1962 Key West Florida Beach – Hawk Guided Missile Defense During Cuban Missile Crisis
Having served in the US Navy, based for a time in Key West, FL, I am aware first hand how ridiculous it is that US national security is still threatened by this poverty stricken island of Communism. Even back in 1982 I was warned along with the rest of the crew that we were to keep quiet about our ship’s itinerary, not telling family or friends since possibly Castro might find out. I told our CO that our own “getting underway” procedures alerted Castro with a lot more accuracy since our radars were turned on 30 minutes prior to port departure only 90 miles from the Cuban coast. Each radar has an electronic “fingerprint” that identifies the vessel, since we used that all the time when we encountered Russian vessels at sea as well.
Jacob Hornberger, from Future of Freedom Foundation, gives us the low-down on Cuba and some possible reasons why the US military and Deep State might want to keep Cuba poor and on the “bad guy” list:
Of all the ludicrous aspects of the Cold War, among the most ridiculous was the notion that Cuba posed a threat to US “national security.” For some 30 years [since the fall of the USSR], the US deep state (i.e., the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA) maintained that Cuba was a communist “dagger” pointed at America’s neck and, therefore, was a grave threat to “national security.”
Again, whenever you hear the government use the “fear card”, you have to do your research instead of accepting it. Our government uses fear to keep us “safe” in our chains, and ignorant, so that we will not ask questions.
Did they mean that the Cuban army was about to invade Florida, conquer the state, move up the Eastern Seaboard, and end up forcibly taking over the reins of the federal government, thereby enabling it to control the IRS and HUD?
If so, that’s absolutely ridiculous. Cuba has always been an impoverished Third World country, one with a very small military force. Even if it could have scrounged up a few transport boats to get a few dozen troops to Miami, they would have been quickly smashed by well-armed private American citizens.
It is true that even my little ship, a 131 foot (40m) US Navy Hydrofoil, went quickly in and out of Cuban waters only to scramble a MIG-21 or MIG-23 our way. This is what a bully does to someone who has no real fighting chance.
Maybe they meant that Cuban leader Fidel Castro would export socialist ideas to the United States, where they would then infect the minds of the American people.
If so, that’s ridiculous because socialism was already taking over the minds of the American people, and long before Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. That’s what President Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security scheme was all about — bringing socialism to America. That was some 25 years before Castro came to power!
Let’s not forget, after all, that Social Security did not originate with James Madison or Patrick Henry. It originated among German socialists near the end of the 1800s and then came to the United States in the 1930s. That’s why the Social Security administration has a bust of Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany, prominently displayed on its website. Bismarck introduced Social Security to Germany. He got the idea from German socialists.
So it was NOT a physical threat to Florida or a socialist export threat to the US as a whole as this came into our culture by other means. It just has to be those “offensive” Cuban missiles that are pointed at America right?
What about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Castro invited the Soviet Union to install nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the United States? They were defensive in nature. The Pentagon and the CIA were pressuring President Kennedy to wage a war of aggression against Cuba, with the aim of installing another pro-US dictator into power, such as Fulgencio Batista, the brutal and corrupt Cuban dictator who preceded Castro. A prime example was Operation Northwoods, the false and fraudulent scheme that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously presented to Kennedy after the CIA’s Bay of Pigs disaster, with the aim of securing regime change in Cuba. (To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected it.)
To deter another US attack or to defend against such an attack, Castro sought assistance from the Soviets. If the Pentagon and the CIA had not been pressuring Kennedy to attack Cuba, Castro would never have invited the Soviets to install those missiles. This was confirmed by the fact that once Kennedy promised that he would not permit the deep state to attack Cuba again, the Soviets took their missiles home.
Oh, defensive, I see. Okay, so now what, what could possibly be of benefit by ensuring that the people of Cuba remain in poverty much like the North Korean people?
Today, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the US deep state steadfastly maintains that Cuba continues to pose a threat to US “national security.” That’s what the decades-old economic embargo that targets the Cuban populace with impoverishment and death is all about.
