Category Archives: CIA

Silicon Valley Algorithm Manipulation Is The Only Thing Keeping Mainstream Media Alive

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.

But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.

So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?

The answer is algorithm manipulation.

Last month a very informative interview saw the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.

At the World Economic Forum’s 2021, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”.

“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny,” Wojcicki said. “But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”

Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a category labeled “borderline content” which it algorithmically de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are interested in that topic:

“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera. And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”

Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has been grouped in the “borderline” category because his views and new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a thousand.

“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,” Kulinski says. “People are coming here to escape that and you’re gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News.”

It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the oligarchic empire to the CEO of a neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In 2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.” In 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only censors right wing content.

Google, for the record, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA. It pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has been a military-intelligence contractor from the beginning.

Then you’ve got Facebook, where a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide. Meanwhile left and antiwar voices, including myself, have been complaining for years that Twitter artificially throttles their follower count.

If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley megacorporations, the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which manufacture consent for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.

The “Russian Threat”

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

During 2016  CIA director John Brennan and FBI director James Comey, together with the corrupt Democrat party, began orchestrating Russiagate in order to prevent Trump from reducing the risk of nuclear war by normalizing relations with Russia.  President Trump tried to nip a New Cold War in the bud, but that was not in the interest of the power and profit of the military/security complex which desperately needs the “Russian threat” as its raison d’etre. 

Stephen Cohen, myself and a few others expressed concern that the tensions between the two  nuclear powers were being driven to more dangerous highs than ever existed during the 20th century Cold War.  Many websites joined in debunking the orchestrated Russiagate fabrication.

To discredit these voices, a new website, PropOrNot, suddenly appeared with a list of 200 “Russian agents/dupes.”  Those of us who had raised red flags about Russiagate and the worsening of tensions were on the list. The Washington Post gave the accusation credibility by reporting the PropOrNot accusation that those who dissented from a hostile policy toward Russia were “Putin agents.”

A number of the falsely accused websites were intimidated and abandoned the truth.  CounterPunch went even further. It dropped its best and most incisive writers—people such as Mike Whitney and Diana Johnstone.  CounterPunch, which  had once collected, published, and marketed a collection of my essays as a book, suddenly discovered that it preferred fiction over fact.  Other websites that had religiously reproduced all of my columns now became selective about which parts of the official narrative they would permit to be examined on their sites.  This was, perhaps, the beginning of the movement to de-platform all who challenge the narrative.

The threat to truth-tellers has now been elevated by election thief Joe Biden’s latest Executive Order declaring a “national emergency” to “deal with the Russian threat.” Pepe Escobar reports that Biden’s order opens every American to being accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. “A sub-paragraph (C), detailing ‘actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad,’ is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia’s positions in international affairs.”

“Supports Russia’s position” includes an objective description and non-partisan analysis of Russian policy. The crucial point is that, in effect, Biden’s executive order places everyone reporting objectively on Russia’s political positions as a potential threat to the United States.  https://www.unz.com/pescobar/putin-rewrites-the-law-of-the-geopolitical-jungle/  

If we are honest, we will acknowledge that we have undergone the complete collapse of the United States.  Truth is prohibited in the media, school systems, and universities if it conflicts with the elite agendas served by the official narratives. The First Amendment is dead and buried. Free speech is reserved for the official narratives, such as “systemic racism”  and “Russian threat.” Those who exercise their Constitutional right find themselves de-platformed or fired.  

To understand how the victory of propaganda over truth elevates the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon, consider the difference between the 20th century and 21st century cold wars.

In the original Cold War both Soviet and American leaders worked to defuse tensions.  Agreements were made on arms control and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. There were regular meetings or summits between American and Soviet leaders.  Diplomatic decorum was maintained.  There were agreements that permitted each side to inspect the other’s compliance.  

This process began with President John F. Kennedy and  Soviet First Secretary Khrushchev.  It continued through President Reagan and, more or less, President George H. W. Bush.  It ended with the Clinton regime and has been downhill ever since.  President Trump intended to reduce the dangerous tensions, but was not permitted.  Indeed, his intent was sufficient cause for the Establishment to drive him from office.  2020 was a coup, not an election.

In the 20th century Cold War Russian experts differed in their assessments of the threat, and their differences were publicly aired. Differing assessments were debated. Dissenters were not demonized as Russian agents.  Today American Russian experts find that being Russophobic is a career boost. In the 20th century the New York Times and Washington Post were aligned with peace efforts. Today they are part of the neoconservative warmongers’ propaganda ministry.

The alarming conclusion is that since the Clinton regime, the US government has worked consistently to worsen relations with Russia even to the extent of publicly demonizing the Russian president and strangling objective debate in the US.  This is the perfect foundation for war.

All the while insouciant Americans elected governments that successively raised the likelihood of nuclear annihiliation while shutting down dissident concerns.  As I reported on March 17, “In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda.  Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.”

Today even in Republican and conservative circles to question Putin’s demonization raises disapproving eyebrows (the same for China and Iran).  The US Establishment has succeeded in labeling objective analysis as “pro-Russian” (or pro-Chinese or pro-Iranian). This means that an objective view of US/Russian relations is off-limits to US policymakers.  

The “Russian threat” is another hoax, one that will destroy the world.

Denying the Demonic

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine.  My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants.  Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus.  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?  Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.  Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.”  It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after.  Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.  I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.  As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

So let me begin with a few reminders.

The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

This list could extend down the page endlessly.  Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.  Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.  Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.  As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

Resist.

Media Pseudo-Debates and the Silence of Leftist Critics The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings.  Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned.  They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent.

They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at age thirty-nine by Hitler, called cheap grace: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.  Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…”

These incompetents are, in the immortal words of the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

Except they could and can.

They’ve actually shot a lot of people, here and abroad.  It’s one of their specialties.  But they mean well.  They screw up sometimes, but they mean well.  They care, even while they kill millions with their guns and bombs. But they have their followers.

As another dissident thirty-nine-year-old pastor, executed by the American state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Mainstream Media Pseudo-Debates

The U.S. rulers have their defenders.  Most are corporate mainstream journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political parties.  They will criticize across the political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it.  So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.

