Category Archives: war

Does the Washington Post Have Fake News?

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

There are two kinds of fake news:

One is a report of something that actually didn’t happen, which for a newspaper to do can reasonably be called lying, inasmuch as a newspaper is expected to report only things that happen, and any violation of that strict standard — which separates journalism from propaganda — is at least negligence violating the very reason why consumers purchase or subscribe to a newspaper (that reason being trustworthiness). This deception amounts unqualifiedly to lying, in any case where a reasonable assumption can be made that the given false ‘news’ report’s falsehood results from the publisher’s propagandistic orientation and intention to deceive on that given matter. (This might be done in order to please the controlling stockholder of an advertiser, or for many other reasons.) In such cases, the fake news is propaganda instead of news. To sell to consumers propaganda as ‘news’ is additionally to deceive them into paying the publisher in order to become deceived by the publisher; so, it’s a deception on top of a deception; it is actually deception-squared. That’s why selling such ‘news’ is even worse than merely giving it away for free (such as honest PR or propaganda is — it is free).

The other type of fake news is omission of a crucial fact from a report, whenever the omission is so crucial that it will sway some readers to believe «x» when «not x» is true, and therefore such an omission is equivalent to lying. This is a far more subtle type of deception, because it relies upon the consumer to deceive himself, instead of upon the publisher explicitly asserting the falsehood to the reader or hearer. Such «sins of omission» are impossible to outlaw, but are more insidious than direct lying is, because any publisher can easily abuse this power to deceive, merely by making clear to his employees what types of facts they will be penalized (demoted etc.) for reporting. For example, any publisher who causes employees to exclude stating as a fact that some public official is lying or did lie about a particular matter, when proof is available that the given official did lie about it, would be publishing fake news on that matter. However, more often, a publisher simply establishes a policy not to hire editors (or producers) who would allow a report to be published that calls a «liar» a person whom the publisher favors, not even if that person can be proven to have lied — he may be said to have «erred» maybe, but not «lied». The tendency, therefore, is that people in power may be described as «lacking in experience» or etc., but not described as a «liar».

Examples will be provided here of both types of fake news in the Washington Post, all of which examples exhibit the same intention to deceive readers in the same type of way on a particular broader subject. This broader subject that’s being deceptively presented is whether or not the U.S. should conquer foreign countries; or, in other words, whether or not America’s military-industrial complex (which thrives upon taxpayers’ enhanced appetites for financing and shedding blood for the nation’s conquests abroad) will be served. Service to that objective is otherwise called «neoconservatism» or neoconservative propaganda, which is the way that the Washington Post will be documented here to be. Understanding the motive for such fake news is far more complex; the only issue to be addressed here is the fake news itself — this particular agenda (neoconservatism) for the WP’s fake news:

First of all, here, will be the paradigmatic case of neoconservative propaganda: the deceptions that were perpetrated upon the American public in order to invade Iraq.

As has been pointed out by many books and by some bloggers, the Washington Post was, in 2002 and 2003, one of the leading deceivers of the American public into invading Iraq so as to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The fact that President George W. Bush lied to assert that he was in possession of conclusive evidence that Hussein was producing WMD in 2002 was, in at least one instance, incontestable practically at the very moment that he said it, but this crucial fact was never reported by the Washington Post, not even when the authoritative agency in the particular instance, the IAEA, made repeated attempts to draw the attention of America’s reporters to the lie.

During a press conference with Britain’s Tony Blair, Bush said, on 7 September 2002, that a «new report» had just come out of the IAEA that Iraq «were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need,» in order to invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein. The IAEA made clear that «There’s never been a report like that issued from this agency», but the WP (like the rest of America’s press) failed to report that the IAEA was accusing the U.S. President, of, essentially, concocting an IAEA ‘report’, on this vitally important matter, a ‘report’ that never existed — in other words, of outright lying in order to assert that the case to invade Iraq had already been made by the IAEA.

