I recently did an interview with Kevin Barrett. You can check it out here: http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/archive/Truth-Jihad-32k-053009.mp3 We talked about torture, ponerology, and Nazis, among other things!
Interview with Kevin Barrett on Ponerology
- Thread starter Approaching Infinity
- Start date
Ady_H101
Jedi
That was an excellent interview! the meat and bones of it was very informative, and served up the ideas of psychopaths it a very palatable way. The adverts, including one by Jack Blood who i thought had died out a long long time ago ( the irony here is really quite serious considering the subject matter ) was quite off putting for those that are informed with the information available right here on this forum, but on the whole i really enjoyed that. It was extemely well put together and for once the host was open minded and even put in his own, well informed and educated,views. well done on this one!!!!
GRiM
The Living Force
Approaching Infinity said:
I really enjoyed listing to it, you are one of the best interviewee i'we heard! You let Kevin speak, listen to what he says, add and comment about it. Very good "flow" though the whole piece! I hope we hear lots and lots more from you! Superb work! (gave me inspiration to finish my project asap!, still working on that 10min movie about psychopathy)
OzRich
Jedi
Harrison mentioned G. M. Gilbert's book "The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany".
It costs almost $1000 on the amazon http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Dictatorship-Examination-Leaders-Germany/dp/0313219753.
Looks like the truth doesn't come cheap (of course !).
Does anyone know of source of cheaper copy ?
It costs almost $1000 on the amazon http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Dictatorship-Examination-Leaders-Germany/dp/0313219753.
Looks like the truth doesn't come cheap (of course !).
Does anyone know of source of cheaper copy ?
ozrich said:
You may want to try a library, preferably one in a network of libraries that has access to hard to find books.
Smallwood
Jedi Master
Here is the transcription for this interview. I might edit it out later for better paragraphs/readability, but just now, I think I'll it be. Took a little bit longer than it really needed to take, but it's ready.
Kevin Barret: "Alright, welcome back to the second hour of Truth-Jihad radio, right here in AmericanFreedomRadio.com ... Harrison Koehli of Red Pill Press, publisher of Political Ponerology. Harrison in the vanguard of this movement studying this science of psychopaths in power. I think that is probably the hottest new psychological science out there, atleast on the internet and mainstream will be catching up. It's an honour and pleasure to have you here Harrison, how are you doing?"
Harrison Koehli: "Oh great! It's good to be back. I've been researching this topic since the book came out, we published it in 2006 and like you said in the first part of the show, it is a pretty difficult book to get through, so when I read it I could understand and see that it could explain a lot of what was going on in the world today and so I kind of made it my goal to research it as much as possible and get as good a grip on it as possible from doing all kinds of other research and that's what I've been doing for the last couple of years."
KB: "Well good for you! I think in retrospect, you ought to be seen as being on the edge of a really important movement to understand something that we all need to understand. You know, Harrison, one of the reasons that so many people really can't come to grips with issues like 9/11 and this torture scandal is that they really can't imagine that fellow human beings could be so evil. Uh, how can people be so evil?"
HK: "Well, you mentioned something in the first hour about this idea or this rumour that people in the White House were watching these torture videos for fun. And really if you think about it, it isn't such an "out there" idea. If you think about all the truecrime-books out there about sadists who do enjoy this kind of thing, not only torturing people but video taping it and watching it. These are the kind of people, that you read about in these books and on the news, are kind of people who would do this in front of a child's mother, just to not only devastate the child but the mother as well. They just have no conscience, they don't care about people and the sadistic ones enjoy this kind of thing.
And so when you look at it, there isn't really any question that it happens in life. And even when we look at other governments it's obvious that it happens. If you look at the anti-Communist propaganda, a lot of it was based on something close to the truth. Because the Communist and the Nazi systems were atrocious, they were psychopathic. If you look at Stalin's (???), Beria, according to the latest and conservative even biographies of him, he personally tortured people in his office. Well, Lobaczewski in the book (The Political Ponerology), he makes the point that it seems that Beria was Stalin's psychopath, he was the one that kind of manipulated behind the scenes. And if you read Stalin's daughter's Svetlana Alliluyeva's book, you can see this..."
KB: "Right... yes... she's actually a neighbour of mine here in Spring Green area of Wisconsin. We'll be back in a few minutes. This is Kevin Barrett talking with Harrison Koehli of Red Pill Press. The science of psychopaths in power called Political Ponerology, an important science these days! Stick around... "
KB: "Right, welcome back. This is TruthJihad radio, right here in AmericanFreedomRadio.com. I'm Kevin Barrett of TruthJihad.com. We're talking about the Political Ponerology. It is the title of a book by Andrej Lobaczewski, published 2006 by Red Pill Press and I've got Harrison Koehli on the line. He's of Red Pill Press and he's been studying this issue of political ponerology, the science of psychopaths in power, the relationships between them, for a few years now. And I guess this is one of the most important theoretical topics out there, because it's got mass of pragmatic and practical implications, and Harrison, why don't you pick up where we left off and tell us what have you been learning about this topic during these past few years?"
HK: "Alright. I was talking about the kind of disconnect that people have of not being able to believe this sort of things and the fact that it doesn't make sense since these things happen all the time. I think where the disconnect really is that they have a hard time believing that these kind of people attain positions of power, and if you look at the situations in other countries with totalitarian governments it becomes pretty obvious that yes they do. But if you look at the system like ours, do psychopaths rise to the top. Well, in looking at the literature, there isn't a whole lot on this topic in the actual psychological literature. After WW2 there were a bunch of psychologists and psychiatrists who talked about this, these were mainly the guys who were analyzing the Nazis who were on trial at the Nuremberg, among them Gustav Gilbert, Leon Goldensohn, David Kelly (?), and they, or most of them, Gilbert in particular, made the observations that psychopaths made a large percent, a significant portion of the top Nazi positions. The most notorious being Hermann Göering who Gilbert had the chance to interview and meet with him on a daily basis for over a year before Göering committed suicide a day before he was scheduled to be hanged. Now, in the years since then there hasn't been a lot that's been done. What we have seen in the last few years has been a book called "Snakes in suits" by Robert Hare and Paul Babiak. This book is about psychopaths in corporations and business, and I think it is a really good book, it's really important for understanding the links, because the corporate environment and the Wall Street environment are very similar to the political environment; the two overlap. If we look at the recent example like Bernie Madoff, I've read numerous articles on the internet with professionals and experts in the field of psychopathy, who speculate that Bernie Madoff perhaps is a psychopath. They don't come out and diagnose him officially, but they can see the correlations. I was actually at a conference that happens every two years, a conference for the "Society of Scientific Study of Psychopathy", and at that conference several speakers made the same point that Bernie Madoff does appear to be a psychopath. Now if anyone is familiar with the story of..."
(crosstalk)
KB: "Harrison, let me just interrupt for a second here... in "Snakes in suits" Robert Hare says that psychopaths never last very long in power because they screw things up so badly. So his paradigm that when somebody rises rapidly in the business community, suddenly everybody thinks "Wow, this guy is so charismatic, he's really hot" and then this person just screws everything up, doesn't do any of the detail work, takes everybody for a ride and then blows up and gets caught, which is pretty much what happened with Madoff. But he suggest that the power elite is probably not full of psychopaths because the psychopaths are so incompetent, that is they are unable to sustain their performance, and yet that's at odds with the view of ponerologists like yourself."