These days such massive media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as adjuncts of one political party or the other.  They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else.  They speak to their respective audiences in self-enclosed vacuums. They promote the divide that runs down the middle of the USA, a divide they helped to create.

Some have argued that this radical division of the media turf is because of economic and business factors; that the media organizations and their “journalists” have seen this strategy as the path to greater profits. There is probably some truth in this.  But it is a small part.

For all sides of the corporate media serve the same overarching political function: to divide and conquer the population; to set the so-called left against right; middle America against the east and west coasts; white against black; working class against middle-class; men against women; husbands against wives, etc. To keep people, who in reality should be allies, fighting with each other.  It is a classic strategy of divide-and-conquer that is carried out by the mainstream media pursuant to their unstated mandate. It is not an accident and has been conducted with a vengeance in recent years.

And crucially, it is anchored in the false premise of the myth of left vs. right with a reasonable center somewhere between.  Such a center has never existed. While left and right might once have been useful categories, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They now just serve to engender pseudo-debates.

Pseudo-debates are not new but they are highly effective.  They are debates based on false premises. In this case, the premise is that the massive corporate media conglomerates are not part of the same system of control and containment of the population, but are genuine opponents in the battle for truth and democracy.  Accept this premise and you have entered into endless debates leading nowhere.  It is a classic method of intelligence agencies to sow uncertainty and confusion and to have people following Alice down the rabbit hole, tumbling and tumbling into an endless void as they argue continually about nothing.[1]

Dr. E. Martin Schotz has brilliantly explicated this trick in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy (“Certainly no honest person could ever accept the ‘single bullet theory’.”) where people are still debating a false mystery almost sixty years after the fact.  He writes:

The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false….Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise—that there is uncertainly to be resolved—seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water. But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.[2]

The entire corporate media ideological spectrum operates under the umbrella of oligarchic control, something that is not new, just more egregious with every passing day. More in your face. The corporate media serve as the mouthpieces for those oligarchs, but they try to convince their separate audiences that this isn’t so. They give people enemies – false ones. Objects to hate.

But just like symptoms are not the disease, they give people a focus upon which to rivet their attention while the disease goes unattended. As with a drug addict, the taking of drugs is not the fundamental problem, although it becomes one and might kill you.  The problem is why one takes drugs; what is it that is one feels needs to be tranquilized and silenced.  Or, as the writer William Saroyan once flippantly said regarding the claim that smoking causes cancer: “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke, not from the smoking itself.”

The corporate mainstream media are the drug that serves to hide the core truth of an oligarchic cancerous warfare state drunk on power and using propaganda to play both sides. Everyone has become pawns in their game.

A recent example serves to illustrate a method in their madness.  There is a new, ongoing Spotify podcast – “Renegades: Born in the USA” – featuring Barack Obama and the singer Bruce Springsteen in conversation. Two rebels – it’s of course ridiculous – but there it is.  Two super rich celebrities stroking each other’s egos in an upper class setting.  One a singer, who rose to prominence out of nowhere as the voice of the small-town beleaguered working class; the other, a mixed-race politician who rose to prominence out of nowhere from a family background redolent of the CIA. Two icons of popular and political culture crossing over with a smooth patina of mixed-arts bullshit telling listeners they we need to return to the good old days when political centrism served the great American ideal that they both share.  People are supposed to take this conversation between “buddies” seriously, as the two sit mask-less with their feet seemingly touching at a time when people are told to wear masks and avoid close contact with those outside their households.  As Bruce strums his guitar, any half-way sentient person would realize he was being played, even while the meaning of the song was so twisted that he was enjoying it.

Left-wing Gatekeepers

Then, if we switch from the mainstream corporate media to alternative voices, especially prominent ones on the left, we notice something even stranger.

I think most readers would agree that the two seismic events of the last twenty years are the current COVID- 19 issue and the September 11, 2001 attacks.  The latter, not only because of all the victims that died that day, but for how it led to so much death and destruction around the world, the endless war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., the ensuing loss of basic liberties and privacy via the Patriot Act, etc. The former for obvious current reasons of death and further loss of basic liberties under the lockdowns as governments throughout the world institute unprecedented  measures of control, etc.  Clearly these two events stand out over the decades. They bookend twenty years of massive U.S. war crimes, the growth of the national security complex, an obscene increase in wealth for the wealthiest, and the loss of privacy and civil liberties for all.

And as everyone knows, September 11th and COVID-19 have resulted in great controversies and much debate because of their serious implications and the obvious questions about the official story lines raised by many respectable writers and researchers of varying political perspectives.  At the very least, one would expect that leftist/liberal critics of the so-called Deep State and the machinations of the elite’s wars and propaganda would have engaged in these discussions about these two seminal events or written analytic articles about them.

But for a core group of prominent left/liberal critics, these two subjects have been avoided like they are of no importance. No debates, no discussions, no analyses – simply silence, as if they didn’t happen and there was nothing to discuss. Cases closed: the government has spoken. Let us move on to more important matters.

But that is wrong.  For example, in about a dozen closely reasoned books of his own and with other international researchers, David Ray Griffin has raised innumerable questions that show that the official September 11 story is full of holes.  Canadian writer Graeme MacQueen has written a devastating exposé of the linked anthrax attacks that followed September 11, showing clearly that they were a U.S. government operation.  I myself have raised significant questions about what I call the linguistic mind-control associated with the attacks in “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore.”  The dissident literature is enormous.

A few of Griffin’s points are illustrative of the many anomalies in the official account. There are so many, and not just from Griffin but from other researchers, that  I will mention just a few about the building collapses, what Griffin calls “miracles of science.”  The contradictions about the hijackers are also voluminous.

Here are a few such scientific miracles:

The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries.  The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires.  WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires.  These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds.  Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies.   In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern.  The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair.  This 30-floor block then disintegrated in midair.

I could go on and on with examples.  The simple point is that there are so many absurdities in the official story that to ignore them is an act of intellectual and moral betrayal.  Anyone who has closely studied the government’s 9/11 Commission Report knows it is highly fictional.