But the fact is that Cuba has never posed a threat to US “national security,” whatever definition one puts on that nebulous, meaningless term. The truth is that it has always been the US government that has posed a threat to Cuban “national security,” as manifested by such illegal and wrongful actions as the CIA invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the decades-long cruel and brutal economic embargo against the Cuban people, the false and fraudulent Operation Northwoods, state-sponsored assassinations attempts against Castro, and acts of terrorism and sabotage within Cuba.
At the end of the day, it is the Deep State (CIA, NSA, and Pentagon) that uses it primarily as a marketing tool to keep defense spending a top priority for the American tax slaves.
Adrift in a sea of feelings is where this country’s society is now. Principles do not matter, faith does not matter, it is most about what we can get for little or no effort or how can we feel safe both physically and emotionally.
A society like this should expect to be slaves, good compliant tax slaves on the government plantation. The elites love this.
In light of the approaching celebration of what was called Armistice Day, since WWII called Veterans Day, it is worth revisiting what some of the founders KNEW as a result of their own experiences:
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.- James Madison
From a 2005 post by Jacob Hornsberger, he rightly predicts what our future holds:
Imagine that the president issues the following grave announcement on national television during prime time: “Our nation has come under another terrorist attack. Our freedoms and our national security are at stake. I have issued orders to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to immediately take into custody some 1,000 American terrorists who have been identified by the FBI as having conspired to commit this dastardly attack or who have given aid and comfort to the enemy. I have also ordered the JCS to take all necessary steps to temporarily confiscate weapons in the areas where these terrorists are believed to be hiding. These weapons will be returned to the owners once the terrorist threat has subsided. I am calling on all Americans to support the troops in these endeavors, just as you are supporting them in their fight against terrorism in Iraq. We will survive. We will prevail. God bless America.”
Now ask yourself: How many of the troops would disobey the orders of the president given those circumstances, especially if panicked and terrified Americans and the mainstream press were endorsing his martial-law orders?
The answer: Almost none would disobey. They would not consider it their job to determine the constitutionality of the president’s orders. They would leave that for the courts to decide. Their professional allegiance and loyalty to their supreme commander in chief would trump all other considerations, including their oath to “support and defend the Constitution.”
Therefore, if the federal government is the primary threat to our freedom, then so are the troops: their unswerving loyalty to their commander in chief makes them the primary instrument by which the federal government is able to destroy or infringe the rights and freedoms of the citizenry.
Jacob also offers a solution, one that will never be taken seriously since our trust as a society is in government and not in the founding father’s Providence:
There is one — and only one — solution to this threat to our freedoms and well-being: for the American people to heed the warning of our Founding Fathers against standing armies before it is too late, and to do what should have been done at least 15 years ago: dismantle the U.S. military empire, close all overseas bases, and bring all the troops home, discharging them into the private sector, where they would effectively become “Citizen-soldiers” — well-trained citizens prepared to rally to the defense of our nation in the unlikely event of a foreign invasion of our country. And for the American people to heed the warning of President Eisenhower against the military-industrial complex, by shutting down the Pentagon’s enormous domestic military empire, closing domestic bases, and discharging those troops into the private sector.
How will our society ever have a faith that could help them have hope while being attacked by a foreign empire? More importantly, how did the founders and militias have such faith in the 1770s?
What remains to be seen is how of if the various parts of American society can once again trust God instead of government for a free future. I guess time will tell.
While Thomas Jefferson got so many things right, as a human, we all have our blind-spots. Maybe at times he was just hopeful that things would work out, that the pendulum would come back from the extremes and allow the people the natural rights and freedoms that their Creator had intended for them in the best of times.
A key point of reflection is discussed in this latest blog post by Brion McClanahan, where Jefferson is challenged in his thought processes by Jon Taylor of Caroline.