HK: "Yeah, and that's one of the problems that I've been looking at for a past couple of years. What I have been able to find is... if you look at the actual case studies, that's where you need to go because even in "Snakes in suits", Babiak who is the first guy to really look at the issue said that before he did his analysis, before he starts seeing these things, the general consensus among the experts was that you wouldn't find psychopaths at all in corporations for exactly that reason, that they are just too incompetent, they wouldn't manage to get past the screening process, because they are impulsive, they are rude, they are bullying, all these things. But what they found was the exact opposite: that these individuals pass with flying colours because they were so charismatic. And if you look at the case studies like I said of other governments you'll see that these kind of people do manage somehow to keep their mask on for significant period of time and it seems to have something to do with, just as there are variations within normal populations, there are variations within psychopaths. So you get the less intelligent psychopaths and more intelligent, you get the more impulsive and the less impulsive, and the more sadistic and the less sadistic. So you have this very small percentage of even psychopaths who are not only extremely intelligent, extremely sadistic but also have the self-control to be able to plan their crimes better than anyone else. You find the same kind of dynamic in common criticisms of conspiracy-theories, like 9/11 for example, that if there was a conspiracy it would have been revealed by now because all conspiracies get revealed. It is an illogical argument because it presupposes that all conspiracies that have happened have been exposed by this point..."
KB: "It's a tautological..."
HK: "Exactly."
KB: "It's a tautological argument, that is, it says that all conspiracies are exposed because all the ones that we KNOW about have been exposed, well that's by definition, that's the ones we know about (laugh)."
HK: "Exactly (laughs), and that's the same thing with psychopaths. We only know about the ones that are caught and those are the ones that become case studies. If you look at Bernie Madoff, he was a succesful businessman, for what, fifty years... something like that? Umm... so what about all that time? So you might be able to make the argument that eventually most of these people get caught, but that's something that really has to be dealt with in an empirical manner and not just off the top of your head verbalisticly."
KB: "Well you know, that is really interesting connection Harrison, between the so called conspiracy-theories and the idea that psychopaths are able to succesfully get into power and stay in power, uh, because there are cases similar to people like Madoff, who are psychopathic perhaps and stay in power for a long time then flame out years later, like it takes decades before they are caught, but likewise with things like Operation Northwoods, this plan where top U.S. Military brass, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to setup bombs in American cities killing civilians, sink American ships on a high seas, kill more civilians, stage a fake airliner shootdown, a bit like something what may have happened in 9/11, in order to create the illusion of a non-existent Cuban attack, to justify an invasion of Cuba. Uh, so we know that the entire top-level of U.S. Military hierarchy was ready to murder hundreds of Americans to start a war with Cuba in 1962, and yet nobody knows this until about 2001. So there again the people who say that there couldn't be any conspiracies because they can't be kept secret, well you say that was kept secret for nearly 40 years and then of course their response, if they are falling for this fallacy is that "well, we finally found about it didn't we?" It's maddening to try to argue with these people. The easily discovered psychopaths are those who are unsuccesful and more succesful ones are discovered much more slowly."
HK: "Exactly, and so what we have for study are the unsuccesful ones, which says something. And if you go back to the example of Beria, or we could use Göering and Hitler, because looking at the case studies it looks like Göering and Martin Bormann were the most psychopathic. Now Gilbert, one of the psychiatrist that analyzed these people, he wrote the book called "The Psychology of Dictatorship", published in 1950. Unfortunately it's out of print, so you can't find it unless you go to an used bookstore or find it used on-line. But one of the things he points out that makes sense and accounts partially for the kind of argument that the people make against the idea, is that even in this top-clique of top Nazis psychopaths were still outnumbered. He makes a point that perhaps Göering was the most psychopathic of the bunch but Hitler and Streicher, Himmler and all these others were more paranoid- or schizoid-personalities. And that it's this combination of these different types and kinds of individuals that really makes the network, of the political, you could call it the "new bourgeoisie", as Lobaczewski called it.
Umm... so it's not just psychopaths and that can partially account for the idea that maybe psychopaths wouldn't be so great in these positions, because where they do excell is manipulating from behind the scenes and this is where "Snakes in suits" is really important because Babiak can here get into the techniques and the exact methods of manipulation that psychopaths use in a corporate environment, and what they do is upon entering the business, they immediately suss out who the important people are and who the unimportant people are. Who can help some, who can't help some. And what they'll do is they foster these relationships with the people who are on the upper echelons of these corporations and get along really well with them, those are the patrons and then the people who can't do anything for them, they'll just ignore. Or they can be pawns if they are useful. So psychopath maybe friendly with someone he uses as a pawn, someone he can use just as a pawn in his ascent to the top of the corporation. What he'll do he'll use their work, he'll have them make excuses for them and he'll also use them in what Babiak calls... umm... I can't remember the term he uses but a psychopath will basicly create conflicts within the environment; he'll set people against eachother and then set it up such a way that they are the ones that benefit from those conflicts. And when you expand that into geopolitical environment, you can see that this is exactly what a false-flag operation is. It is setting up these rivalries, setting up these conflicts that benefit a hidden group. So we have Americans fighting Muslims and it's this manufactured conflict that only benefits the psychopaths, because if either side of the actual fight was to know the whole story then they wouldn't want to do it and they'd want to find out who is responsible. And that's the whole 9/11 movement, we've got people who are seeing this and that's what it really comes down to, 9/11 is just a typical psychopathic maneuver and you find this in all kinds of truecrime-books, the same kind of thing, but people aren't really comfortable applying it to the political level. Again, going back to the truecrime-literature, you read about families of psychopaths who will upon learning about who and what, let's say their father really is, can't believe it and are in a complete denial. And if you play that to the American system and public, a lot of people are in denial, because it is like a family, it is like finding out that their father is a serial killer. For some people it can be so life-shattering that they won't even go there, and unfortunately that's a big block, and it is what makes it so unbelievable. And like you said, hopefully, for people that read Ponerology, who read the books on psychopathy like "Snakes in suits", it kind of creates the framework where these things are a bit more understandable and not so unbelievable."
KB: "And that gives us a chance to defend ourselves against it. You know I see patterns, Harrison, in American politics, where the really bad stuff, the Big Lie, the Big Crime, gets covered up by people just turning away from it, whereas smaller crimes get prosecuted and acknowledged and written into the historical record. Just a couple of examples, Watergate of course, the break in to the Democratic headquarters, I mean that's what people think about when they think about Watergate, that it is just a break in to try to get a political tinders (?). It's really pretty minor compared to other stuff that's going on, murders of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and so on, attempted military coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Pearl Harbor deception, Operation Northwoods, the Liberty deception, in which Johnson apparently conspired with Israelis to murder hundreds of American sea-men on an unarmed ship, and on, and on and on... there are these really huge things! Of course, 9/11 and anthrax and so many things going on since, these really big crimes we can't face! They are too evil. Instead, someone caught with his pants down or Nixon with some burglars in office, that we can deal with. Maybe when people read Ponerology, they'll be able to stretch their minds enough to be able to deal with these larger crimes, which really need to be acknowledged if they are going to be prosecuted and corrected."