This instance wasn’t like all of the U.S. ‘intelligence failures’ in which the President’s own — i.e. U.S. — intelligence agencies, had refused to contradict him in public; this was instead an entirely independent intelligence agency that the President was citing as an authority here — and they were directly contradicting him, in public, about it. They just couldn’t get word out about that, to the American public. So, the idea that Bush wasn’t lying in order to ‘justify’ his invading Iraq, but was only relying upon America’s own faulty intelligence agencies regarding the matter, definitely does qualify as fake news in the WP, and it persists even today, as fake ‘history’ about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The invasion on 20 March 2003 wasn’t ‘an error’; it was a crime, and a very massive one.

This fake news that Bush had ‘erred’ to invade Iraq was of the indirect type because it entailed suppression of the crucial fact from being published; it wasn’t fake news because the WP published their own lies about it. However, such stenographic ‘reporting’ of the government’s lies is merely passing along a dictatorship’s propaganda, not publishing real news. Real news always requires a publisher’s own investigation and the skepticism that any real scientist has about any allegation. In matters so important as an invasion of a foreign country, ‘news’-reporting can’t get any worse than such stenography being palmed-off as ‘news’, and the persons to be blamed for this fraud against the public are never the mere employees (who might lose their jobs if they don’t comply) but the publisher himself or herself — ultimately the controlling stockholder in the firm, who wouldn’t invest in the given ‘news’-organization if it were to be fully honest.

More recently, the WP has published fake news about Syria’s Bashar al-Assad (who is a Ba’athist, like Saddam Hussein was), like it had published fake news about Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

On 2 April 2017, it was «‘The hospitals were slaughterhouses’: A journey into Syria’s secret torture wards».

On 15 May 2017, it was «Syria using crematorium to hide executions, State Department says».

On 16 May 2017, it was «‘I still have nightmares’: Voices from inside Assad’s torture network in Syria».

All were based upon PR-agency-shopped allegations and questionable evidence (like ‘Saddam’s WMD’ etc. had also been) from people who either were, or could have been, Al Qaeda affiliated, or else Islamic Brotherhood affiliated, extremist Islamists — supporters of Sharia law. And it all started with (and the WP’s ultimate sources were uncorroborated testifiers as having personally experienced what was shown in) «the Caesar photographs», from «the Syrian Detainee Report». As wikipedia puts it (my boldfaces):

The source, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was at the time a photographer with the Syrian military police who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Movement. His job was «taking pictures of killed detainees» at just two military hospitals in Damascus.[5] He told war crimes investigators that he used to be a forensic investigator. But once the Syrian uprising began, his job became documenting the corpses of those killed in Syrian military prisons.[8] He did not claim to have witnessed executions or torture.

As the U.S. government’s Wilson Center explains about the Syrian National Movement:

The 2011 uprising

After Syrians launched their own uprising in March 2011, the [Muslim] Brotherhood took a leading role in assembling the exiled opposition in the Syrian National Council. It was launched in August 2011. The Brotherhood was the only organized and experienced movement among an otherwise deeply fragmented opposition. It also had support from Qatar and Turkey. But its domination over the opposition in exile was contested. The Brotherhood’s immediate challenge was competition from rival Islamists who secured influential positions on the Syrian National Coalition, the Council’s successor, which was established in November 2012.

The rival Islamists included the Coalition’s first president, Sheikh Mouaz al Khatib. Khatib, a former preacher at the historic Umayyad Mosque, had special legitimacy since he had just left Damascus. Another rival was Imad al din al Rashid, former vice-dean of the Faculty of Sharia of Damascus. His Syrian National Movement, an alliance of secularists, moderate Islamists and Salafis [«Salafis» means extreme fundamentalist Muslims], failed to recruit significant following.

Both Qatar and Turkey are run by fundamentalist («Sharia») Sunni Muslims who want to conquer the Shia Muslims who lead the fundamentalist Shia regime in Iran and the non-sectarian secular regime in Syria. These Sunnis want also a (U.S.-supported) gas pipeline to be built through Syria to transport Qatar’s gas into the EU to grab market-share away from Russia, which is the main country that America’s aristocracy wants to weaken and ultimately to conquer.