The same is true for dissenting voices on the COVID-19 issue.  Three publications in particular have published an enormous amount of well-reasoned critiques of the official version of the COVID-19 narrative: Global Research, Off-Guardian, and Children’s Health Defense.  All present many articles by serious writers who raise innumerable questions and make irrefutable points about this matter.

And again, the point is not simple agreement with the dissenters’ arguments, but the need to engage their critiques.  Here too the silence is resounding, for it says “we buy the official account.”

Consider these few:

The man who invented the test used to determine the so-called COVID positive test results, the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Kary Mullis, has said that the test cannot do that, it is not a diagnostic test, and therefore all the test results are meaningless.  Additionally, there is serious doubt that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease called COVID 19 since there is no evidence that the virus has ever been isolated.  Assuming for argument’s sake, however, that the PCR test can detect  a specific virus, even Anthony Fauci himself, and the World Health Organization (one hour after Biden was sworn into office), have both said that the PCR test in order to have any accuracy must be performed at cycles below 35 thresholds while for a year those tests have been done at thresholds much higher, resulting in vast numbers of false positives.  Cycle thresholds are the level at which the PCR test is said to detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus.

Furthermore, eminent voices such as Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Koenig at Global Research, Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Children’s Health Defense, and Catte Black and Kit Knightly at Off-Guardian have for a long time been vociferously objecting to the official narrative with a vast amount of additional analyses involving the consequences of the wide-spread lockdowns.  Such dissidents have had to fight against an organized campaign of censorship that should raise the alarm for anyone who cares about truth.

For leftists who remain silent on these fundamental issues, I can assure them that these critiques of the official explanations of September 11, 2001 and COVID-19 are not right-wing conspiracies but are the work of leftists digging deep for truth.

It is therefore more than odd that certain left/liberal writers completely avoid these issues.  One must assume, therefore, that they accept the official explanations for these events, just as this coterie of  leftist/liberal critics dismiss the voluminous and detailed critiques of the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy.  From their silence one can assume that these matters are of no importance because the authorities have given us the truth.

One such deceased left-wing writer, who can stand in for the group of living writers I allude to, was the well-known and often brilliant journalist Alexander Cockburn, the founder of Counterpunch Magazine.  In Cockburn’s case, however, and to his credit even though he had no idea what he was talking about regarding September 11, 2001 and the JFK assassination, he did not remain silent but expressed his bile in ways he thought piercing but which made him appear quite ignorant.  Cockburn had a sharp tongue and liked to ridicule anyone who disagreed with him.  He excoriated all who questioned the JFK assassination or September 11 as “conspiracy nuts,” “lunatics” involved with “kookery.”

Echoing the CIA’s conspiracy meme, his name calling was offensive and his ignorance of these matters extraordinary.  But he was a star leftist, an untouchable. Few wished to criticize him.  He started with the assumption that government stupidity, incompetence, and screw-ups allow these terrible events to happen, and then without a shred of evidence, concluded that is why they happened.  All evidence and logic to the contrary, he derisively dismissed as the work of fools. Only Cockburn and a government that admits mistakes were made were right.  His arguments on these matters were pseudo-debates based on a premises he conjured out of thin air.

He was a master incompetent of the incompetence theory, one that many prominent leftists follow today, such as a recent passing comment by one of them on the COVID-19 matter as a mishandling by the ruling elite.  The implicit assumption being that the basic government and mainstream media tale is correct and all would be far better if the Trump administration hadn’t screwed up. Nothing further is forthcoming or necessary. Let us proceed on the assumption that the official account is true and that the government’s  inept response is the problem. Failure of leadership.  Government negligence.  Incompetence.

And anyone who even harbors a suspicion that there may be more to the story is engaging in conspiratorial thinking.  Of course this is the same response given to those who for twenty years have researched and questioned the government’s account of September 11, 2001.  The 9/11 omission story. The fictional account that will dominate the news as the twentieth anniversary approaches this September.  Will any of those liberal/leftists who have remained silent all these years let it pass as truth?  I suspect so but hope not.

The Need for Dialogue

So we have pseudo debates on one hand and silence on the other when what is required is not self-censorship but open critical dialogue on these fundamental matters. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” said Martin Luther King from the pulpit of Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 when he condemned the Vietnam War and broke his own silence in opposition to many of his advisers. A year later to the day, like JFK, he was murdered by the warfare state he condemned. Like Senator Robert Kennedy two months later.  They were killed by very competent people.

Dr. Martin E. Schotz wrote twenty-six years ago in History Will Not Absolve US that those he had in mind for their defense of the Warren Commission were “such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, the editors of The Nation magazine, and, if everyone remembers, I.F. Stone as well.  I think the positions of these individuals are very important because in their surprising (to us) dishonesty and willingness to cooperate with the warfare state in covering up the crime, there is obviously something to be learned.”

Yes, there is. It is time for all people of good will to stop finding excuses for the ruling elites, whether through incompetence theories or the silent refusal to publicly engage the government and its critics on the most important issues of our time – September 11, 2001 and COVID-19.  Those Schotz names above are heroes for many on the liberal/left today who follow in their stead.  It’s as though they have found it necessary to mimic their teachers’ lessons.  Better logic would have them analyzing the premises of September 11 and COVID-19.  Start with the basics.  Be explicit.  Tell us why you are silent.

It’s time to graduate from this school of denial.

 

 

[1] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/letterToVJS.html#partIa

[2] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998EMS.html#s2

Do U.S. and UK Have the World’s Most-Censored Press?

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

How can democracy exist in a nation where none of the mainstream media, and few even of the non-mainstream media, are reporting the realities that all of the controlling billionaires want the public not to know?

On February 12th, the top UN official who monitors nations’ compliance with international human rights laws in the application of international sanctions, Alena Douhan, reported that the U.S.-and-allied sanctions against Venezuela violate a number of international laws and have greatly worsened the conditions, and even the maintenance of life, in Venezuela, and have caused millions of Venezuelans to flee the country so that they and their children can survive. Dr. Douhan is an internationally respected specialist in international human rights laws, and the website of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that she is “an author of more than 120 books and articles on various aspects of international law. She has more than 40 publications (including four books) related to human rights covering inter alia issues of targeted and comprehensive sanctions; unilateral coercive measures, freedom of opinion, privacy, counter terrorism, right to development, right to education,” and other matters. The U.S. and its allies profess to endorse and embody, not to oppose and ignore, the values that the UN hired her to represent, but they do oppose and ignore them.

