My OperaThe death of truth drags us down
By NonZionist. Thursday, December 24, 2009 5:50:56 AM
History, for the most part, is written by the victors. They, the victors, invariably become the "Good Guys", born without sin, pure as the driven snow, while the countries and peoples they have conquered and eradicated become the "Bad Guys", black as coal, driven by pure spite, madmen with one and only one desire: to blow up the world!
As long as we ourselves are somewhere in the camp of these victors, we tend to accept this facile "history" and avoid looking too closely at it. The world to us is a comic-book or fairy-tale, "Good Guys and Bad Guys", "Heros and Villains", just like it was when we were five years old.
But today, more and more of us are looking more like victims than victors. We lose our homes and farms, we declare bankruptcy, we lack access to health care. While the rich get richer, we get poorer and sicker. And then we begin to wonder whether the masked-media have told us the whole story. Could there be another side to history? What does history look like from the perspective of the victims?
Yes, there is another side to history, and it differs greatly from the Official Story. For one thing, this alternative history makes sense in an adult way: It is no mere comic-book. No one is Absolutely Good and no one is Absolutely Evil -- though some come close.
My first encounter with history as written by the victims came about thirty years ago. The encounter was painful at first, but in the end it set me free -- that is, I discovered what freedom really means, and why it is precious. Here's my story.
Seeking out the truth
So much of what happens in this world, happens unseen. The sun rises, half of the planet warms, billions of people are affected, but a person who goes only by the tv news shows will know nothing of this world-wide event: The rising of the sun changes the world, but it just isn't "newsworthy".
Other events go unreported because they are seen by some people and not by "the right people". In a crime, the victim sees one thing and the criminal sees another, and if the news is reported by the criminals, no one will know of the victim's story. Does this mean that the rape "never happened"? Similarly, when military aggression occurs, the victims see one thing and the aggressors or victors, another.
Unfortunately, most of our "mainstream" history books are written by the victors. Many of the victims are dead, and those who survive do not have the resources to publish their story and make it available to a wide audience. In addition, the victor dominates the media and can easily make sure that the voice of the victims gets drowned out.
Why should it matter? Who cares about history, anyway, these days? Why should we care?
We should care because our indifference to history is one of the causes of our political paralysis. If we have no past, we have no future. We are like a deer in the headlights, unable to move out of the way of the oncoming truck, because it cannot remember or understand how it got where it is. Better, perhaps, we are like the adopted child, plunked into the middle of a family the child knows nothing about: How does that child feel? Is that any way to live?
Should we then start reciting and memorizing the Official History, like people in a re-education camp? No: We already know the Official History -- history as written by the victors -- and we know that it leaves much or even most of the story untold. We are indifferent to this history because we know instinctively that it is mainly self-aggrandizement and self-delusion, and we no longer feel a need to hide behind that wall of lies. Nothing can cure our indifference, nothing but the truth and the whole truth, and to get that, we have to seek out the victims and listen to their story and judge for ourselves just where the whole truth lies. If we do not make the effort to get at the truth, then we are living a lie, living a life starved for meaning, squandering our energy on a charade.
My first glimpse of truth
I too grew up with the manichaean "Good Guys / Bad Guys" world view. Today, I find it incredible that so many otherwise rational adults continue to believe in this comic-book or fairy-tale worldview -- but thirty years ago, it was all I knew how to imagine. At that time, our government was "Saving the World" from the "Godless Commies". Imagine: Thirty and forty years ago, the lack of religion was the Enemy that we were all supposed to Fear and Hate. Like sheep, we believed -- just as we believe today that the presence of religion is the Enemy. Thrity and forty years ago, we saw the "Commie Devils" as heretics who "Didn't Think Like Us". We were the Good Guys, and it was our job to kill the Commies, because they were the Bad Guys: It all "Made Sense". No questions were asked.
For me, all that changed in 1980, when Vietnam acted to bring down the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Ironically, at the time, I had a subscription to a pro-war neo-con magazine. From that source, I learned about the Khmer Rouge and the genocide they were perpetrating in Cambodia. The entire population of Phnom Penh -- even invalids and hospital patiencts -- had been forced out into the fields to labor, and there, many had been clubbed to death. For the Pol Pot madmen, wearing eyeglasses was proof that one was an "Intellectual", a capital offense. So when Vietnam, responding to border raids by Pol Pot, helped a native Cambodian, Heng Samrin, to overthrow the Khmer Rouge butchers, I cheered.
