The Tide of Lies Keeps Rising,
by John Kaminski
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Maybe it has always been this way.
Phony pretexts - repeated often enough - become real reasons. Things
that we know for certain are not true become true in the public mind
simply through endless repetition.
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Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Former weapons inspector Scott
Ritter, a card-carrying Republican who voted for Bush, debunked that
hysterical assertion months ago; yet the Bush administration fanatics
carry on with their murderous mantra: "Iraq has weapons of of mass
destruction," and eventually, the whole world falls into line, repeating
the phrase as if in a hypnotic trance.
It is the formula devised by the arch Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels:
Invent the lie and repeat it often enough and it becomes the truth, no
matter what the facts actually are.
True - this is not exactly a new thing. Nor does false propaganda
arise from just one side of the political spectrum. Our newest Nobel
Peace Prize winner, former President Jimmy Carter, once canceled U.S.
participation in the Olympic Games because of Soviet aggression in
Afghanistan. But recently we have learned that Carter's top foreign
policy adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admitted starting that fight and
creating the conditions that lured the Soviets to attach themselves to
that toxic tar baby. Many Americans complained at the time about how
many athletic careers were betrayed by the withdrawal from the Olympics,
but I tend to think of how many people were needlessly killed by what
was essentially a capricious political intrigue, although it did
eventually lead to the breakup of the Soviet megastate.
Perhaps the quintessential phony pretext was Adolf Hitler's 1934 use
of a fire in Germany's Reichstag building, which he insisted was a crime
perpetrated by Communists, but most historians theorize was a ruse used
to institute new repressive measures throughout Nazi Germany. Many
people theorize that the destruction wreaked on Sept. 11, 2001 in the
United States was an event belonging in the same category, a false
terror incident used to implement more repressive measures in the U.S.
as well as serve as a bogus justification for murderous, hideous target
practice in hapless Afghanistan. As the Bush adminstration continues to
block numerous inquiries into relevant aspects of that tortuous day, the
suspicion grows that he and his petronazi cabal arranged and supervised
those horrible attacks.
The Vietnam war, which cost the world some 3 million lives, is now
largely believed to have been started by just such a phony pretext: the
infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, which initially was reported as a
minor attack on an American ship off the coast of Hanoi but now is
consensually regarded as a total fabrication by American warmongers. The similarity to what is happening now in regard to Iraq is eerily familiar.
And the events leading up to this present day - when the U.S. is
perched to strike with its finger on the trigger of its massive war
machine - give even more credence to the suspicion that claims about
Iraq's aggressive nature are just a smokescreen with multiple purposes.
The first deception is of course the amount of oil beneath the
ground of that country, second in quantity in the world only to Saudi
Arabia. It would certainly help the disintegrating American economy to
suddenly be in control of a huge new source of oil, for which we could
then name our own price.
The second deception is the creation of a U.S. staging area for
eventual military control of that whole oil-producing region. With our
foreign policy sadly reflecting Israel's genocidal intent to carve out a
much larger area of control for itself, the U.S. would undoubtedly pick
fights with Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Libya and even Saudi Arabia and
Egypt, just like America has arbitrarily picked this current fight with
Iraq, simply because the bully is large enough and there is no country,
nor coalition of countries, tough enough to resist it.
The third deception is that we are doing this for the welfare of the
American people, who surely will not profit from a windfall cache of
cheap oil (the profits will be kept by the corporate titans), and who
surely will suffer from sending troops into an area poisoned by
discarded radioactive ordnance. Even the American troops themselves have
been poisoned by supposedly preventive innoculations which contain
ingredients whose purpose the government will not reveal. What benefit
will Americans get from this? None. Only more insoluable tragedy.
But it is the fourth deception that is the most egregious of all,
and provides the key to all those other deceptions perpetrated in the
name of American dominance. Ten weeks ago, Saddam Hussein was off the
radar screen, a minor Middle Eastern despot kept in check by sadistic
sanctions and random bombings that have taken a heavy toll over the past
decade without serious objection by the so-called civilized world. Then
came the new round of lies. A meeting in Czechoslovakia, long since
debunked, alleged a terror connection between al-Qaida and Iraq. Then an
endless succession of unprovable claims from the White House, repeated
with increasing frequency until they became the consensus truth in the
world's brainwashing, corporate media.
The use of the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein is directly
connected ot - and meant to deflect scrutiny from - the Bush cabal's
attempt to block legitimate inquiries into the World Trade Center
slaughter and the corporate thievery of Enron, Halliburton, and Harken
corporations. If we're writing about aspects of Iran, we can't be
writing about Vice President Cheney's illegal refusal to reveal how he
tilted America's energy regulations to benefit the corporate plunderers
he represents.
Now we are going to war, to kill and maim thousands, and the poison
even many of own finest young people, just in order to keep embarrassing questions from being asked of the rogue aristocrats who have hijacked
American democracy and turned it all into their own Ku Klux Klan version
of corporate truth. There is no politician in American powerful enough
or brave enough to oppose this atrocity. The ugly American people remain
cowered by fear in their own financial self-centeredness, unable to
confront the genuine truth of the matter: that American leaders of both
parties have worked to cover up the murders of thousands of their own
people, and countless more thousands around the world, and no one of any
consequential reputation has the guts to stand up and say so.
And through it all, the tide of lies keeps rising. What will become
of us?
- John Kaminski
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida.
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