It seems that in June of 1798, at the peak of the Federalist’s power move that launched atrocities like the Alien and Sedition Act that made it a crime to be critical of the government (only 20 years after all the American Colonies publicly were critical of the British government), John Taylor wrote that the union seemed to be on the verge of dissolving. It was most obvious by this point that party power had already prompted the rush to use general government for the good of one region of the united States so young in its journey.
Thomas Jefferson quickly penned back a response that admitted that the New England states were seeing the South as something that could be tapped:
… that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings as well as exhausting our strength and substance. their natural friends, the three other Eastern states, join them from a sort of family pride, and they have the art to divide certain other parts of the Union, so as to make use of them to govern the whole.
However, Jefferson claimed this would soon be corrected by voting.
Brion explains:
They would only suffer so long under the heel of these petty tyrants, and he insisted that a “scission” of the Union would do little to arrest the problems of political division, what Jefferson considered to be a natural occurrence in a “deliberating” society. If New England were removed from the Union, Jefferson argued that a division between Virginia and Pennsylvania would soon rise and that would be met by another round of division until the entire Union would be torn asunder for even the Southern States would feel the sting of partisanship and division.
Jefferson continued:
I had rather keep our New-England associates for that purpose, than to see our bickerings transferred to others. they are circumscribed within such narrow limits, & their population so full, that their numbers will ever be the minority ..
Well, at this point, history has proven that John Taylor’s viewpoint was correct, and he articulated it in a rather long letter back to Jefferson. In summary Brion shares:
Taylor considered the partisanship of New England to be a byproduct of both geography and “interest,” and unlike Jefferson he did not think that party divisions were natural occurrences. He cited Connecticut as an example of a fairly unanimous electorate and thought that the rigid—almost religious—belief in “checks and balances” failed to fully arrest the sword of despotism in the United States. In other words, the Constitution was doomed from the beginning .. liberty had to be the direct end of government and if the Union failed to protect liberty, then it was a worthless bond of oppression.
John Taylor did not believe that party politics could fix the “unequally yoked” union between regions that had very different interests and principles. He also pinpointed the key part of the Constitution that resulted in a nationalist central government that is prone to pillaging:
Taxes are the subsistence of party. As the miasma of marshes contaminate the human body, those of taxes corrupt and putrify the body politic. Taxation transfers wealth from a mass to a selection. It destroys the political Equality, which alone can save liberty; and yet no constitution, whilst devising checks upon power, has devised checks sufficiently strong upon the means which create it. Government, endowed with a right to transfer, bestow, and monopolise wealth in perpetuity is in fact, unlimited. It soon becomes a feudal lord over a nation in villenage.
John Taylor, over 200 years ago predicted our situation as it stands today:
But since government is getting [sic] into the habit of peeping into private letters, and is manufacturing a law, which may even make it criminal to pray to God for better times, I shall be careful not to repeat so dangerous a liberty.—I hope it may not be criminal to add a supplication [sic] for an individual—not—for I will be cautious—as a republican, but as a man.
Edward Snowden revealed that this aspect of a dysfunctional government that is only interested in perpetuating itself at all costs makes us neither free or brave!
Voting better is something politicians and public education imprints into our brains, for they know it is week and ineffective so that their agenda as a massive tax collecting parasite can continue.
Once the states were stripped of their power to nullify and secede, nothing stood in the way of total central control by the moneyed elites in this land.
To quote our contemporary, Ricardo Duchesne, who asked in his book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization:
“What caused the buildup of ideas…From the Italian Galileo to the Polish and Prussian Copernicus?… these ideas then being picked up and debated across Europe, to the Dane Tyco Brahe in his study of comets, the German Kepler building on Brahe, and also the Englishman William Gilbert… these ideas then fused with the Dutchman Christian Huygen’s centrifugal force, the French Descartes’ algebraic geometry and so on…”
A sense of independence and freedom runs throughout our history. What we find in our people is that rather than state-sanctioned, top-down mandates directing scientific and artistic life, the Westerners more often had independent spaces of inquiry– guilds, universities, laboratories, artistic circles, who sought to dare and create and explore.