Then I turned on the "All-News" radio -- and found the U.S. government condemning Vietnam. Day after day, for weeks, the chorus of condemnation coming from the government and the media droned on. I could not believe my ears. "Does the government really not know what was happening in Cambodia?" I asked. "Doesn't the government know it is supporting genocide?! Don't the media know?"
Incredibly, the U.S. backed Pol Pot at the U.N., and Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House, declared the Khmer Rouge to be the "Legitimate Government of Cambodia". I was shocked to the bone: "What is 'legitimate' about murdering over a million people?" I wanted to know. This spectacle left me heart-broken.
(I later found out that I was seeing only the tip of the iceberg: The U.S. government was supplying the perpetrators of the genocide with both diplomatic and material support. U.S. policy may have been guided by the "Sonnenfeldt Doctrine", an abomination that called for the U.S. to support the worst possible communist regimes so as to make communism look as bad as possible.)
It took me months to recover. Finally, I decided that the U.S. government and the American people are not one and the same. The moral bankruptcy of the former did not imply the moral bankruptcy of everything. This seems obvious today, when government corruption is so massive and so rampant and hundreds of billions of dollars are disappearing, but thirty years ago, it was a very hard thing to admit.
Shocking revelations
U.S. support for Pol Pot is one of the things that forced me to start asking questions. I pulled on a thread here and a thread there and gradually the whole tapestry of Cold War lies unraveled. Out of necessity, I learned to think for myself. Much of what I discovered astonished me.
For example, I had been led to believe that NATO was "Defending Us" from the "Warsaw Pact"; I was amazed to find that the Warsaw Treaty Organization, as it was properly called, was actually formed in 1955, six years after the formation of NATO. The Official History had things backwards.
I learned that almost all of the new weapons in the race to nuclear suicide were invented and first deployed by the U.S., with the Soviets playing catch-up one to five years later. Where the Soviet Union threatened the U.S. from Cuba, the U.S., with bases all over the world, threatened the Soviets from the south, from the east and from the west. I realized that the U.S. government was not simply reacting to the "Soviet Threat": It was leading the race to global annihilation. That implied that it had the power to stop the suicide race at any point. So why did it not use that power?
Indeed, I found that there were dozens of unanswered Soviet peace offers on the table, offers calling for bilateral disarmament and containment and gradual dissolution of NATO and the WTO. The U.S. also made offers, but the U.S. offers were so outrageous and one-sided that no sane government could possibly accept them. The use of such fake proposals is something that had been called for in NSC-68, a secret 1950 Cold War document. Once, in the mid-1950s, the Soviets actually accepted one of these fake proposals, much to the dismay of the U.S.. The U.S. was then forced to reject its own proposal.
U.S. plans for a nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union began in the fall of 1945, with JIC-329. The plan called for atomic attacks on 20 Soviet cities and would have killed many millions. I'm not making this up. Here it is, straight from a government document:
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/summer00/art06.html
+(
The Soviet cities selected for atomic bombing in JIC 329 were Moscow, Gorki, Kuibyshev, Sverdlovsk, Novosibrisk, Omsk, Saratov, Kazan, Leningrad, Baku, Tashkent, Chelyabinsk, Nizhni Tagil, Magnitogorsk, Molotov, Tbilisi, Stalinsk, Grozny, Irkutsk, and Yarolavl. JIC 329 was the likely basis for the earliest known nuclear war plan against the Soviet Union.
)+
On at least one occasion, in the 1950s, the U.S. was one vote away from launching a nuclear attack -- the sole dissenting vote coming from Gen. Matthew Ridgeway.
In the 1980s, under Reagan, the U.S. started to deploy first-strike Pershing IIa missiles only six minutes from the Soviet border. Six minutes was not enough time for human beings to distinguish between a false alert and a real attack. As a result, we put ourselves and the entire human race at the mercy of obsolete Soviet computer technology. The only thing that saved us from nuclear suicide was Gorbachev's capitulation.
What takes the place of truth
This brief section presents only a small tip of one of many icebergs. What are we to make of this? How can the truth possibly be so much at odds with what we are told as children and continue to believe as adults?