HK: "(About the big crimes). And on the topic of torture. The whole torture scandal is another typical psychopathic maneuver and straight out of totalitarian handbook. The idea of creating this outside enemy. First of all as read of "1984", Orlov could see that the government was the one setting up the resistance bombings... and it's... I just find it somewhat annoying that the people that cite Orwell, can't see this happening in the real life..."
(laughs)
KB: "I agree."
HK: "So we've got this fake enemy. And how you create a fake enemy? You need actual people. Well, you do exactly what the Communists did or what the Nazis did. You get a whole bunch of people, you round them up and set (?) them up, and probably they are completely innocent of the crimes you are going to charge them with. What you do is torture them, you get them to admit to what you want them to admit to, and then you stage a public show trial where they reveal that they are what government needs them to be.
And this serves a bunch of purposes, not only does the torture fulfill the aggressive urges and desires of the psychopaths doing the torturing, it serves as an intimidation factor for the rest of the population. This is what the Communists did in all the Eastern block countries. People were afraid and the government knew it. The secret police would torture people and people knew about it, even if it wasn't talked about in the news or even in public conversations. This was really private stuff. People knew and they were terrified. And this is one of the purposes of this whole torture scandal, it shows: "Well this is what we do to you if you are a terrorist", and who is a terrorist? Well, that definition is expanding more and more every day, so that people who merely dissent, who don't agree with these policies can and will be labeled terrorists. And this is basicly saying: "This is what we are gonna do with you."
KB: "And yeah, it's a lesson to the herd, stay in line. Well, some members of the human herd aren't really willing to put up with it forever and I'm certainly one of them and I hope you are too. We'll be back in a bit and talking with Harrison Koehli of the Red Pill Press. Ponerology! The science of psychopaths in power... "
KB: "Alright and welcome back, you are listening to TruthJihad radio, right here on AmericanFreedomRadio.com. -...- people like William Pepper are going to be coming on this show in about a week or so. William Pepper's the man who convinced the jury that Martin Luther King Junior didn't get shot by James L. Ray. Ray was innocent, he was a patsy, set up by these psychopaths who did it. Who are these psychopaths? Well high-level army officers had a backup team of U.S. Army snipers on a nearby rooftop, and the shooting was apparently done by the top sharpshooter in the Memphis Police Department. And the whole thing was coordinated through the military, the CIA and the organized crime. Who are these people that do this sort of thing? That's what we are talking about here with Harrison Koehli of the Red Pill Press. Harrison is specialist in Political Ponerology, the science of evil for political purposes, which is applied psychology or psychopathy of psychopaths in power, a hot new topic, I wrote about it in a very popular essay called "The twilight of the psychopaths", which I hope to turn into a book. I will be picking Harrison's brain since I expand that book. Harrison, in the work I've read on psychopaths, there's often this sense that you get from authors like Martha Stout, who's written a couple of good books on the topic, that these psychopaths are kind of shallow or empty inside in a certain way that they can put up a good imitation of just about anything but what they are imitating just isn't there, she says that they... you can't really imagine a psychopath actually understanding great poetry, or even "ok" poetry (laughs). Uh, is that something that you've encountered in your work, this notion that they are kind of empty people."
HK: "Yeah, absolutely, and that idea goes back to the first real great work on psychopathy, called "Mask of Sanity" by Hervey Cleckley. And the idea is that psychopaths lack something. Normal people, growing up, they have this emotional content, Lobaczewski called it an "instinctive substratum". We have these instinctive reactions to things that happen in our environment. These are emotional reactions. Growing up we learn empathy, we learn to feel another's pain. And these things just become totally natural, so that things that seem to us self-evident really aren't to a psychopath and that's again where the confusion comes back to the picture here, because psychopaths are born without any of these higher emotions, they may feel what some of the experts call "proto-emotions". Now this can be just simple anger or frustration or just the adrenaline rush of being faced with a police officer, being shot at or something like that. You hear stories like that in a book by Robert Hare called "Without a conscience", about the criminal type. But psychopaths are lacking this. They don't have any comprehension of, or have any idea of what it means to be human, liek you said they wouldn't be able to appreciate poetry or art or anything with any emotional content. Now, the emotional content, like I said, makes us human. Psychopaths lack that, so for a parent to see that their child is a monster is a tough thing. Most parents wouldn't be willing to go that far. And if you read a book that Cleckley recommends, called the Incredible Charlie Carewe, a novel where the main character is a psychopath. From an early age Charlie Carewe realizes that he's different and Cleckley recommends it as a probably best portrayal of a psychopath in fiction. And Charlie growing up can see that he is really not quite the same and what he does is that he tries to figure out the correct responses to certain situations. So, he gets in trouble, the first response is to pretend that he is crying, he is sorry and that he feels really bad. And so from an early age psychopaths learn these outward cues and the words that we use when at an emotional situation. But the thing is that they are completely acting, they have no awareness of the emotional content behind the words, behind the action, so they may cry, they maybe really good at it. They may express joy or happiness of friendship. But these are really just manipulations. They don't feel any of these emotions and they use these reactions to manipulate us, because that's the way that the psychopaths manipulate us. They manipulate using our emotions, and again 9/11 is the perfect example, because easiest way to manipulate a person, like Goering says, is by using their tendency towards revenge, our anger, hatred. You tell a person that they are being attacked and a person thinking the attack is real is naturally wanting to attack back, and that is just a simple manipulation of an emotional response. And you can get those kind of manipulations out of any emotion, you can manipulate towards something that the person wants, you manipulate them to do something because they want to be rewarded for it, you can manipulate them out of fear, out of anger, out of revenge, out of disgust, by turning outsiders or enemies to things which are below human, then the people become almost as bad as psychopaths, almost become psychopaths in effect. Into kind of people that would do the work at concentration camps, or in the military. They may not be psychopaths, but they have been conditioned and put into environment where they will act psychopathically and that's another problem we have to deal with, the tendency to..."
KB: "You know in Abu Ghraib, these Abu Ghraib torture photos we were talking about. Some of these people are ordinary American kids that got set up to do this by the higher ranking psychopaths, most of them in the
CIA, it appears."
HK:"Uh-uh... yeah, absolutely."
KB: " Yeah, you know, speaking of fictional portrayals of manipulative psychopaths, I think I recently re-read MacBeth, not MacBeth I'm sorry, whatshisname, the moor, heh, wasn't that recently."
(laughs)
KB: "...you know what I'm talking about, the Shakespeare play, the Othello! The Othello, yeah... and in the Othello the bad guy, Iago strikes to me as kind of an ultimate manipulative psychopath, he inflicts MacBeth into thinking that his wife has been unfaithful and plays on him in a really painful way. Actually a kind of a grueling play to experience, but I think the people down through the ages have noticed that there are other people out there like them, often in the halls of power. Micky Yago's (?) a kind of classical portrayal of that. Um... but getting back to the torture scandal, and this is an another situation where we can ask, will people turn away from this or will they face up to it? Will we get a kind of public investigation or commission to publicize this and go after people responsible or will it get swept under the rug because people don't just want to face it."
HK: "Uh-uh... yeah, it's hard to say. It could go either way. And if you look at the criminals involved, chances are you'll never get a confession out of them. It was same way with the Nazis. Trying to get them to admit what they did is next to impossible. And so, unfortunately the people aren't going to get the satisfaction of seeing their leaders fess up to what they have been doing. Now, people may be charged if it ever gets to that point, I'm skeptical that it ever will. I just don't see it very optimistically."