Her February 12th report, titled “Preliminary findings of the visit to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela by the Special Rapporteur”, stated that:

The Special Rapporteur considers that the state of national emergency announced by the U.S. Government on 8 March 2015 as the ground for introducing sanctions against Venezuela, and repeatedly extended, does not correspond to the requirements of art. 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, such as the existence of a threat to the life of the nation, the limiting of measures to the exigencies of the situation, a limited duration, the absence of discrimination, the prohibition to derogate from the right to life and the prohibition of punishment of activity that does not constitute a criminal offence, as referred to in the communication of human rights experts of 29 January 2021.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that unilateral sanctions against the oil, gold, mining and other economic sectors, the state-owned airline and the TV industry constitute a violation of international law, and their wrongfulness is not excluded with reference to countermeasures. The announced purpose of the “maximum pressure” campaign – to change the Government of Venezuela – violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in the domestic affairs of Venezuela that also affects its regional relations.

Referring to customary norms on the immunity of state property, the Special Rapporteur reminds that assets of the Central Bank and property used for public functions belong to the state of Venezuela rather than to its Government or any individual. Therefore, freezing assets of the Central Bank of Venezuela on the ground of non-recognition of its Government as well as the adoption of relevant sanctions violates the sovereign rights of the country and impedes its effective government to exercise its duty to guarantee the needs of the population.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that the listing of state officials ex officio contradicts the prohibition on punishment for activity which does not constitute a criminal offence, prevents the officials from the possibility to represent the interests of Venezuela in international courts and other international institutions, and undermines the principle of sovereign equality of states. She also notes that repeated refusals of banks in the United States, the United Kingdom and Portugal to release Venezuelan assets even for buying medicine, vaccines and protective kits, under the control of international organizations, violates the above principle and impedes the ability of Venezuela to respond to the COVID-19 emergency.

The Special Rapporteur is concerned that unilateral targeted sanctions in their existing form violate at the very least obligations emerging from universal and regional instruments in the sphere of human rights, many of which are of a peremptory character – procedural guarantees and presumption of innocence with a view that the grounds for their introduction do not constitute for the most part international crimes or comply with the grounds for universal criminal jurisdiction, while noting the fact of the submission to the International Criminal Court by a group of states of a referral against Venezuela on 27 September 2018.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that applying extraterritorial jurisdiction to nationals and companies of third states for cooperation with public authorities, nationals and companies in Venezuela, and alleged threats to such third-state parties, is not justified under international law and increases the risks of over-compliance with sanctions. The Special Rapporteur notes with concern the reported threats to private business and third-country donors, partners and humanitarian organizations, and the introduction of secrecy clauses in the Venezuela Anti-Blockade Constitutional Law as concerns the identity of corresponding partners.

Impact on enjoyment of human rights:

The Special Rapporteur notes with concern that sectoral sanctions on the oil, gold and mining industries, the economic blockade of Venezuela and the freezing of Central Bank assets have exacerbated pre-existing economic and humanitarian situation by preventing the earning of revenues and the use of resources to develop and maintain infrastructure and for social support programs, which has a devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela, especially those in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, people with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous population.

The Special Rapporteur underlines that existing humanitarian exemptions are ineffective and insufficient, subject to lengthy and costly procedures, and do not cover the delivery of spare parts, equipment and machinery necessary for maintenance and restoration of the economy and public services. …

The Special Rapporteur underlines that the blocking of property, assets and bank accounts of citizens of Venezuela by foreign and correspondent banks, quite often because of over-compliance, results in the violation of the right to property. She also notes with concern that the application of unilateral sanctions against Venezuela affects the rights of third-country nationals, in particular, the termination of contracts with third-country companies has the potential risk of affecting economic and property rights of their owners and employees; and the absence of contributions from Venezuela, which used to donate to regional assistance projects (e.g. ALBA), is negatively affecting the right to humanitarian aid of its beneficiaries beyond Venezuela’s borders.

The Special Rapporteur recognises that targeted and secondary sanctions violate rights to a fair trial, procedural guarantees, freedom of movement, property rights and the right to reputation. Sanctions against representatives of opposition groups for participation in elections violate their right to hold and express opinions, and to participate in public affairs.

In short, the U.S. regime has blocked even the possibility of democracy in Venezuela, and has done this by itself violating international laws. The U.S. Government is behaving as an international thug, and it lies to say that it supports the rule of law in international affairs; it is supporting, instead, the rule of force in international affairs; it is today’s Nazi regime, attacking and destroying countries that had posed no danger whatsoever to itself, and trying to control every nation for the benefit of America’s aristocracy. Yet, U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, with only one exception, hid instead of reported what she had said. Consequently, the U.S., and its allies, have the world’s most untrustworthy ‘news’-media, which systematically hide (instead of report) this ugly reality to their public. Obviously, such a regime cannot possibly be a democracy, because their public are being lied-to by the regime. That’s how America and its allies came to invade and destroy Iraq, and that’s the way things clearly are today. The U.S. regime is voracious; it is imperialistic; and it is psychopathic.

In fact, Dr. Douhan greatly understated how much the U.S.-and-allied regimes have been and are perpetrating international-law violations against Venezuela, because nothing in her report even so much as mentioned the biggest of all violations of international law, which was the violation for which the Nazis were prosecuted and executed at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II, which was “Aggressive War” — the perpetration of attacking against a nation that has not attacked one’s own nation.

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting headlined on March 10th, “UN Rebuke of U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela Met With Stunning Silence” (from U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media) and closed by saying that,

Keeping with tradition, Douhan’s damning report has been met with stunning silence by establishment media outlets. Neither the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post nor BBC reported on Douhan’s findings, leaving the task primarily to alternative media (Venezuelanalysis, 2/15/21; Canary, 2/13/21). (CNN—2/13/21—had an exceptional report focused on the UN report, which noted Douhan’s statement that sanctions “constitute violations of international law.”)