Inspiring, in that even in the midst of the wars that Jesus said Himself were to be persistent (The Bible Book Of Matthew Chapter 24 Verses 6-8 spoke by Jesus):
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.All these are the beginning of birth pains.
.. and yet, the results of wars can be redeemed, and while they may have had evil intentions, there can be healing on the other side and a deeper view of life, as a gift, itself:
… With such engines of passion and curiosity driving us, conflicts naturally arise, but past wars do not negate the wider bonds of our people.
Often times, wars were fought to assert sovereignty, harkening again to that theme of freedom.
And of course, sometimes we were at the hands of leaders who, unrestrained by small scale bonds and duties, sought megalomaniacal gains, or sold out to the lure of unchecked power, sometimes subverted by alien influences.
This doesn’t mean that when the German and English soldiers put down their arms to play games with each other during the Christmas truce of World War I, they didn’t know deep down that they were related. They did.
Just like in the early 1900s, when elderly Union and Confederate soldiers embraced each other at American Civil War battle anniversaries…
Yes, we share a common Source, we are all made in the image of the One who made us. We are designed to tinker, to learn, to improve, to discover:
No matter what we may learn, no matter how surprised we may be by future findings, our story reaches back much further than is commonly thought today.
Know what has been shared in this presentation.
Let it spur you on to discover more.
Know that we have a common source and that now more than ever, share a common fate.
I guess it may be the curse of anyone having the “bent”, or the DNA, to see, in my mind, ahead. This is a kind of forth-telling instead of fore-telling. I do not believe that I can predict the future, but I tend to have a sense of how things might be trending.
In a previous post, I lamented about the type of people who coped with seasons of crisis. Here is a quote:
The character to stand up to tyranny when ones own family and way of life could be swept away like that of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible is something that was not seen in these united States since the War for Independence 80 years earlier when the same kind of people stood up to the British Empire.
A man or woman of honor were people, who in times of crisis, rose to the occasion and became unwilling leaders in their efforts to repel the forces of change that represented a foe who’s agenda was to implement their own life view on others, with force. Honor was a sought after attribute especially in the South in the decades after the War for Independence, and by the 1930s had all been but overshadowed by something new ..
If one can imagine being in the Southern United States in 1860, reading the newspapers or hearing the winds of war. Similar to being in the Northern American Colonies in 1775, or in the Southern American Colonies in 1780 after the fall of Charleston, South Carolina, everything changes in a matter of days.
Society is turned upside-down when politics fail and warfare breaks out or economic warfare spreads as in places like Venezuela. The country’s infrastructure fails, the transportation of foods cease and deprivation spreads.
While I could “prepper-talk” y’all into stocking up on ammo, food stores and water, and encourage y’all to get into shape walking with your bug-out-bag for miles several days in a row, I do think the most important way to prepare for possible disaster scenarios is within one’s own mind and then educating others on the philosophical and psychological aspects of what might come down the pike. The other things can then fall into pace in their own time.
I have followed “The Woodpile Report” for a time but found myself fascinated in the latest post about the centrality of food in our daily lives. As the author would put it:
Calories are life.
Short and to the point. I guess that is what I like about this author even though there are many points we might not be in total agreement with. One has to be able to sift it to extract the precious jewel. Truth is not always self evident. Sometimes one is blind to it 🙂
So in this post, the author points out various times in recent history where food itself was weaponized:
[Union Gerneral] Sherman’s “scorched earth” campaign began on November 15th [1864] when he cut the last telegraph wire that linked him to his superiors in the North. He left Atlanta in flames and pointed his army south. No word would be heard from him for the next five weeks. Unbeknownst to his enemy, Sherman’s objective was the port of Savannah. His army of 65,000 cut a broad swath as it lumbered towards its destination. Plantations were burned, crops destroyed and stores of food pillaged.