KB: "You know the possibility of foreign war-crimes prosecutions. You know, has happened with Pinochet's. Currently there is a case in Spain against Bush for war-crimes. In fact William Pepper will be on the radio with me in a couple of weeks, who has been for a few weeks working on the case with the Spanish court that is going after Bush. I don't know Harrison... I think there is a chance, one way or another that this is going to happen before too long or there will be prosecutions, there will be enough that these guys aren't going to be retiring comfortably. On the other hand, you will have to worry about the possibility that they could always try to pull out bigger manipulations to cover up the past crimes. At what point do you think they will be able to pull another 9/11-style thing, and is that something that you see as a realistic possibility, in not too distant future?"
HK:"Well I don't know. I think there is definitely a possibility, but there are certain things that I don't know if they were planning on or what, because if you imagine that they would have done the same thing 60 years ago, they would have had easier time of doing it. If you look at the example of the Reichstag fire, it's been what, 75 years? Atleast close to 70 years since it's happened and still only recently has there been anything that people are calling an irrefutable proof that it was a Nazi operation, and not the work of a lone deranged Communist. And I think that if there would have been something like the Internet in the 30s when this happened, you might have had a movement for it like there is today for 9/11 truth. But you know, it's hard to say because once the next big thing happens, you are gonna have thousands, tens of thousands of people scouring the Internet looking for every contradiction and every lie, and they are going to see a lot of them. And that is what has happened now, with the alternative news on the Internet. So, it'll be hard to get away with, but again the thing with psychopaths is that they don't really have that kind of "inner brake", when it comes to these sorts of things. Like Bernie Madoff, they'll go to the very end having no clue that they are the ones that are gonna pay. Lobaczewski described it as that a germ that invades the body has no idea that it is going to die with the body that it kills. And so, if there is another huge attack like 9/11, I think it just might be enough to be the straw that breaks the camel's back."
KB: "Well, you'd hope that the non-psychopaths in the positions of power, and there clearly are some in military-, in the so called "intelligence"- and in the high-level government communities, must realize that these things like 9/11, as spectacular and succesful as they are in certain respects, are really insane and dangerous paths for a nation or an empire to go down. And I would hope that some of the same people, the top-military officers that supposedly met after 9/11 to discuss the fact that it was an inside job and what to do about it, we are hearing more and more about that now from Wayne Madsen as well. That these kind of people would be able to solidify their position, to protect these institutions that they work in from psychopaths. I mean that's what I would have. Not so much that they would tell the truth and expose their psychopathic colleagues, right know, but rather that they are laying down the law and saying: "Ok, you've gotten this far, now don't do it again."
HK: "Ok, I think one of the things that can be done and that Lobaczewski recommends in the book, is that even if these crimes go unpunished, even if we don't get to the bottom of everything that they have been doing, we can atleast prevent any further crimes of this sort by introducing some kind of screening process for all positions of political leadership. They've started to do this in the business environment, again, Babiak has been working on this B-scan, or Business-scan for companies, corporations to use to screen out possibly psychopathic individuals before hiring. This should be applied to the political environment."
KB: "Yeah, unfortunately I'm afraid that some of these bureaucracies work in exactly opposite way, they screen out the non-psychopaths. Now, Wayne Madsen got busted out in the National Security Agency, after going after some pedophile sex-criminals in the Intelligence community. Hopefully we'll turn that around at some point (laughs). This is Kevin Barrett talking with Harrison Koehli of the Red Pill Press, of the psychopaths in power."
KB: " Hey, welcome back. The final segment of tonights Truth Jihad radio, here in AmericanFreedomRadio.com. I'm Kevin Barrett of TruthJihad.com and we are talking about the unspeakable Truth, that psychopaths... well, I don't think they rule our world, but that they have slightly disproportionate influence, and right now in the top-levels of U.S. government for the past 10 years or so it's just been beyond obvious, that the psychopaths are in command and out of control, hence the mass-murders in Iraq, the atrocity of 9/11 when they blew up the WTC with the advanced U.S. nanotech thermite and took us to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, against countries that have never threatened us, never done us any harm, hence some energy resources. So we are in the midst of a psychopathic period of history, and it is always easier to see this in other countries and other places But when it happens in your own country, when it's your own leaders, there is a kind of a disconnect there that is hard to break through and to see the truth. My guest Harrison Koehli of RedPillPress.com is one of the leading experts that atleast I know of on this subject. Now Harrison, you were talking about screening the potential psychopaths and the idea that corporations can do some kind of a test, to screen prospective psychopaths and tell us a little bit more about that and how you would go about making that test spread around places like political candidates and military-intelligence applicants and places like that."
HK:"Well, I think the most details about that are above my level of expertise. I'd like to talk to some of the experts involved in doing this in the business environment. I haven't yet, but I know a little bit about it how it works. First of all, they have in criminal environment something called "the psychopathy checklist", and so you have to be trained to use this and those that are, use it along with the interview to assess the level to which you have traits in common with a prototypical psychopath. Now, in the Business-scan it is a similar thing where they basicly test the personality traits. As far as I know, it can be as simple as a common self-report personality quizz that you get when applying to a certain position. And so for anyone applying for a certain position to have one of these little personality quizzes done on them, well it is a little bit more complicated than a simple personality quizz but anyway, it can give an idea of the extent to which you have these psychopathic traits. Just at the level of a test it might not be able to tell for certain whether you are psychopathic or not, but if they have a high enough score on a test, you can be pretty sure that you don't want them working on your company.
Now this can be just as easily applied to the political environment I think. The problem is of course to start it being used. And this is where you run up into problems, just as in Poland and these Eastern-block countries, psychopaths seem to have some level of self-awareness of who and what they are. In the Communist countries they put an embargo on psychopathy-research. Officially, you were not allowed to publish or research psychopathy, because that is the Achille's heel of the system. Now, in the North America, we have a bit of an advantage because the psychopathy reserach has been going on so strong for the past 60 years that you can't yet just completely eliminate it, though we do have these kind of precedents of research that we can use, but you can expect a whole lot of hollering and filibustering for these things to be applied to the politics. You might even get people saying that you need psychopaths in power because they get the job done, they do what other people can't, they have power doing what normal people lack doing certain things... Unfortunately that kind of thinking might be an additional stall to getting this kind of legislation pass and I think it would have to be at legislative level."
KB:"Now, that raises the question: what do you do with these psychopaths when you screen them off? Do you send into some island, prison them just for being psychopaths or...? (laughs) Can they be put into some use in any way besides as professional killers."
HK: "Now that is where it gets controversial. In the legal community there is some debate over this issue. It's not really commonly known, but the insanity plea doesn't get applied to a whole bunch of cases, it isn't as highly used as the movies portray. But when the criminal says that they were insane when committing a crime, that means that they are going to be put away indefinitely into an institution. If this was to apply to psychopaths and there is some debate that it should apply, then we would have the dangerous psychopaths put away indefinitely. And because as it seems there is no real way or evidence to show that they can be rehabilitated or cured, then it would be for the rest of their lives.
Now if you look at the business-world, just because you score high on a B-scan, doesn't mean that you are going to prison or something. It just means that you won't get the job. The very least that this device can do in the political environment is just ensure that these people do not get into positions of power in politics. Now, we would have to be apply this to all special interests groups, all the lobbies... because in politics it is all these other people that have a lot of say as well and not just the politicians."