Saddam Hussein had been supported by America’s aristocracy when Saddam was trying to conquer Shiite Iran back in the 1980s, but became opposed by the U.S. aristocracy as soon as he turned against and invaded fundamentalist Sunni Kuwait and became friendly toward secular Russia, which since 1979 has been plagued by (U.S.-Saudi-backed) «mujahideen» (who became called «Taliban» and some of whom then became «Al Qaeda») and other fundamentalist Sunnis in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere, who want a Sharia-law-ruled Russia. The Obama regime in America came into office in 2009 determined to overthrow Syria’s secular leader Bashar al-Assad; and, starting in 2010, actively pursued organizing rebels against Syria’s secular government. On 24 September 2010, Jared Cohen of Hillary Clinton’s State Department was working to find a way to stir demonstrations to bring down Assad’s government; and, on 23 June 2011, he was meeting inside the London Ecuadorean Embassy with Google’s Eric Schmidt to pry out of Julian Assange information about how to do this; and, on 25 July 2012, Cohen was (now as a high Google executive paid by top Hillary backer Schmidt) telling Hillary’s other aides about Cohen’s own progress in putting the Syrian overthrow-plan into effect. Google also assisted the 1 March 2013 start of Hillary’s plan for the February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which used nazis to bring down Ukraine’s government, just as they used jihadists to bring down Syria’s government — extremists in both cases.

With ‘allies’ such as Saudi Arabia’s despots, and such as the apartheid Israeli ‘democracy’ (which latter is so theocratic it doesn’t even have any constitution), the U.S. government is no ‘democracy’, despite its Constitution (which the U.S. government routinely violates). But whereas the Washington Post calls Russian Television ‘fake news’, Russian Television presents news about those regimes and their allies, while the WP presents lies about RT, and about Russia, and about any ally of Russia (such as Saddam Hussein was, and Bashar al-Assad is). If this sounds like a lopsided characterization, it’s nonetheless stated because the associated reality is also lopsided. That’s the reality which should be reported but is instead blacked-out in America’s press

Of course, one of those Russian allies is Syria, whose government the U.S. government therefore is at war against, and has invaded, while pontificating that the world’s most ‘aggressive’ country is Russia, and while claiming to be the moral authority that can dictate morality to the ‘barbarous’ Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.

On 16 December 2016, Human Rights Watch published «If the Dead Could Speak: Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria’s Detention Facilities», claiming to confirm the «Caesar» photos. Then, on 7 February 2017, Amnesty International published «Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Exterminations at Saydnaya Prison, Syria», further ‘confirming’ the alleged depravity of Assad’s government. Yet a third ‘authority’ that was additionally cited in the three articles in the Washington Post that were here referred to as having alleged that Assad was doing these types of things to innocent people during the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-Turkey-UAE-Kuwait war to conquer his country, was the Syrian Network for Human Rights. How reliable, then, are these three alleged ‘authorities’ on that subject?

Wikipedia’s section «Criticism of Human Rights Watch» has a subsection «Allegations of Bias», which states, among other things:

Ideological and selection bias[edit]

HRW has been accused of evidence-gathering bias because it is said to be «credulous of civilian witnesses in places like Gaza and Afghanistan» but «skeptical of anyone in a uniform».[1] Its founder, Robert Bernstein, accused the organization of poor research methods and relying on «witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers».[2] In October 2009, Bernstein said that the organization had lost critical perspective on events in the Middle East:[2] «[T]he region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region».[2] HRW responded by saying that HRW «does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world».[3] Tom Porteus, director of the HRW’s London branch, replied that the organization rejected Bernstein’s «obvious double standard. Any credible human rights organization must apply the same human rights standards to all countries».[4]

According to The Times, HRW «does not always practice the transparency, tolerance and accountability it urges on others».[1] …

Fundraising[edit]

On September 7, 2010, it was announced that George Soros planned to donate $100 million to Human Rights Watch.[69] Soros’ donation was criticized by Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor.[70]

Journalists have criticized Human Rights Watch for requesting, encouraging or accepting financial donations in Saudi Arabia and for its fundraising methods.