The plight of both black and white in the South were of little concern for the armies as they march through this conquered land. It took over 100 years for this region to recover.
The War Orders given by the [British] Admiralty on 26 August 1914 were clear enough. All food consigned to Germany through neutral ports was to be captured and all food consigned to Rotterdam was to be presumed consigned to Germany. The British were determined on the starvation policy, whether or not it was lawful. The average daily diet of 1,000 calories was insufficient to maintain a good standard of health, resulting by 1917 in widespread disorders caused by malnutrition such as scurvy, tuberculosis, and dysentery. In December 1918, the National Health Office in Berlin [Germany] calculated that 763,000 persons had died as a result of the blockade by that time.
Berlin 1919 – Food Riot Strikes a Butcher Shop
Again, bringing the effects of war to the innocent civilians was something that the 20th century seems to have learned from the 19th century from the War Against Southern Independence in the Americas from 1861-1865.
In September 1944, trains in the Netherlands ground to a halt. Dutch railway workers were hoping that a strike could stop the transport of Nazi troops, helping the advancing Allied forces. But the Allied campaign failed, and the Nazis punished the Netherlands by blocking food supplies, plunging much of the country into famine. By the time the Netherlands was liberated in May 1945, more than 20,000 people had died of starvation.
Famine in Netherlands During WWII
It is apparent that Americans, British and even Germans would cross that moral line to punish the innocent to expedite their own war agendas.
The problem [in Japan] was not just harvests and the cutting off imports, transportation problems developed. Fuel shortages made it increasingly difficult getting food from the countryside into the cities. Food Shortages had begun to appear in some parts of the country even before Pearl Harbor. By 1944 theft of produce still in the fields led police to speak of a new class of “vegetable thieves” and the new crime of “field vandalizing”. The average calorie intake per person had by late 1945 declined to far less than deemed necessary even for an individual engaged in light work.
In this case, this is a nation which is not able to facilitate, via transportation, feeding their own civilian population due primarily to USA embargoes waged in the year BEFORE Pearl Harbor in late 1940! The United States utilized economic warfare to force a conflict in the Pacific to justify joining the United Kingdom and France in their fight during WWII:
The [07OCT1940] memo [declassified in 1994], scanned below, detailed an eight step plan to provoke Japan into attacking the United States. President Roosevelt, over the course of 1941, implemented all 8 of the recommendations contained in the McCollum memo. Following the eighth provocation, Japan attacked. The public was told that it was a complete surprise, an “intelligence failure”, and America entered World War Two.
In summary, the Woodpile Report’s emphasis on the war and food connection:
Wars are generally about food. Ancient Rome imported its food and fought epic wars to develop new sources and keep the ones it had. Medieval fiefdoms were agricultural enterprises, raiding their neighbors was common. The westward expansion of America in the nineteenth century was about food and the means to move it, as was Japan’s expanding empire in the early twentieth century. Germany explicitly cited food production to justify its aggression in the east. Their rants about fighting Bolshevism was pep rally stuff, Nazism itself was excessively patriotic Marxism.
Bingo! Just know in a potential “civil war” season in the domestic United States, where civil unrest is sparked in the metro areas first:
Seizing the nation’s food would be an obvious move. Expect them to deploy troops to secure big ag and the necessary transportation facilities, destroy anyone who got in their way and terrorize potential troublemakers.
Most ‘preppers’ suggest a year or two of food supplies without resupply. I am pretty sure a vast majority of Americans (including myself) have not accomplished this in preparation for what may happen, or may not happen in the continental United States in the next 2-10 years. The Woodpile Report’s author also contends that the footprint suited for a sustained protected food supply system needs to be very small:
Well placed and practiced survivalists could get by on a onesey-twosey basis. Two may survive where one wouldn’t. Three or four may be better, assuming an adequate reserve of food and supplies. With more than four the liabilities are likely to outweigh the advantages. It assumes the deepest of deep larders, extensive supplies and harmonious wisdom in all things. Unless each make an irreplaceable contribution of critical value it’s probably too big a footprint for this phase. Loosely allying with similar small groups for mutual benefit may be the better choice. Five or more is a crowd, a danger to itself.