KB: "Alright, well we'd pretty much amputate a big chunk of the top levle of power in politics and in all kinds of areas if we did this but I think we should do it (laughs). Well alright, thank you Harrison Koehli, it's been a great as always, I wish we had brought you on earlier here tonight because we could talk about this for hours. Keep up the good work and give us your website once again."
HK: "Okay, you can go to RedPillPress.com or Ponerology.com. It's P-o-n-e-r-o-l-o-g-y-.com."
KB: "One of the most important words that you may have not heard much about (laughs). Well alright Harrison, thanks it's been great."
HK: "Thanks Kevin."
KB: "Take care. Harrison Koehli of the RedPillPress.com, Ponerology.com, I'm Kevin Barrett of TruthJihad.com, that's it for tonight's show, until next week and stay tuned to an American Freedom Radio."
Kevin Barret: "Alright, welcome back to the second hour of Truth-Jihad radio, right here in AmericanFreedomRadio.com ... Harrison Koehli of Red Pill Press, publisher of Political Ponerology. Harrison in the vanguard of this movement studying this science of psychopaths in power. I think that is probably the hottest new psychological science out there, atleast on the internet and mainstream will be catching up. It's an honour and pleasure to have you here Harrison, how are you doing?"
Harrison Koehli: "Oh great! It's good to be back. I've been researching this topic since the book came out, we published it in 2006 and like you said in the first part of the show, it is a pretty difficult book to get through, so when I read it I could understand and see that it could explain a lot of what was going on in the world today and so I kind of made it my goal to research it as much as possible and get as good a grip on it as possible from doing all kinds of other research and that's what I've been doing for the last couple of years."
KB: "Well good for you! I think in retrospect, you ought to be seen as being on the edge of a really important movement to understand something that we all need to understand. You know, Harrison, one of the reasons that so many people really can't come to grips with issues like 9/11 and this torture scandal is that they really can't imagine that fellow human beings could be so evil. Uh, how can people be so evil?"
HK: "Well, you mentioned something in the first hour about this idea or this rumour that people in the White House were watching these torture videos for fun. And really if you think about it, it isn't such an "out there" idea. If you think about all the truecrime-books out there about sadists who do enjoy this kind of thing, not only torturing people but video taping it and watching it. These are the kind of people, that you read about in these books and on the news, are kind of people who would do this in front of a child's mother, just to not only devastate the child but the mother as well. They just have no conscience, they don't care about people and the sadistic ones enjoy this kind of thing.
And so when you look at it, there isn't really any question that it happens in life. And even when we look at other governments it's obvious that it happens. If you look at the anti-Communist propaganda, a lot of it was based on something close to the truth. Because the Communist and the Nazi systems were atrocious, they were psychopathic. If you look at Stalin's (???), Beria, according to the latest and conservative even biographies of him, he personally tortured people in his office. Well, Lobaczewski in the book (The Political Ponerology), he makes the point that it seems that Beria was Stalin's psychopath, he was the one that kind of manipulated behind the scenes. And if you read Stalin's daughter's Svetlana Alliluyeva's book, you can see this..."
KB: "Right... yes... she's actually a neighbour of mine here in Spring Green area of Wisconsin. We'll be back in a few minutes. This is Kevin Barrett talking with Harrison Koehli of Red Pill Press. The science of psychopaths in power called Political Ponerology, an important science these days! Stick around... "
KB: "Right, welcome back. This is TruthJihad radio, right here in AmericanFreedomRadio.com. I'm Kevin Barrett of TruthJihad.com. We're talking about the Political Ponerology. It is the title of a book by Andrej Lobaczewski, published 2006 by Red Pill Press and I've got Harrison Koehli on the line. He's of Red Pill Press and he's been studying this issue of political ponerology, the science of psychopaths in power, the relationships between them, for a few years now. And I guess this is one of the most important theoretical topics out there, because it's got mass of pragmatic and practical implications, and Harrison, why don't you pick up where we left off and tell us what have you been learning about this topic during these past few years?"
HK: "Alright. I was talking about the kind of disconnect that people have of not being able to believe this sort of things and the fact that it doesn't make sense since these things happen all the time. I think where the disconnect really is that they have a hard time believing that these kind of people attain positions of power, and if you look at the situations in other countries with totalitarian governments it becomes pretty obvious that yes they do. But if you look at the system like ours, do psychopaths rise to the top. Well, in looking at the literature, there isn't a whole lot on this topic in the actual psychological literature. After WW2 there were a bunch of psychologists and psychiatrists who talked about this, these were mainly the guys who were analyzing the Nazis who were on trial at the Nuremberg, among them Gustav Gilbert, Leon Goldensohn, David Kelly (?), and they, or most of them, Gilbert in particular, made the observations that psychopaths made a large percent, a significant portion of the top Nazi positions. The most notorious being Hermann Göering who Gilbert had the chance to interview and meet with him on a daily basis for over a year before Göering committed suicide a day before he was scheduled to be hanged. Now, in the years since then there hasn't been a lot that's been done. What we have seen in the last few years has been a book called "Snakes in suits" by Robert Hare and Paul Babiak. This book is about psychopaths in corporations and business, and I think it is a really good book, it's really important for understanding the links, because the corporate environment and the Wall Street environment are very similar to the political environment; the two overlap. If we look at the recent example like Bernie Madoff, I've read numerous articles on the internet with professionals and experts in the field of psychopathy, who speculate that Bernie Madoff perhaps is a psychopath. They don't come out and diagnose him officially, but they can see the correlations. I was actually at a conference that happens every two years, a conference for the "Society of Scientific Study of Psychopathy", and at that conference several speakers made the same point that Bernie Madoff does appear to be a psychopath. Now if anyone is familiar with the story of..."
(crosstalk)
KB: "Harrison, let me just interrupt for a second here... in "Snakes in suits" Robert Hare says that psychopaths never last very long in power because they screw things up so badly. So his paradigm that when somebody rises rapidly in the business community, suddenly everybody thinks "Wow, this guy is so charismatic, he's really hot" and then this person just screws everything up, doesn't do any of the detail work, takes everybody for a ride and then blows up and gets caught, which is pretty much what happened with Madoff. But he suggest that the power elite is probably not full of psychopaths because the psychopaths are so incompetent, that is they are unable to sustain their performance, and yet that's at odds with the view of ponerologists like yourself."
HK: "Yeah, and that's one of the problems that I've been looking at for a past couple of years. What I have been able to find is... if you look at the actual case studies, that's where you need to go because even in "Snakes in suits", Babiak who is the first guy to really look at the issue said that before he did his analysis, before he starts seeing these things, the general consensus among the experts was that you wouldn't find psychopaths at all in corporations for exactly that reason, that they are just too incompetent, they wouldn't manage to get past the screening process, because they are impulsive, they are rude, they are bullying, all these things. But what they found was the exact opposite: that these individuals pass with flying colours because they were so charismatic. And if you look at the case studies like I said of other governments you'll see that these kind of people do manage somehow to keep their mask on for significant period of time and it seems to have something to do with, just as there are variations within normal populations, there are variations within psychopaths. So you get the less intelligent psychopaths and more intelligent, you get the more impulsive and the less impulsive, and the more sadistic and the less sadistic. So you have this very small percentage of even psychopaths who are not only extremely intelligent, extremely sadistic but also have the self-control to be able to plan their crimes better than anyone else. You find the same kind of dynamic in common criticisms of conspiracy-theories, like 9/11 for example, that if there was a conspiracy it would have been revealed by now because all conspiracies get revealed. It is an illogical argument because it presupposes that all conspiracies that have happened have been exposed by this point..."