Moreover, the PR department of New York’s Syracuse University headlined on 17 December 2016, «HRW Validates Caesar Report on Syrian Torture, First Reported by Law Professor David Crane» and reported regarding the HRW study, which was co-authored by Professor Crane:

Commissioned by London law firm Carter-Ruck on behalf of Qatar, the Caesar Report’s other co-authors were international prosecutors Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva QC and Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. This team — which also included forensics experts — analyzed 835 images, 150 of those in depth, uncovering evidence of starvation, beatings and strangulation, as well as an obsessive documentation of the killings. The lawyers also cross-examined Caesar and found him to be «a truthful and credible witness,» according to Crane.

Qatar had commissioned anti-Assad PR from HRW, and got what they had paid for, in their «Caesar Report».

Regarding Amnesty International’s report, which was issued on 7 February 2017, the invariably cogent «Moon of Alabama» blogger headlined and documented appropriately about it the same day, «Hearsay Extrapolated — Amnesty Claims Mass Executions In Syria, Provides Zero Proof», but one could also say that it provided zero evidence (but lots of allegations). Three days later, the also credible Tony Cartalucci bannered «US Cooks Up New Syrian Atrocities Amid Syrian Talks». Then, yet another day later, on February 11th, the brilliant Rick Sterling headlined «Amnesty International Stokes Syrian War» and he utterly destroyed the AI study’s credibility. Among many other things, he tracked the AI study’s funding and backing back to Soros and other rabid haters of Russians. Finally, on February 25th, Paul Mansfield bannered «Amnesty fake report ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ invents Assad war crimes to undermine Syria peace talks».

As regards the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), it (and other U.S.-arsistocracy-backed fronts) was discussed by Helena Glass, on 8 February 2017, headlining «Amnesty International – A Propaganda Machine»:

Like the Syrian Observatory of [for] Human Rights, the SNHR is a one man show. One man who lives in the UK, who has no background, and who adamantly and openly hates Assad. Neither of these ‘organizations’ list their funding although it is widely believed to come from the UK’s GCHQ.

BOTH organizations claim to have ‘a network of spies on the ground in Syria with whom they converse daily for information’. Like SOHR, Fadel Abdulghani, the Director of Syrian Network of Human Rights, lists absolutely no previous background or history on social media sites. He never existed prior to becoming an expert…and Chairperson of his one man show…

But it gets worse: Fadel Abdulghani is aligned with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which the US and Australia consider an alias of MEK. MEK, headed by Maryam Rajavi was considered a terrorist organization by the US as of 2003 and was delisted in 2012.

It gets worse: The delisting of MEK as a terrorist organization was made by then Secretary of State – Hillary Clinton!

Uh-oh.

Thus it would appear that one of Amnesty International’s prime source[s] for their claim that Assad tortured and murdered 13,000 comes from one man who is affiliated with a former terrorist organization who has no background or previous experience and who would seem to have been ‘created’ from thin air…and possibly funded by GCHQ! Wow!

Apparently, Maryam Rajavi openly declares that she is the leading advocate and voice to ‘violently over-throw the government of Iran’.

The international war to overthrow Assad is barbaric, and nothing that is said in the present article is necessarily rejecting the possibility that some of the gruesome things that have been alleged about Assad’s handling of his side of that international invasion against Syria’s government might be true. But that’s not the topic here, anyway; the topic is instead the question as to whether the Washington Post has fake news. It certainly does — and lots of it, including also, for example, that ‘news’paper’s continuing not to report that the coup that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014 was a coup by the U.S., and no grass-roots democratic revolution, such as the U.S. regime (and its propaganda-organs) claim it to have been. That ‘news’paper’s subscribers are buying propaganda.

War on Terror: Greatest Covert Op

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(Editor’s Note: The following commentary is drawn from a speech delivered by Douglas Valentine at a 2010 peace conference. In expanded version is included as the final chapter of his book “The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World”.)

By Douglas Valentine

Source: Consortium News

The politics of terror are the greatest covert operation ever.

In explaining why, I’ll begin by defining some terms, because, when discussing the covert op called “the politics of terror,” words and their management are all important.

How are politics and terror actually defined: how are these meanings manipulated; for what purposes, and by whom?

Terrorism is defined as “violence against civilians intended to obtain a political purpose.”

This is an ambiguous phrase, which begs the questions: what are politics and violence?

Politics is defined as “the process by which groups of people make collective decisions.” And violence in this context is the use of force to compel a person or group to do or think something against their will. That includes the violence of words – of threatening to hurt – and of social structures, as well as the violence of deeds.

So, by definition, terrorism is political violence – hurting people, or threatening to hurt them, in order to make them govern themselves (or acquiesce to an external force) against their will.

In America, terrorism is always condemned by the government, and, accordingly, America is never a perpetrator of terrorism, but always the victims of it.

The U.S. war on terror is the ultimate expression of this principle: it is a military response to terrorism; violence in self-defense, not (ostensibly) violence for a political purpose.

That’s the official story – the assumption. But I’m going to show that America does engage in terrorism – violence against civilians for political purposes. This “state” terrorism, however, is covert, in so far as it is equated with national security, and thanks to that built-in ambiguity, it has both stated and unstated purpose.

The State and Unstated Policy in America 

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. But who really makes the overarching political decisions in America? Who governs us?

The two political parties represent the people and they compete for control of the government. Historically, Republicans have generally favored business and Democrats have favored labor. The political division is, generally, class based.

Now, the government can be controlled by either political party; but the state endures –  “the state” being the nation’s indispensable industries and infrastructure (banking, auto industry, insurance, Microsoft), and the institutions which defend the nation’s enduring interests: the military, law enforcement, the intelligence and security services.

In Europe they often, cynically, refer to the state as “industry” or Big Business. In America we tend to call “the state” the Establishment – an ambiguous word that needs to be defined.

The dictionary defines Establishment as, “An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.”

I would venture to say that the interests of the state and the Establishment are the same, and that the definition of Establishment with a capital E is the pivotal phrase in discussing “state” terrorism.

Consider this: there is the politics of the two parties vying for control of the government, and there is the Establishment, the state, making the covert (ostensibly non-political) decisions that effectively govern America.

Many of those covert decisions concern national security: they are unstated policy.

Moreover, these covert policy decisions about national security are made by people who control the military, law enforcement, and intelligence and security services. These guardians of “the state” are collectively called the National Security Establishment.

Like the Establishment that secretly rules the “state,” the National Security Establishment is an exclusive group that is not accountable to the political whims of the people.

These professional guardians of the state – the Establishment – are assumed to be above partisan politics. Their loyalty is assumed to be to the law or national security. And that assumption is the Big Lie upon which state terrorism is based.

Yes, it is true that the National Security Establishment is not accountable to the people: and, in fact, it has built a series of ever-larger, concentric moats around itself called the National Security State, precisely to keep the people out of its business.

The National Security Establishment rules the National Security State, with an iron fist, but it is pure propaganda that the National Security Establishment and State are not political.

In order to get inside the National Security Establishment, and rise to a position of authority within it, one must be born there (like Bush or make billions like Bill Gates), or submit to years of right-wing political indoctrination calibrated to a series of increasingly restrictive security clearances.

Political indoctrination – adopting the correct right-wing ideology – and security clearances represent the drawbridge across the moats.

The National Security State is the covert social structure of the Establishment, and it has as its job not just defending the Establishment from foreign enemies, but also expanding the Establishment’s economic and military influence abroad, while preserving its class prerogatives at home.

By “class prerogatives,” I mean the National Security State is designed to keep the lower class from exerting any political control over the state; especially, redistributing the Establishment’s private wealth.

To these unstated ends – imperialism abroad and repression at home – the National Security State engages in terrorism – i.e. political violence – on behalf of the Establishment.

Indeed, the National Security State is political violence, terrorism, in its purest form.

The Establishment and its National Security State as Terrorism

The lower classes in America have little voice in making government or state policy. Some members of the lower classes have given up hope, others are content: but in either case, voter turnout is a mere 54 percent.

