick Forsyth practically financed a coup in Africa.

'By the end of 1970s only 3 of the 34 independent African states- Gambia, Ivory Coast and Guinea-Bissau had yet to experience a coup or an attempted coup'

p.150

Seems like it was a favorite pastime of France in this area.

Tom Hayden, who later married Jane Fonda, once worshipped Kim Il Sung at a Berkeley commune.

Warhol taped all his conversations, and on Watergate;

'Everyone should be bugged all the time'

Mao on Watergate;

'What's wrong with having a tape recorder? Do rulers not have the right to rule?'

p.163-4

'Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected'

- Frank Church, Apr. 1976

Norman Mailer was spied by FBI since 1962 on Hoover's orders.

p.169

USA is said to be the only country that combines law enforcement and counter espionage in a single agency.

'During the long reign of Hoover the distinction between crime and political dissent was blurred to invisibility. He believed that both crime and Communism had the same source-overindulgent parents.'

p.171

Hoover had 200 files on Leftists. On the far Right, 2.

Notes; Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization by Immanuel Wallerstein

 'That the emergence of such ethnicity also played a politically divisive role for the working classes has been a political bonus for the employers' 

p.28

'They tried using political influence to create a new monopolistic advantage for themselves..thus monopolistic practice and competitive motivation have been a paired reality of historical capitalism'

p.33

'without the short term concern for the global impact of such behavior..' he questions Adam Smith's assumption of harmony as a result of capitalism

p.34

'This phenomenon of relocation has been part and parcel of historical capitalism from the outset'

p.35

'Each major technological change has been less the motor than the consequence of historical capitalism'

p.37

He argues Capitalism was the method of the elites to maintain the status quo, their social/economical hierarchy.

Thus, 'the trend towards egalitarianization  of reward had been drastically reversed. The upper strata were once again in firm control politically and ideologically'

p.42

He also argues that State power and capitalism came together

p.51-

'the states have regularly spent considerable energy in enforcing their regulation against recalcitrant groups, most particularly work-forces. Worker rebellion has usually brought forth a ready repressive response from the state machineries.

p.52

'redistribution has in fact been more widely used as a mechanism to polarize distribution than to make real income converge'

p.53

then discusses how the state rewards capital; official subsidies, bearing the cost of product development,

'such theft of public revenues as well as correlate corrupt private taxation procedures have been a major source of private accumulation of capital throughout historical capitalism'

'Finally, government have redistributed to the wealthy by utilizing the principle of the individualization of profit but the socialization of risk'

p.54

-

not convinced;

'the vast majority of the populations of the world are objectively and subjectively less well off materially than in previous historical systems, politically as well'

p.40

'it is only in the 20th century that a sign that the historical system of capitalism finally come into structural crisis'

p.43

'construction of state structures was itself one of the central institutional achievements of historical capitalism'

p.48

'All these state decisions were taken with direct reference to the economic implications for the accumulation of capital;

p.52

'taxation has been a steadily expanding phenomenon over the historical development of the capitalist world economy as a percentage of total value created or accumulated..power to tax was one of the most immediate ways in which the state directly assisted the process of accumulation of capital in favor of some groups rather than others'

p.53