KB: "It's a tautological..."
HK: "Exactly."
KB: "It's a tautological argument, that is, it says that all conspiracies are exposed because all the ones that we KNOW about have been exposed, well that's by definition, that's the ones we know about (laugh)."
HK: "Exactly (laughs), and that's the same thing with psychopaths. We only know about the ones that are caught and those are the ones that become case studies. If you look at Bernie Madoff, he was a succesful businessman, for what, fifty years... something like that? Umm... so what about all that time? So you might be able to make the argument that eventually most of these people get caught, but that's something that really has to be dealt with in an empirical manner and not just off the top of your head verbalisticly."
KB: "Well you know, that is really interesting connection Harrison, between the so called conspiracy-theories and the idea that psychopaths are able to succesfully get into power and stay in power, uh, because there are cases similar to people like Madoff, who are psychopathic perhaps and stay in power for a long time then flame out years later, like it takes decades before they are caught, but likewise with things like Operation Northwoods, this plan where top U.S. Military brass, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to setup bombs in American cities killing civilians, sink American ships on a high seas, kill more civilians, stage a fake airliner shootdown, a bit like something what may have happened in 9/11, in order to create the illusion of a non-existent Cuban attack, to justify an invasion of Cuba. Uh, so we know that the entire top-level of U.S. Military hierarchy was ready to murder hundreds of Americans to start a war with Cuba in 1962, and yet nobody knows this until about 2001. So there again the people who say that there couldn't be any conspiracies because they can't be kept secret, well you say that was kept secret for nearly 40 years and then of course their response, if they are falling for this fallacy is that "well, we finally found about it didn't we?" It's maddening to try to argue with these people. The easily discovered psychopaths are those who are unsuccesful and more succesful ones are discovered much more slowly."
HK: "Exactly, and so what we have for study are the unsuccesful ones, which says something. And if you go back to the example of Beria, or we could use Göering and Hitler, because looking at the case studies it looks like Göering and Martin Bormann were the most psychopathic. Now Gilbert, one of the psychiatrist that analyzed these people, he wrote the book called "The Psychology of Dictatorship", published in 1950. Unfortunately it's out of print, so you can't find it unless you go to an used bookstore or find it used on-line. But one of the things he points out that makes sense and accounts partially for the kind of argument that the people make against the idea, is that even in this top-clique of top Nazis psychopaths were still outnumbered. He makes a point that perhaps Göering was the most psychopathic of the bunch but Hitler and Streicher, Himmler and all these others were more paranoid- or schizoid-personalities. And that it's this combination of these different types and kinds of individuals that really makes the network, of the political, you could call it the "new bourgeoisie", as Lobaczewski called it.
Umm... so it's not just psychopaths and that can partially account for the idea that maybe psychopaths wouldn't be so great in these positions, because where they do excell is manipulating from behind the scenes and this is where "Snakes in suits" is really important because Babiak can here get into the techniques and the exact methods of manipulation that psychopaths use in a corporate environment, and what they do is upon entering the business, they immediately suss out who the important people are and who the unimportant people are. Who can help some, who can't help some. And what they'll do is they foster these relationships with the people who are on the upper echelons of these corporations and get along really well with them, those are the patrons and then the people who can't do anything for them, they'll just ignore. Or they can be pawns if they are useful. So psychopath maybe friendly with someone he uses as a pawn, someone he can use just as a pawn in his ascent to the top of the corporation. What he'll do he'll use their work, he'll have them make excuses for them and he'll also use them in what Babiak calls... umm... I can't remember the term he uses but a psychopath will basicly create conflicts within the environment; he'll set people against eachother and then set it up such a way that they are the ones that benefit from those conflicts. And when you expand that into geopolitical environment, you can see that this is exactly what a false-flag operation is. It is setting up these rivalries, setting up these conflicts that benefit a hidden group. So we have Americans fighting Muslims and it's this manufactured conflict that only benefits the psychopaths, because if either side of the actual fight was to know the whole story then they wouldn't want to do it and they'd want to find out who is responsible. And that's the whole 9/11 movement, we've got people who are seeing this and that's what it really comes down to, 9/11 is just a typical psychopathic maneuver and you find this in all kinds of truecrime-books, the same kind of thing, but people aren't really comfortable applying it to the political level. Again, going back to the truecrime-literature, you read about families of psychopaths who will upon learning about who and what, let's say their father really is, can't believe it and are in a complete denial. And if you play that to the American system and public, a lot of people are in denial, because it is like a family, it is like finding out that their father is a serial killer. For some people it can be so life-shattering that they won't even go there, and unfortunately that's a big block, and it is what makes it so unbelievable. And like you said, hopefully, for people that read Ponerology, who read the books on psychopathy like "Snakes in suits", it kind of creates the framework where these things are a bit more understandable and not so unbelievable."
KB: "And that gives us a chance to defend ourselves against it. You know I see patterns, Harrison, in American politics, where the really bad stuff, the Big Lie, the Big Crime, gets covered up by people just turning away from it, whereas smaller crimes get prosecuted and acknowledged and written into the historical record. Just a couple of examples, Watergate of course, the break in to the Democratic headquarters, I mean that's what people think about when they think about Watergate, that it is just a break in to try to get a political tinders (?). It's really pretty minor compared to other stuff that's going on, murders of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and so on, attempted military coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Pearl Harbor deception, Operation Northwoods, the Liberty deception, in which Johnson apparently conspired with Israelis to murder hundreds of American sea-men on an unarmed ship, and on, and on and on... there are these really huge things! Of course, 9/11 and anthrax and so many things going on since, these really big crimes we can't face! They are too evil. Instead, someone caught with his pants down or Nixon with some burglars in office, that we can deal with. Maybe when people read Ponerology, they'll be able to stretch their minds enough to be able to deal with these larger crimes, which really need to be acknowledged if they are going to be prosecuted and corrected."
HK: "(About the big crimes). And on the topic of torture. The whole torture scandal is another typical psychopathic maneuver and straight out of totalitarian handbook. The idea of creating this outside enemy. First of all as read of "1984", Orlov could see that the government was the one setting up the resistance bombings... and it's... I just find it somewhat annoying that the people that cite Orwell, can't see this happening in the real life..."
(laughs)
KB: "I agree."
HK: "So we've got this fake enemy. And how you create a fake enemy? You need actual people. Well, you do exactly what the Communists did or what the Nazis did. You get a whole bunch of people, you round them up and set (?) them up, and probably they are completely innocent of the crimes you are going to charge them with. What you do is torture them, you get them to admit to what you want them to admit to, and then you stage a public show trial where they reveal that they are what government needs them to be.
