The Tide Of Lies Keeps Rising
Maybe it has always been this way.
By John Kaminski *
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?
**********
* - John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida.