I ordered a book today because I was listening to NPR on the way to Friedenau which is a very remote part of Berlin if you come from Mitte and Mitte is Berlin and all you see every day is Mitte with its Mittepeople in their Mitteclothes – I was on my way to take photos of my Range Rover which broke down more than a year ago and I have only now, with slight pressure from my brother-in-law, my wife and the people at the garage where the Range Rover is parked since August 2012, gotten around to auctioning it on Ebay (yes, the Ebay of Pierre Omidyar, a new name in the Pantheon of the Present): Where was I? On my way to Friedenau, in a DriveNow Mini, listening to NPR: The Brothers, that is the book they talked about, it is by the former New York Times Reporter Stephen Kinzer and explains that more or less everything you always knew but would never have acknowledged, dared to acknowledge, because there is nothing you feel is more stupid than Antiamericanism – that more or less everything is true: Kinzer tells the story of the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, and how they ran the foreign policy of the United States in the Fifties, John Foster as Secretary of State for Eisenhower and Allen as the CIA director, one overt, the other covert, both destructive on a biblical level, seas of blood, two sons of a Calvinist preacher who had to go to church three times on Sunday and make reports on that for the father, the rest of the week they only had to go once. The Dulles. They were the Cold War. They more or less created the menace of Communism, they created the mess, the fear, the wars of the Cold War era, they destroyed governments and countries and people – because these brothers could, and countries need enemies. Otherwise the people might start to criticize their own governments. So better hold them in fear. Make them duck and cover. Show the nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert on TV as if it was not the American military who did this test but already the Russians who would send their missiles in 30, 25, 20 minutes to Cleveland, Nashville, Walla Walla. All the folly of the 20th century is in this story of the brothers who had worked before as corporate lawyers, and when their former client, the United Fruit Company in Guatemala suddenly faced a government that was going to destroy their nefarious privileges, the brothers without really consulting anybody just as well decided to destroy this government. Some in Congo, same in Iran, they would have done away with Nasser if they could have and also with Nehru. As I said, this is all not new, I had heard it before and read it before, in University with all the left-wing bores and later, too, but I always tried to refuse it, did not want to accept that America did in fact act so recklessly, foolishly, stupidly. These brothers. Of course the Vietnam war, because Kennedy was stupid enough to have Dulles in his administration. The Bay of Pigs. All the Dulles. What would the world have been like without these brothers, the journalist asked the author. He did not dare to say outright ‘A better place’, because that would have been naive. But he described how the dynamics of mutual radicalization, fear and pressure had worked as the movements for reform or social change in countries around the world realized that their project would likely fail if done in a democratic framework – it would be much to easy for the CIA to move in and do their evil work. So they figured that they were better off creating a dictatorship first. Much more efficient. This is how history spun out of control. We are still reeling from it today. My car, by the way, won’t be on Ebay tonight. I have problems uploading the photos because my disk or whatever it is called seems to be full.