“Harmonious wisdom”, probably something that is in every increasingly short supply as the clock tics and the pages of the calendar turns. I was just lamenting today how the talents of previous generations were not passed on to mine, how my wife’s grandmother could properly field dress a deer, and filet a fish. These things, taken for granted just 50 years ago are now a rare skill unless one lives primarily in rural areas. It is no wonder that the odds are stacked economically against these areas by our own government, we don’t want people to be too self sufficient now do we?
The ruling class would continue to work against middle America’s existence. As said above, they’d confiscate local stores of food on a continuing basis, seize major food producing areas intact and grab the needed transportation facilities. Make no mistake, their hirelings would be granted license for absolute ruthlessness. Free fire zones and minefields are not off the table. Skilled labor, if otherwise unwilling, would be arrested and compelled to work.
FEMA camps would lure people who get hungry, removing the more compliant and complacent from the land so that their responsibility could end for these land areas that can then be deemed “no-go” zones where military can sweep up any resistance with any method at their disposal.
Feeding their base would guarantee the loyalty of supporters, inflict mass death on the deplorables by ‘no cost’ neglect and keep armed confrontation largely confined to flyover country.
While portions of the “fly-over” country would be retained as the source of food items for those that remain, first those connected to the government (military, police, HSA, etc.), large swaths of today’s farmland would not be needed IMHO. Importing food items to supply the east and west coasts might be all that is needed to retain control.
Privation, disease, hunger, murderous chaos and high intensity combat would likely peak in the second year. This is the knothole which would separate the survivalists from dabblers and hopeful idealists.
Thinning of the herd. Everything will have changed, and for those that remain, it will be, or would be a strange new world, if all this comes to fruition.
The author ends on a note of encouragement, that no matter when or if this crisis emerges, one needs to count the cost:
Be a survivor. The who and what of a civil war would matter only occasionally. Food would matter every hour of every week. Stack food high, wide and deep where it’s secure from looters and confiscation. Backup your stash with an “iron rations” fallback stash. Stack seeds, garden tools, fishing and hunting gear to be prepared for self-resupply opportunities.
I will have to be honest and say, while I thought about these things when I left the US Navy in the early 1980s, the sheer effort to raise a family and to provide for their daily needs overshadowed my own ability to prepare for what seems to be coming down the pike.
With the events that have unfolded so far in the 21st century, I do believe that the priority to plan and strategize is upon us all. The economic trajectory this country is on is not sustainable. The US Empires days are numbered, but as with most empires, this could take years or decades. Only God knows the timing.
Finally, I also have to admit that I have failed. Here is what I wrote last year:
[During Hurricane Sandy in 2012] Sotelo also said Blackhawk helicopters patrol the skies “all day and night” and a black car with tinted windows surveys the camp while the government moves heavy equipment past the tents at night. Reporters were not allowed in the fenced complex or “FEMA camp” to report on conditions either, where lines of displaced residents formed outside portable toilets. Security guards were posted at every door, and residents could not even use the toilet or shower without first presenting an I.D. to a government official.
Yes, this is standard protocol .. and many will have no options should this day come. It might not hurt your future, your kid’s future or your grandkid’s future to think about a plan B sometime in the near term. At worst case you never use it .. best case it may save your family from government abuse or worse .. Personal goal by the end of 2018: Own a Plan B
I have no Plan B here near the end of 2019. Have I squandered my time? Will I regret my lack of planning in the years to come? (Can anyone else related?)
I guess time will tell, and that the very act of looking at my words from many months ago help to convict my heart that something has to change in the next year.
I guess I was on track in June 2019 when I wrote “Preparing (Prepping?) the Next Generation with Love” in this post, but I am not sure I heeded my own advice.