Whether hopeless or content, they know they cannot fight conventional thinking. For example, when the Establishment exerts its influence, it is not considered politics; it is simply the status quo. The rich create jobs and must be accommodated with trillion-dollar bailouts, paid for by workers taking furloughs.

That’s just the way it is. Politicians in the service of the Establishment, for over-arching reasons of national security, have to keep the capitalist financial system afloat.

It is the same thing with the National Security Establishment: America invaded Iraq, and there was nothing the people could do about it. The decision was made for them. Peace activists, least of all, had no voice in the decision, because they are assumed to have no stake in national security.

You will not find peace activists in the National Security Establishment; and that political repression is part of covert state terrorism.

Likewise, if labor seeks to exercise influence, its efforts are described as exploiting the state for more than it deserves, because it does not have an enduring stake in the state.

It is a fact: only Establishment wealth – ownership – is equated with national security.

Consider the immortal words of Leona Helmsley: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

That injustice in the tax code is political repression and, in so far as it makes the people fearful, it is state terrorism. The Establishment fears losing its loopholes, while workers and the poor fear losing their homes: two types of fear, one for each class, one stated, one unstated.

The Establishment engages imperialism and political repression through propaganda (word management violence) and social structures. This state terrorism also is unstated, covert.

Only when the people rebel and challenge the Establishment is the word terrorism applied.

Likewise, the military, police or intelligence actions that provoke rebellion, or the responses to rebellion, are never called terrorism: they are national security.

And that’s how the management of words helps to repress the lower classes.

Language and the Psychology of State Terror

America’s industrial-sized war machine was never said to terrorize Iraq; the invasion was not political because the war machine is owned by the Establishment.

The Establishment profiting from war is not politics; it is ideological neutral “profits.”

In fact, America exerts its unwanted political influence overseas, through the state terror of aircraft carrier fleets, bombers, nuclear subs, shock and awe invasions, pacification programs, the overthrow of governments, and support of repressive puppet regimes.

This state terrorism, which you never hear about, is the biggest covert psychological warfare operation of all time.

This psywar operation depends on narrowly defining terrorism as a suicide bomber, a hijacked plane, the decapitated body of a collaborator: the “selective terrorism” of rebels and nationalists who, outgunned and outlawed in their own country, have no other options, other than submission.

The purpose of this “selective terrorism” by rebels is psychological: to isolate collaborators, while demonstrating to the people the ability of the rebels to strike at their oppressors. Brutal pacification cam­paigns – state terrorism – prevent people from making a living. Selective terrorism does not.

That’s a big, meaningful “class” difference.

The National Security Establishment understands that selective terror achieves political and psychological goals that state terror does not – that it rallies people to revolutionary ideals.  So the National Security Establishment engages in selective terror, too, by targeting the rebel, his family and friends in their homes.

This is the selective terror con­ducted by counter-terrorists. But don’t be confused: it is terrorism. All terrorism is psychological and political; state terror seeks to immobilize people and make them submissive, apathetic and/or ostensibly “content.”

The National Security Establishment fully understands that once people have been terrorized, they have been politically defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.

As former Director of Central Intelligence William Colby once said: “The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply.”

This principle of the psychological use of “the implication or latent threat of terror” is what brings us back to America and the business of terror.

The Business of Terror

State terror – colonization abroad and political repression at home – is a key means of extracting profits and maintaining ownership of property. Ask the American Indian.

In its colonies abroad, the U.S. engages in state terrorism by removing all legal protections for rebels; detention, torture, and summary execution are the price for rebellion against U.S. policy.

State terrorism overseas, imperialism, is never acknowledged by the U.S. media, because the media is a big business closely affiliated with the National Security Establishment; indeed, two of the major networks are owned by defense contractors.

And state terrorism applied domestically to ensure “internal” security is never acknowledged. But the National Security State is well thought out, by professionals in language management, and political and psychological warfare, aimed at you.

“Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance,” says Johan Galtung, a founder of the disciipline of peace and conflict studies. But he adds “structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality of the social system and its institutions, of government…is tacit violence. Structural violence is a structure of exploitation and social injustice.”