The issue is not that Western media are uninterested in Venezuela. In February 2019, the month after Juan Guaidó declared himself president, the Guardian published 67 separate articles about Venezuela, regularly citing the UN on Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian conditions—signaling Maduro’s sole responsibility for a crisis about which something must surely be done.

For example, the Guardian (2/27/19) reported in 2019, “The UN’s political and peace building chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, depicted a devastating collapse in Venezuela’s health system”—while making no reference to sanctions.

Similarly, the New York Times, whose editorial board had supported 10 out of 12 U.S.-backed coups in Latin America since 1954, has regularly covered the deteriorating economic situation in Venezuela with—at best—only fleeting reference to U.S. and European sanctions.

The New York Times (12/5/20), for instance, described how “Yajaira Paz, 35, has lost nearly everything” to the Venezuelan economic crisis: “her mother, dead from a heart problem she could not afford to treat; her brothers, to migration; her faith in democracy, to the nation’s crippled institutions” — omitting any mention of sanctions.

The Washington Post Magazine (3/3/21) reports that “most Venezuelans eat fewer than two meals a day”–but doesn’t mention that it’s U.S. government policy to make their lives worse.

The Washington Post Magazine’s emotive article also noted how “the pandemic wore away even more access to basic necessities in a country racked by deepening poverty and crisis,” blaming “the national mismanagement of resources” and, again, ignoring the existence of sanctions.

Corporate media thus consistently emphasizes the gravity of Venezuela’s humanitarian situation while overlooking crucial evidence on the catastrophic impact of sanctions, fortifying the very narratives deployed to justify the economic siege against Venezuela.

The collective silence over Douhan’s report is only the most recent case of propaganda by omission on Venezuela. By refusing to acknowledge Washington and London’s fundamental role in making Venezuela’s “economy scream,” corporate media play a key part in manufacturing consent for regime change.

I looked to find whether the London Times or Telegraph — UK’s equivalents to America’s Washington Post and New York Times — had reported on Douhan’s report, and I found that they had not. Then I searched to find whether Reuters had, and found that they had published, on February 12th, not a news-report about the matter, but instead a brazen propaganda-report about it, headlining “UN envoy urges U.S. to relax Venezuela sanctions, drawing opposition rebuke”, which propaganda failed so much as even to mention the Special Rapporteur’s central allegation, of rampant international-law violations by the U.S. and its allies against Venezuela in these sanctions. The Reuters ’news’ came entirely from enemies of Venezuela’s Government, and closed with

“We regret the rapporteur’s imprecisions and the lack of mention of subjects like corruption, inefficiency, political violence and the use of hunger as a tool of social and political control,” Miguel Pizarro, opposition leader Juan Guaido’s envoy to the United Nations, wrote on Twitter.

“That is allowing oneself to be used for regime’s propaganda.”

U.S. Ambassador for Venezuela James Story – who is based in neighboring Colombia, as the two countries cut off diplomatic ties in 2019 – wrote on Twitter on Thursday that Venezuela’s crisis was due to “the regime’s corruption,” noting that the sanctions exempted humanitarian goods.

The Special Rapporteur’s report had made mention of those very same allegations by the U.S.-and-allied team, and noted that such non-adjudicated allegations have no legal standing whatsoever, and that

The Special Rapporteur underlines that existing humanitarian exemptions are ineffective and insufficient, subject to lengthy and costly procedures, and do not cover the delivery of spare parts, equipment and machinery necessary for maintenance and restoration of the economy and public services.

The Special Rapporteur is concerned that the application of extraterritorial secondary sanctions [punishments against countries and companies that refuse to comply with the U.S. regime’s sanctions against Venezuela] as well as the reported threats of sanctions, result in over-compliance with existing sanctions regimes, preventing the Government of Venezuela, its public sector and private companies from purchasing machinery, spare parts, medicine, food, agricultural supplies and other essential goods even within the licenses issues by the U.S. Government, and also result in a growing number of bank transfer refusals, the extension of bank transfer periods (from 2 to 45 days), higher delivery, insurance and bank transfer costs, as well as reported price rises for all (especially imported) goods.

The Special Rapporteur notes with concern that the absence of resources and reluctance of foreign partners, banks and delivery companies to deal with Venezuelan partners results in the impossibility to buy necessary medical and technological equipment, reagents and spare parts for the repair and maintenance of electricity, gas, water, public transport, telephone and communication systems, schools, hospitals, houses and other public institutions, thus undermining the enjoyment of many human rights, including the right to a decent life.

In other words: reading the Reuters ’news’-report is merely reading lies, instead of news.

Not only do the U.S. and its allies have ’news’-media that aren’t more reliable than those in other dictatorial regimes, but the U.S. itself has the world’s highest percentage of its people living in prisons, and if that doesn’t indicate a police-state, then nothing does. America is a one-dollar-one-vote country, an aristocracy, not a democracy, and any nation that’s internationally allied to it is only another of its vassal nations, no democracy itself. Imperialism is international dictatorship, and that’s what the U.S. now is. All of its alliances need to be terminated — especially NATO. Either the UN will continue to be just an international talking-forum, having no actual power over or to impose international law, or else NATO will be ended, because only the international thugs have power in the international realm, at present. Any nation that remains in NATO is vassalizing itself to the world’s most aggressive nation, America. It’s in the spirit of Hitler, not in the spirit of FDR.

Any country which remains allied with the U.S. regime is plain evil. How can the American people tolerate such a dictatorship? On March 11th, a Democratic Party website, Political Wire, headlined “Impasse Over Iran Nuclear Talks Sets Off Scramble”, and virtually all of the reader-comments were blaming only the Republican Trump for this situation, not the Democrat Biden, for it, though this is Biden’s action, not Trump’s. The partisanship isn’t really about good versus bad, but about Democrat versus Republican. Thus, a brainwashed public is easy for the billionaires to control, so that both Parties represent, actually, only the billionaires’ interests, not the public’s interests. Just as the Nazi regime played the German people for suckers, today’s American regime plays the American people for suckers.