And this serves a bunch of purposes, not only does the torture fulfill the aggressive urges and desires of the psychopaths doing the torturing, it serves as an intimidation factor for the rest of the population. This is what the Communists did in all the Eastern block countries. People were afraid and the government knew it. The secret police would torture people and people knew about it, even if it wasn't talked about in the news or even in public conversations. This was really private stuff. People knew and they were terrified. And this is one of the purposes of this whole torture scandal, it shows: "Well this is what we do to you if you are a terrorist", and who is a terrorist? Well, that definition is expanding more and more every day, so that people who merely dissent, who don't agree with these policies can and will be labeled terrorists. And this is basicly saying: "This is what we are gonna do with you."
KB: "And yeah, it's a lesson to the herd, stay in line. Well, some members of the human herd aren't really willing to put up with it forever and I'm certainly one of them and I hope you are too. We'll be back in a bit and talking with Harrison Koehli of the Red Pill Press. Ponerology! The science of psychopaths in power... "
KB: "Alright and welcome back, you are listening to TruthJihad radio, right here on AmericanFreedomRadio.com. -...- people like William Pepper are going to be coming on this show in about a week or so. William Pepper's the man who convinced the jury that Martin Luther King Junior didn't get shot by James L. Ray. Ray was innocent, he was a patsy, set up by these psychopaths who did it. Who are these psychopaths? Well high-level army officers had a backup team of U.S. Army snipers on a nearby rooftop, and the shooting was apparently done by the top sharpshooter in the Memphis Police Department. And the whole thing was coordinated through the military, the CIA and the organized crime. Who are these people that do this sort of thing? That's what we are talking about here with Harrison Koehli of the Red Pill Press. Harrison is specialist in Political Ponerology, the science of evil for political purposes, which is applied psychology or psychopathy of psychopaths in power, a hot new topic, I wrote about it in a very popular essay called "The twilight of the psychopaths", which I hope to turn into a book. I will be picking Harrison's brain since I expand that book. Harrison, in the work I've read on psychopaths, there's often this sense that you get from authors like Martha Stout, who's written a couple of good books on the topic, that these psychopaths are kind of shallow or empty inside in a certain way that they can put up a good imitation of just about anything but what they are imitating just isn't there, she says that they... you can't really imagine a psychopath actually understanding great poetry, or even "ok" poetry (laughs). Uh, is that something that you've encountered in your work, this notion that they are kind of empty people."
HK: "Yeah, absolutely, and that idea goes back to the first real great work on psychopathy, called "Mask of Sanity" by Hervey Cleckley. And the idea is that psychopaths lack something. Normal people, growing up, they have this emotional content, Lobaczewski called it an "instinctive substratum". We have these instinctive reactions to things that happen in our environment. These are emotional reactions. Growing up we learn empathy, we learn to feel another's pain. And these things just become totally natural, so that things that seem to us self-evident really aren't to a psychopath and that's again where the confusion comes back to the picture here, because psychopaths are born without any of these higher emotions, they may feel what some of the experts call "proto-emotions". Now this can be just simple anger or frustration or just the adrenaline rush of being faced with a police officer, being shot at or something like that. You hear stories like that in a book by Robert Hare called "Without a conscience", about the criminal type. But psychopaths are lacking this. They don't have any comprehension of, or have any idea of what it means to be human, liek you said they wouldn't be able to appreciate poetry or art or anything with any emotional content. Now, the emotional content, like I said, makes us human. Psychopaths lack that, so for a parent to see that their child is a monster is a tough thing. Most parents wouldn't be willing to go that far. And if you read a book that Cleckley recommends, called the Incredible Charlie Carewe, a novel where the main character is a psychopath. From an early age Charlie Carewe realizes that he's different and Cleckley recommends it as a probably best portrayal of a psychopath in fiction. And Charlie growing up can see that he is really not quite the same and what he does is that he tries to figure out the correct responses to certain situations. So, he gets in trouble, the first response is to pretend that he is crying, he is sorry and that he feels really bad. And so from an early age psychopaths learn these outward cues and the words that we use when at an emotional situation. But the thing is that they are completely acting, they have no awareness of the emotional content behind the words, behind the action, so they may cry, they maybe really good at it. They may express joy or happiness of friendship. But these are really just manipulations. They don't feel any of these emotions and they use these reactions to manipulate us, because that's the way that the psychopaths manipulate us. They manipulate using our emotions, and again 9/11 is the perfect example, because easiest way to manipulate a person, like Goering says, is by using their tendency towards revenge, our anger, hatred. You tell a person that they are being attacked and a person thinking the attack is real is naturally wanting to attack back, and that is just a simple manipulation of an emotional response. And you can get those kind of manipulations out of any emotion, you can manipulate towards something that the person wants, you manipulate them to do something because they want to be rewarded for it, you can manipulate them out of fear, out of anger, out of revenge, out of disgust, by turning outsiders or enemies to things which are below human, then the people become almost as bad as psychopaths, almost become psychopaths in effect. Into kind of people that would do the work at concentration camps, or in the military. They may not be psychopaths, but they have been conditioned and put into environment where they will act psychopathically and that's another problem we have to deal with, the tendency to..."
KB: "You know in Abu Ghraib, these Abu Ghraib torture photos we were talking about. Some of these people are ordinary American kids that got set up to do this by the higher ranking psychopaths, most of them in the
CIA, it appears."
HK:"Uh-uh... yeah, absolutely."
KB: " Yeah, you know, speaking of fictional portrayals of manipulative psychopaths, I think I recently re-read MacBeth, not MacBeth I'm sorry, whatshisname, the moor, heh, wasn't that recently."
(laughs)
KB: "...you know what I'm talking about, the Shakespeare play, the Othello! The Othello, yeah... and in the Othello the bad guy, Iago strikes to me as kind of an ultimate manipulative psychopath, he inflicts MacBeth into thinking that his wife has been unfaithful and plays on him in a really painful way. Actually a kind of a grueling play to experience, but I think the people down through the ages have noticed that there are other people out there like them, often in the halls of power. Micky Yago's (?) a kind of classical portrayal of that. Um... but getting back to the torture scandal, and this is an another situation where we can ask, will people turn away from this or will they face up to it? Will we get a kind of public investigation or commission to publicize this and go after people responsible or will it get swept under the rug because people don't just want to face it."
HK: "Uh-uh... yeah, it's hard to say. It could go either way. And if you look at the criminals involved, chances are you'll never get a confession out of them. It was same way with the Nazis. Trying to get them to admit what they did is next to impossible. And so, unfortunately the people aren't going to get the satisfaction of seeing their leaders fess up to what they have been doing. Now, people may be charged if it ever gets to that point, I'm skeptical that it ever will. I just don't see it very optimistically."
KB: "You know the possibility of foreign war-crimes prosecutions. You know, has happened with Pinochet's. Currently there is a case in Spain against Bush for war-crimes. In fact William Pepper will be on the radio with me in a couple of weeks, who has been for a few weeks working on the case with the Spanish court that is going after Bush. I don't know Harrison... I think there is a chance, one way or another that this is going to happen before too long or there will be prosecutions, there will be enough that these guys aren't going to be retiring comfortably. On the other hand, you will have to worry about the possibility that they could always try to pull out bigger manipulations to cover up the past crimes. At what point do you think they will be able to pull another 9/11-style thing, and is that something that you see as a realistic possibility, in not too distant future?"
