Alex Constantine

Constantine's least readable book. If you have not read Virtual Government, Psychic Dictatorship USA, or the Covert War Against Rock, I beg you NOT to read this book & to start with any of those instead. His previous books were published by Feral House, whereas this is published by Trine Day. I have heard that Trine Day is a real headache to work with, that they do not employ experienced editors and that they generally provide very little support to their authors before/during/after publication. So maybe Constantine received very little direction/support in crafting a coherent thesis.

The publisher's blurb gives the impression that the book presents a coherent history of of fascist death squads/right-wing terrorism in the United States. It does not do that. Instead, it reads like a series of poorly sequenced blog posts. In fact, I suspect that Constantine just copied/pasted entries from his various blogs (e.g. The Constantine Report, Constantine's Blacklist, &c). There is nothing wrong with publishing an anthology of previously published work. But it should have been explicitly presented as such and should have been organized by subject matter instead of pretending that all of the short works fit together under the umbrella of fascist death squads because that it simply not the case.

As an example of sloppy editing, here is a passage repeated nearly verbatim 160 pages apart:

"To confirm that looting was afoot at Fannie Mae, one had to look no further than the audit committee where we found Fred Malek, Richard Nixon’s “Jew counter” – a select group of directors who failed miserably at spotting irregularities. These dancing partners were paid huge sums in inflated director salaries to look the other way. (In the past, Chicago’s Arthur Andersen LLP, formerly one of the “Big Five” accounting firms, performed the same invaluable service for corrupt corporations, but lost its license in 2002 when its collaborative role in investment fraud became obvious in the case of Enron.)" [e-book p. 24]

"For confirmation that a Ponzi scheme or corporate looting is afoot, one has to look no further than the audit committee – a select group of directors who fail miserably at spotting irregularities. These dancing partners are paid huge sums in inflated director salaries to look the other way. (In the past, Chicago’s Arthur Andersen LLP, formerly on of the “Big Five” accounting firms, performed this invaluable service, but in 2002 lost its license to practice when its collaborative role in investment fraud became obvious in the case of Enron.) [e-book p.184]

And just so we're clear--both times that Constantine goes off on this corporate looting tangent, he never explicates how the looted assets are funding terrorism or other illicit activities. I mean, I'm already sold on what I *think* is his premise (i.e. that the CIA puppeteers the collapse of financial institutions & other business entities in order to launder money). But as far as I can recall, he never explicitly makes this claim and he certainly does not provide any evidence for it. He provides lots of assorted factoids, but seems incapable of arranging them into an argument. As I read this book, I just jotted down the names of spooky players in order to look them up elsewhere because this text is too unreliable to use as source material.

A very serious error in the introduction put me in a hypercritical mood from the start, but I think my evaluation would have ended up the same anyway. The error in question: Constantine endorses the Zionist propaganda that Palestinian resistance fighters planned to poison the colonizers' well water as part of Operation Atlas during WWII. This fabrication was seeded relatively recently (1980s) in the book "The Hunt for the Red Prince," a sensationalist "non-fiction" thriller co-authored by a Zionist politician and a Zionist journalist. This absurd story has been thoroughly debunked by disinterested historians, though of course ghouls like Alan Dershowitz repeat it shamelessly. So, great company you're in there Constantine... Really astounding. Beyond astounding: infuriating. I mean, considering that it is an established fact that the Zionist entity used chemical and biological weapons during the Nakba of 1948 (see, e.g., Operation "Cast Thy Bread").… (mere)

The part of this book that was the most new to me was the section about Tupac Shakur. I recall clearly when he died but I thought little of it. He had seemed like a gangsta to me and gangstas sometimes get shot. I didn’t (and mostly still don’t) listen to rap and knew little about the man, to be honest, but the media portrayal of him painted a picture that substituted itself for real information about the man and his death. Constantine’s research into Shakur’s death revealed a completely different picture of Shakur for me, and pointed to very sound reasons why there might have been a conspiracy to kill him. That Shakur was the heir apparent to an activist family, one of whom escaped from prison and defected to Cuba, the way the shooting occurred, the seeming lack of police attempts to solve the murder, all make it seem as if there were some sort of conspiracy to kill Tupac and obfuscate the investigation. Read my entire review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/the-covert-war-against-rock-by-alex-constantine/… (mere)