Here’s how evil the U.S. is, and how tolerant of it the American people are: the only good thing that President Barack Obama did was the Iran nuclear deal, to end the punishing sanctions against Iran if Iran would allow in IAEA inspectors and not move toward developing nuclear warheads; but Obama’s successor Donald Trump tore it up; and now Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, is demanding that Iran — which hadn’t broken the deal, the U.S. did — must make additional concessions first, weaken its missile-delivery systems, before the U.S. regime will even consider to negotiate with Iran to restore the Iran nuclear deal. In other words: Biden is effectively continuing Trump, by demanding Iran to make concessions even before negotiations start — a nonstarter, which Iran cannot accept, and no sovereign nation could accept. This behavior by the U.S. regime continues decades of U.S. imperialism against Iran. America stole Iran from the people of Iran, in a 1953 CIA coup, and after the Iranian people grabbed their country back in 1979, America’s aristocracy have been ceaselessly trying to steal it from them yet again. And yet the U.S. regime has the gall to blame Iran, not blame America’s own billionaires (the beneficiaries of U.S. imperialism and wars); and, so, Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats, instead of Americans blaming their own actual dictators (the billionaires who fund both of the dictatorship’s Parties).

Will Europeans continue being allied with today’s Nazi regime? What news-media in the U.S. and in its vassal nations report these realities? Is that not a total blockade against truth?

Furthermore, on March 13th, the brilliant geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris headlined an 18-minute video report, “Israel v. Iran in Syria: Israel’s Covert War on Iran’s tankers” and penetrated behind the surface U.S.-and-allied reporting on the publicly unannounced change by the U.S. regime and its allies, to replace the U.S. gang’s prior hiring of jihadist mercenaries to bring down Syria’s Government, to instead impose a blockade against Syria so as to starve-out the Syrian people, as the new way to conquer Syria. Of course, what he reports there is not reported in U.S.-and-allied media.

How can democracy exist in a nation where none of the mainstream media, and few even of the non-mainstream media, are reporting the realities that all of the controlling billionaires want the public not to know? How can that be a democracy? It can’t.

Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime. 

This is true.  The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience.  We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket.  All this is documented and not disputed.  It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.

With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive.  It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

Just the other day The New York Times had this headline:

Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.

Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.”  This is guilt by headline.  It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook.  Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow.  What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy.  We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.

First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc.  They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically.  Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.

Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says:

They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’

Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.

In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.  These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so.  If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many.  The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense.  These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc.  They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media.  Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations.  Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc.  The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.  All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work?  Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell.  It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc.  They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.

As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:

There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director. 

It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA.  He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.”  This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.

Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short.  Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey.  Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.

The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case.  His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues.  To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK.  It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be.  They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.

So they killed him.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi.  He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual.  The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.

To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it.  That’s where the true stories lie.  That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.

To Conspiracy Theory or to Not Conspiracy Theory (That is the Question)

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By Scott Owen

Source: CounterPunch

Ever since the words were first introduced, conspiracy theories have carried the weight and stigma of mysterious enigmas wrapped in multiple layers of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies. The very notion of conspiracy theories is itself considered by some to be a conspiracy theory. There are those who maintain that the CIA invented the term or at least brought it into our common language as a way of ridiculing those who questioned the Warren Report account of the murder of president JFK.

Whether the CIA did or did not intentionally use those words, conspiracy theory, to discredit those who were non-believers of the official Warren Report line, we will never know. And that’s the thing about a conspiracy theory, as to its truth, we may never know. What should be known however, what we would be better to believe, is that in this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies, that there are without a doubt conspiracies. If the CIA ever had the desire to de-legitimize someone or some entire group, then or especially now, this moment is certainly ripe for supplying them with all the necessary ingredients for pulling off a grand conspiracy of mass de-legitimization of those they see as being political rabble-rousers.

The group who stormed the capitol on Jan.6th is one such group who follow conspiracy theories but although they are unique in being the ones who stormed the capitol, they are not unique in their beliefs in conspiracy theories. It might be hard, if one were to look, to find someone who does not believe in some conspiracy theory or another and it would be right for that to be the case because surely, one or the other of those theories is true, based on facts and even provable if the right material evidence could be produced. In this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies however, it is sometimes very hard, impossible even for most of us, to get our hands on the right material evidence and those shady CIA operators are loving it. Nothing produces the environment where conspiracy theories thrive like reams of hidden or redacted evidence.

Are many of the conspiracy theories we hear nothing but pure bunk made-up by who knows who for no other reason than to confuse and distract? Yes, many of them are. Are some of those theories the result of half understood notions that are used in an effort to understand hidden truth? Yes, many of them are. Are some of those theories true but only the tip of even greater conspiracies that we still haven’t even begun to suspect? It’s likely so. Would it be of some value to the public to keep an open mind where conspiracy theories are concerned? Yes, as it would be one of the tyrants greatest moments in  psy-op history if we were not keeping an open mind where conspiracy theories are concerned. Are conspiracy theories currently being down-played and ridiculed as being absurd and the domain of idiots and fools? Yes they are!

Is this treatment of conspiracy theories as some form of mental illness or instability, coupled with corporate and government censorship of things that they and they alone deem as being conspiracy theories with no redeeming even harmful value to the public, a smart way to go in societies hoping to retain some shred of truth and freedom? No it is not. Let us ask ourselves then, would we be wise to write off as unacceptable any theories that suggest conspiracy and to then allow government and corporate control of censorship of those theories? I think not. Would you then prefer to live in a society where people are allowed to freely suggest conspiracies where there may or may not be conspiracies or would you prefer to live in a society where no conspiracy theories are allowed even though they may or may not be true?

Do you wish to live in a society where you and you alone are allowed to discern truth from fiction according to the evidence you yourself are able to uncover or do you want corporations and government to do that for you?

REVIEW: Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies by Edward Curtin

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By Ray McGinnis

Source:  Off-Guardian

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a selection of essays. They reveal what stirs author Ed Curtin’s heart, his mind, and his path toward clarity. With each chapter he passionately reflects on the state of his country and what matters most to him. It is a compelling read.

