- 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.
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?
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- John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida.
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