HK:"Well I don't know. I think there is definitely a possibility, but there are certain things that I don't know if they were planning on or what, because if you imagine that they would have done the same thing 60 years ago, they would have had easier time of doing it. If you look at the example of the Reichstag fire, it's been what, 75 years? Atleast close to 70 years since it's happened and still only recently has there been anything that people are calling an irrefutable proof that it was a Nazi operation, and not the work of a lone deranged Communist. And I think that if there would have been something like the Internet in the 30s when this happened, you might have had a movement for it like there is today for 9/11 truth. But you know, it's hard to say because once the next big thing happens, you are gonna have thousands, tens of thousands of people scouring the Internet looking for every contradiction and every lie, and they are going to see a lot of them. And that is what has happened now, with the alternative news on the Internet. So, it'll be hard to get away with, but again the thing with psychopaths is that they don't really have that kind of "inner brake", when it comes to these sorts of things. Like Bernie Madoff, they'll go to the very end having no clue that they are the ones that are gonna pay. Lobaczewski described it as that a germ that invades the body has no idea that it is going to die with the body that it kills. And so, if there is another huge attack like 9/11, I think it just might be enough to be the straw that breaks the camel's back."
KB: "Well, you'd hope that the non-psychopaths in the positions of power, and there clearly are some in military-, in the so called "intelligence"- and in the high-level government communities, must realize that these things like 9/11, as spectacular and succesful as they are in certain respects, are really insane and dangerous paths for a nation or an empire to go down. And I would hope that some of the same people, the top-military officers that supposedly met after 9/11 to discuss the fact that it was an inside job and what to do about it, we are hearing more and more about that now from Wayne Madsen as well. That these kind of people would be able to solidify their position, to protect these institutions that they work in from psychopaths. I mean that's what I would have. Not so much that they would tell the truth and expose their psychopathic colleagues, right know, but rather that they are laying down the law and saying: "Ok, you've gotten this far, now don't do it again."
HK: "Ok, I think one of the things that can be done and that Lobaczewski recommends in the book, is that even if these crimes go unpunished, even if we don't get to the bottom of everything that they have been doing, we can atleast prevent any further crimes of this sort by introducing some kind of screening process for all positions of political leadership. They've started to do this in the business environment, again, Babiak has been working on this B-scan, or Business-scan for companies, corporations to use to screen out possibly psychopathic individuals before hiring. This should be applied to the political environment."
KB: "Yeah, unfortunately I'm afraid that some of these bureaucracies work in exactly opposite way, they screen out the non-psychopaths. Now, Wayne Madsen got busted out in the National Security Agency, after going after some pedophile sex-criminals in the Intelligence community. Hopefully we'll turn that around at some point (laughs). This is Kevin Barrett talking with Harrison Koehli of the Red Pill Press, of the psychopaths in power."
KB: " Hey, welcome back. The final segment of tonights Truth Jihad radio, here in AmericanFreedomRadio.com. I'm Kevin Barrett of TruthJihad.com and we are talking about the unspeakable Truth, that psychopaths... well, I don't think they rule our world, but that they have slightly disproportionate influence, and right now in the top-levels of U.S. government for the past 10 years or so it's just been beyond obvious, that the psychopaths are in command and out of control, hence the mass-murders in Iraq, the atrocity of 9/11 when they blew up the WTC with the advanced U.S. nanotech thermite and took us to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, against countries that have never threatened us, never done us any harm, hence some energy resources. So we are in the midst of a psychopathic period of history, and it is always easier to see this in other countries and other places But when it happens in your own country, when it's your own leaders, there is a kind of a disconnect there that is hard to break through and to see the truth. My guest Harrison Koehli of RedPillPress.com is one of the leading experts that atleast I know of on this subject. Now Harrison, you were talking about screening the potential psychopaths and the idea that corporations can do some kind of a test, to screen prospective psychopaths and tell us a little bit more about that and how you would go about making that test spread around places like political candidates and military-intelligence applicants and places like that."
HK:"Well, I think the most details about that are above my level of expertise. I'd like to talk to some of the experts involved in doing this in the business environment. I haven't yet, but I know a little bit about it how it works. First of all, they have in criminal environment something called "the psychopathy checklist", and so you have to be trained to use this and those that are, use it along with the interview to assess the level to which you have traits in common with a prototypical psychopath. Now, in the Business-scan it is a similar thing where they basicly test the personality traits. As far as I know, it can be as simple as a common self-report personality quizz that you get when applying to a certain position. And so for anyone applying for a certain position to have one of these little personality quizzes done on them, well it is a little bit more complicated than a simple personality quizz but anyway, it can give an idea of the extent to which you have these psychopathic traits. Just at the level of a test it might not be able to tell for certain whether you are psychopathic or not, but if they have a high enough score on a test, you can be pretty sure that you don't want them working on your company.
Now this can be just as easily applied to the political environment I think. The problem is of course to start it being used. And this is where you run up into problems, just as in Poland and these Eastern-block countries, psychopaths seem to have some level of self-awareness of who and what they are. In the Communist countries they put an embargo on psychopathy-research. Officially, you were not allowed to publish or research psychopathy, because that is the Achille's heel of the system. Now, in the North America, we have a bit of an advantage because the psychopathy reserach has been going on so strong for the past 60 years that you can't yet just completely eliminate it, though we do have these kind of precedents of research that we can use, but you can expect a whole lot of hollering and filibustering for these things to be applied to the politics. You might even get people saying that you need psychopaths in power because they get the job done, they do what other people can't, they have power doing what normal people lack doing certain things... Unfortunately that kind of thinking might be an additional stall to getting this kind of legislation pass and I think it would have to be at legislative level."
KB:"Now, that raises the question: what do you do with these psychopaths when you screen them off? Do you send into some island, prison them just for being psychopaths or...? (laughs) Can they be put into some use in any way besides as professional killers."
HK: "Now that is where it gets controversial. In the legal community there is some debate over this issue. It's not really commonly known, but the insanity plea doesn't get applied to a whole bunch of cases, it isn't as highly used as the movies portray. But when the criminal says that they were insane when committing a crime, that means that they are going to be put away indefinitely into an institution. If this was to apply to psychopaths and there is some debate that it should apply, then we would have the dangerous psychopaths put away indefinitely. And because as it seems there is no real way or evidence to show that they can be rehabilitated or cured, then it would be for the rest of their lives.
Now if you look at the business-world, just because you score high on a B-scan, doesn't mean that you are going to prison or something. It just means that you won't get the job. The very least that this device can do in the political environment is just ensure that these people do not get into positions of power in politics. Now, we would have to be apply this to all special interests groups, all the lobbies... because in politics it is all these other people that have a lot of say as well and not just the politicians."
KB: "Alright, well we'd pretty much amputate a big chunk of the top levle of power in politics and in all kinds of areas if we did this but I think we should do it (laughs). Well alright, thank you Harrison Koehli, it's been a great as always, I wish we had brought you on earlier here tonight because we could talk about this for hours. Keep up the good work and give us your website once again."
HK: "Okay, you can go to RedPillPress.com or Ponerology.com. It's P-o-n-e-r-o-l-o-g-y-.com."
KB: "One of the most important words that you may have not heard much about (laughs). Well alright Harrison, thanks it's been great."
HK: "Thanks Kevin."
KB: "Take care. Harrison Koehli of the RedPillPress.com, Ponerology.com, I'm Kevin Barrett of TruthJihad.com, that's it for tonight's show, until next week and stay tuned to an American Freedom Radio."