The epigraph at the beginning of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” comes from Theodore Roethke’s poem “In A Dark Time”. Here the poet describes a state of disorientation and dislocation of identity. Roethke asserts this is essential to achieve clarity, insight and wisdom. In a dark time, one discovers the fragmented and broken state of things. With this fitting epigraph, Ed Curtin proceeds to alert his readers to the fragmented and broken state of things in America, and the task of its citizenry to begin to see more clearly.

The topics Curtin, a former professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, takes up are not original to him. But they are marked with his own articulate original stamp. One aspect of his novel contribution is that Curtin steps beyond standard frameworks of political analyses.

Three themes have permeated his attention from a young age: truth, death and freedom. He cites an excerpt from an interview with the poet Kenneth Rexroth who told journalist Lawrence Lipton in 1959:

Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.

Rexroth referred to this system of fraud as the “social lie.” And in Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, Curtin takes on the task of describing the roots of the fraud, and its more recent manifestations. He also takes time to point out, despite the burdens society grapples with in an age of deceit, that beauty, art, love, and whimsy are among the qualities that persist as signs of grace.

In his essay “Inside America’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry Of Lies” Curtin cites Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans who in 1969 brought to trial a case naming persons connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Garrison attempted to show that the assassination of JFK was the work of the CIA and Allen Dulles.

However, Garrison was routinely described as a lunatic by CIA-connected media spokespersons. It was Garrison’s conclusion that American citizens passively consumed television news that was laced with propaganda. Such propaganda was manufactured to preclude Americans from “understanding…what is really happening….”

Garrison warned that Americans were living “in a doll’s house.” Building on the hard lessons Jim Garrison learned from the trial in 1969, Ed Curtin observes:

In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

His book was also released in winter 2020, some 57 years after JFK’s assassination.

Curtin notes that in 2009:

[President] Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S. trained killers, and now [followers of Trump complain about] all these ‘non-white’ people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S…

After 2009. it was learned that U.S. officers at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies trained members of the Honduran military to oust democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. In 2009 and the years following Honduras has had one of the highest rates of murder in the world. These have been driven by death squads connected to the Honduran military. But this coup mattered little to both President’s Obama and Trump, while Hondurans have paid the price in murder, increased debt and poverty.

Examples of what Curtin raises continue since his book was published in late 2020. For Venezuelans it matters little whether a Republican or a Democrat is president in the USA. Under Donald Trump there was a failed attempt in May 2020 to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. And on the first day of his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order declaring the United States recognizes Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the nations’ President. This despite Maduro winning over 67% of the popular vote in 2018; That the second candidate in the election results was Henri Falcón who won 21%; And Juan Guaidó wasn’t even a candidate in 2018. Imagine if Venezuela protested the result of the 2020 United States election, and recognized Mitt Romney as president (who ran in 2012 but didn’t run in 2020).

With Biden there is a change of tone from Trump, but many American foreign policies remain the same. Former President Jimmy Carter said of Venezuela’s 2012 elections when Hugo Chavez was re-elected:

…of the 92 elections that we’ve [Carter Centre Foundation in Atlanta] monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.

But that story that doesn’t conform with the media’s narrative. So, it goes down the memory hole.

Curtin notes that while average Americans have not constructed the doll’s house they live in, they are complicit. It is average Americans who have accepted “decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind.” A consequence of accepting illusory narratives is that people are not really free.

In order to cope with a plausible lie, consumers of the news play dumb. And Curtin notes most Americans…

want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked.

As they become a people of the lie, repeating the lies they are fed, a memetic desire arises in society. And the repetition of these lies fuels violence and scapegoating. The doll’s house that Americans (and many citizens of other countries who consume the news uncritically) live in, are reinforced by contracts they have made with the world. This is in order to enhance their social standing, financial status, professional advancement and maintain familial harmony. That kind of peace of mind and contentment require individuals not to venture out far from the doll house, in case they encounter truths they find hard to handle.

Curtin notes that the Central Intelligence Agency began to use the term “conspiracy theory” in a memo on April 1, 1967. This was to discredit assassination theories about other plausible actors in the death of the slain president on November 22, 1963. And he notes that it just so happens that the term “9/11” was first used on September 12, 2001, by future New York Times editor Bill Keller to designate the language for how to refer to the day of the attacks. By using a term synonymous with dialing an emergency number in the United States, the term became fused with feelings of “anxiety, depression, panic and confusion.”

It is useful to note that at the time of the attacks on September 11, 2001, the emergency number in Saudi Arabia was 999. In Afghanistan the emergency numbers were 102, 112 and 119. The numbers in Yemen were 191 and 194. The emergency numbers in the United Arab Emirates were 112, 998 and 999. The emergency number in Libya was 1515. The number in Kuwait was 112. The numbers in Iraq were 104, 115 and 122. In Syria emergency numbers were 110, 112 and 113. In Lebanon the numbers variously were 112, 140, 175 and 999. The emergency numbers in Egypt were 122, 123 and 180. Across continental Europe the emergency number to call on September 11, 2001, was 112. The emergency numbers in Iran were 110, 112, 115 and 125.

Curiously, 911 was a number to dial an emergency uniquely in the United States, Canada, Mexico (as well as 065, 066 and 068), and South America. 911 was not an emergency number in the states where Arabs were alleged to have plotted to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

In some future scenario – were it to ever happen – might rogue American terrorists fly planes into skyscrapers in Tehran, Iran? And in such a scenario, might such terrorists plot an attack on a January 10th, 12th or 15th of a given year, fusing the day of the atrocity with the abbreviation for a date synonymous with one of the numbers Iranians dialed in case of an emergency?

In his essay “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore,” Curtin notices that by “referring to September 11 as 9/11,” Keller ensured…

an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. It is a term that pushes all the right buttons evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery; it is propaganda at its best.

Because Curtin suspects that the repetition of the term “9/11” is embedded in an advanced form of mind-control, he refuses to use the term in relation to the attacks. Instead, he uses the phrase “the attacks of September 11, 2001.” Whatever vocabulary we use to refer to the attacks, Curtin advises that we find one that can unbind us from the mesmerizing impact of its official shorthand repeated endlessly, subliminally evoking confusion, depression and panic in its hearers.