One thing it demonstrates: Belief is fallible. Believing that our government is the Good Guy does not make it so. Believing that our government has a right to attack anybody anywhere does not make it so. Believing that our government's suicidal and sometimes genocidal policies are a necessary "Reaction" or "Defense" does not make it so. We have to ask where these false beliefs come from. They come from inculcated fear. They come from wishful thinking. They come from projecting the good intentions of the ordinary American onto the war-making elite.
We find that the truth is often the very opposite of what we have been led to believe. And there is a reason for this. Politicians often do one thing and say the opposite -- this is how they satisfy irreconcilable constituencies. E.g., they give medical insurance companies billions of dollars and call it "Health Care", or they take away our rights and call it a "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act". Like these politicians, governments use idealistic words as a figleaf to cover up aggression. The greater the fake idealism, the greater the aggression it covers up.
Indeed, truth is the first casualty of war -- and in a country that is perpetually at war, truth is as dead as a door-nail.
But it's worse than that. The death of truth creates a void that needs to be filled -- otherwise, ordinary people might notice its absence and start asking inconvenient questions. So the corpse of truth is revived and made to speak the very opposite of what is true. Over time, we are poisoned by these lies. We who were once free come to accept the most monstrous crimes as "Necessary" and "Good". The lies add up, till we find ourselves in a corner with "No Choice" but to torture people, "No Choice" but to nuke this or that town, "No Choice" but to wipe out millions -- we who were once free.
To recover our freedom, our humanity, our wholeness, and our sanity, we must separate ourselves from the war system and regain an independent moral sensibility. Then we must go back and ask who was the first casualty in this war. Finally, we must evict the reeking inhuman devil that now brazenly occupies the place once reserved for truth.
+(
There are none so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
)+
-- Goethe
Those who want to keep us confined to the Official History and its comic-book worldview will attack what I have written as "Revisionism". That label is misapplied. My aim is not to "revise" the lies: My aim is to expose them, so that we can get beyond them. My aim is to clear away some of the lies that have been choking us for decades, so that we can recover our freedom and start breathing the clean fresh life-giving air of truth.
The lie about Democracy
Here is an excerpt from an article that deals with one the lies used to cover up military aggression. The article indicates that neither wing of the War Party has a monopoly on deception: The D's and the R's are two sides of a single coin.
http://prorev.com/shilling.htm
+(
The Coalition of the Shilling
The Iraqis will have to learn democracy someplace else
By Sam Smith / The Progressive Review
Tired of killing Muslims, we are now trying to teach their survivors some democracy.
There are a number of practical problems with this, among them being that the curriculum is in the hands of the most authoritarian, deceitful, anti-democratic, and constitution-wrecking administration we've ever had. But there's an even more disturbing matter: wander around your nation's capital and try to find something better. Leaving aside anomalies such as the ACLU and the Cato Institute, a few members of Congress, and a handful of anachronic journalists, this town shows virtually no interest in liberty, the Constitution, or democracy these days - except when prescribing them to those in far away lands.
This is not hyperbole; it is simple, grim fact. And also essential, because what makes a democracy or constitutional republic function are not words written on paper, not oaths uttered, nor clichés reiterated in public addresses, but natural, visceral, organic love of the principles overtly avowed.
....
The retreat from democracy continued with little attention during the Clinton years. Incidents such as Waco were only the tip of the iceberg. Lesser known phenomena included using mercenaries from Dyncorp to help in domestic drug raids. As Daniel Forbes wrote in Alternet, "This band of retired military honchos has 1,000 operatives with some sort of "secret" mojo, spying on the American public at the feds' behest and helping to hoover up vast sums of money in over 60,000 seizures."
In 1997, the Washington Post finally caught up with the fact that mock military urban attacks had taken place in 21 cities. And the academic journal Social Problems found that 89% of the over 500 police departments it surveyed had fully functioning special operations units trained and modeled on military principles. For all practical purposes, these units represented a military force whose target was American communities and citizens. Between 1980 and 1995, the number of incidents involving paramilitary units quadrupled.
The Great Pretenders
Thus, in many ways, America over the past two decades was an accident waiting for September 11 to happen. All the pieces were in place - an increasingly powerful military; a corrupt and leaderless Congress; the disappearance of civics from school curricula; the slow acculturation to unconstitutional behavior by police, military and prosecutors; a media more interested in the power to which it aspired than in the readers and viewers it was meant to serve; the concentration of formerly devolved power inside of Washington, and the concentration of Washington power inside of the White House.
....
)+
(100%)