As our post-modern society has evolved, the task of creating propaganda is more complex. And so, the complexity of society drives a majority to want ready-made frameworks for understanding their reality coherently. Curtin shows that…

people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the ‘truth,’ but that so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda.

Nonetheless, the propaganda is efficient enough to allow most people to deduce that they’ve reached their conclusions of their own free will. Most people will assume that they’ve been provided with a suitable range of information about the key points of a given topic in order to decide what is trustworthy. However, the same consumers of the news will regard as inconceivable that the narrative they’ve been led to accept contains cherry-picked news that omits perspectives that are off-message. Surely, wouldn’t any dissenting voices that are worth knowing about would be given a hearing on the six o’clock news?

Curtin concurs with author Lisa Pease who wrote in her book A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy:

The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.

To support his assessment, Curtin points to numerous examples in different chapters across his book. This includes a chapter on “The Message From Dallas, JFK and The Unspeakable,” where he summarizes JFK author James W. Douglass’ layer-by-layer excavation of a CIA-backed assassination of a president who had turned from war-making toward peace-making.

In another chapter titled “What Are We Working For ‘At Eternity’s Gate’,” Curtin writes about the rat-race. He recalls a summer job as a clerk in a General Motors office in Manhattan. The “bait” was the salary, and so his youth was spent that summer confined to a boring job.

As I read Curtin’s description, I thought about some of the jobs I had: working a night shift as a hotel security guard, a cleaner at a private golf club, and working at a vehicle repair shop for the Ministry of Forests for the Province of British Columbia. The latter I spent a summer affixing forestry vehicle identification serial numbers on the side of government trucks.

The author mentions a film about the life of Vincent Van Gogh, titled At Eternity’s Gate, which offers a vision of new possibilities for what it means to work, to be alive. For Van Gogh it was the “act of painting” that was “the stroke of genius.” And so, for the impoverished painter it was not the completion of paintings that was important, but immersing himself in painting. This was the key to life.

In this essay, Curtin invites the reader to contemplate what it means to live and to ask ourselves why we work. He tells us:

For Vincent the answer was simple: reality. But reality is not given to us and is far from simple; we must create it in acts that penetrate the screens and clichés that wall us off from it.

One of the screens that Curtin had to penetrate was a slogan he was taught as a United States Marine:

My rifle is my life.

Curtin saw through the slogan, recognizing that being human meant to be a lover of life and being committed to waging peace.

In yet another essay, “The Sexual Passion of Winston Smith”, Curtin details the commodification of society, where everything can be bought and sold. As he speaks about the body’s commodification, Curtin reminds us that part of the body – “the tongue is a bell, tolling out its [language’s] meaning.” It is finally the tongue that helps us in speech to “tell the truth that propagandists try to deny.”

In his book, the author offers suggestions for pointing a way forward that can help us search for truth in a landscape of falsehoods. One of these is poetry. He points out that citizens in Chile, Ireland and Russia know their national poets and can quote their works “by heart.” But in America poets and poetry are ignored. A new generation is too busy checking Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. But Curtin argues:

Poetry is the search for truth. It marries outer to inner.

The best of what poetry can offer helps a society…

address questions of value and ultimate concern…of truth and lies.

He contrasts these with…

screen and selfie culture [where] these matters are irrelevant.

In addition to truth and lies, Curtin points to myriad oddities that dot the landscape of America’s cultural past. Many of the rock n’ roll bands in the mid-sixties were viewed as part of a countercultural/anti-war protest movement against the establishment. There are books like one by Alex Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock, that document operations by the CIA and FBI to discredit and disrupt the lives of pop-rock stars identified as subversive. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and others had extensive intelligence files on them. Constantine cites a leaked intelligence memorandum discussed in testimony before the Church Committee on April 26, 1976.

Regarding certain recording artists, the FBI wrote to its agents:

Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges….Send articles to newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt….Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death.

But was another arm of the intelligence community simultaneously grooming anti-establishment recording artists? In Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies Curtin notes that Buffalo Springfield performed in concert, along with the Beach Boys, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, in Orange County, New York, on November 25, 1967.

Curtin points out that this is “a very odd venue for a ‘dissident’ rock group.” Their Top Ten hit in the spring of ’67 – “For What It’s Worth” – invited radio listeners to consider, though it wasn’t “exactly clear” what was “happening,” to “stop,” and “look” at what was “going down.”

How did members of Buffalo Springfield feel about performing at the military academy when there were “battle lines being drawn?” And what an odd thing for cadets at West Point to be listening to lyrics that warn:

step out of line, the man come and take you away.

Citing David McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, Curtin notes that “Papa” John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, and that his dad was a Marine Corps Captain:

John’s wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was involved in covert intelligence in Vietnam.

The Doors Jim Morrison, a neighbor and friend of Philips, was the son of U.S. Navy Admiral George Morrison who was the commander of American Naval ships during the Gulf of Tonkin incident that accelerated the Vietnam War.

Frank Zappa’s father happened to be a chemical warfare specialist.

Curtin notes others like David Crosby and Stephen Stills were also from military family backgrounds. And many of these young musicians all converged at Laurel Canyon:

Although they were draft age, none of them [were] drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock movement…

Were these musicians’ part of intelligence community operations, as much as the agents who were harassing them? Or as David McGowan asks, was…

the entire youth culture of the 1960s…created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray…?

With each chapter, Ed Curtin takes us into different rooms in the doll’s house, and helps us connect the dots. His stories and reflections, in an age of “fake news”, are essential reading.

In the quest for truth, readers of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies will be advised to take the road less travelled. This road requires we quiet our minds, and welcome silence. It is a road less travelled where each must ask: what can I do to help transform our terrible, corrupt, beautiful world longing to be more human, just and peaceful?

Curtin does not intend for us as readers to simply finish his book unfazed. He hopes his chapters might rouse us to find ways to resist in this age of permanent war and oligarchy, in a world still longing for peace and justice.

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is available in digital and paperback versions at Amazon and other retailers. For more info and praise for the book, visit Ed Curtin’s website: www.edwardcurtin.com