As Colby said: “The implication or latent threat is enough to insure people will comply.”

The war on terror and its domestic version “homeland security” are the law of the land – America’s new legally criminal social structure based on administrative detention, enshrined in The Patriot Act and a number of executive orders, some secret.

This lack of due process comes on top of a justice system already skewed to protect the propertied elite and pack the prisons with the poor, through “structural violence,” mainly the drug wars.

The Establishment’s new anti-terror and anti-drug laws make the National Security State the most fearsome covert political and psywar machine the world has ever seen. And the National Security State is growing: the “Top Secret America” series in the Washington Post put it at 750,000 cadres.

This secret state within a state extends into the homeland’s critical infrastructure and beyond. For example, the arms industry provides good jobs, making American imperial aggression seem a positive value.

And this is how the psyched-out people become one of the moats.

As it is modeled on the totalitarian corporate paradigm, the National Security State in all its manifestations fits the classic definition of a fascist dictatorship. And we know what its intentions are. They have been stated.

In the days after 9/11, right-wing Republican stalwart Kenneth W. Starr, the Clinton inquisitor, said the danger of terrorism requires “deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security.”

But is there an on-going emergency that requires deference to the political branches, meaning the right-wing ideologues who rule the National Security State? And what does it mean for Establishment opponents if due process is completely abandoned at home, and subjected to politics?

Michael Ledeen, a former counter-terror expert on Reagan’s National Security Council, blamed 9/11 on President Bill Clinton “for failing to properly organize our nation’s security apparatus.”

Ledeen’s solution to the problem of those who sneered at security was “to stamp out” the “corrupt habits of mind.” By which he means Liberalism.

In other words, the reactionary right-wing that owns the National Security State wants to impose its total rule on the people in order to create a security conscious, uniform citizenry – marching in lock step, flags waving – that is necessary to win the war on terror.

This is how the National Security professionals are incrementally creating the requisite fascist social structure – through terror, the best organizing principle ever.

“This is time for the old motto, ‘kill them all, let God sort ’em out.’ New times require new people with new standards,” Ledeen asserted. “The entire political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will give us a chance to prevail.”

When Ledeen says “political” world he means the “owners of the business” of state terror, the right-wing ideologues who pack the National Security State and the capitalist Establishment they serve.

And they have won the propaganda war, folks.

Gaslighting: State Mind Control and Abusive Narcissism

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By Vanessa Beeley

Source: 21st Century Wire

Exceptionalism: the condition of being different from the norm; also:  a theory expounding the exceptionalism especially of a nation or region.

There are many theories surrounding the origin of American exceptionalism. The most popular in US folklore, being that it describes America’s unique character as a “free” nation founded on democratic ideals and civil liberties. The Declaration of Independence from British colonial rule is the foundation of this theory and has persevered throughout the often violent history of the US since its birth as a free nation.

Over time, exceptionalism has come to represent superiority in the minds and hearts of Americans. Belief in their economic, military and ideological supremacy is what has motivated successive US governments to invest in shaping the world in their superior image with little or no regard for the destruction left in the wake of their exceptional hegemony.

In considering itself, exceptional, the US has extricated itself from any legal obligation to adhere to either International law or even the common moral laws that should govern Humanity.  The US has become exceptionally lawless and authoritarian particularly in its intolerant neo-colonialist foreign policy.  The colonized have become the colonialists, concealing their brutal savagery behind a veneer of missionary zeal that they are converting the world to their form of exceptionalist Utopia.

Such is the media & marketing apparatus that supports this superiority complex, the majority of US congress exist within its echo chamber and are willing victims of its indoctrination. The power of the propaganda vortex pulls them in and then radiates outwards, infecting all in its path.  Self-extraction from this oligarchical perspective is perceived as a revolutionary act that challenges the core of US security so exceptionalism becomes the modus vivendi.

Just as Israel considers itself ‘the chosen people’ from a religious perspective, the US considers itself the chosen nation to impose its version of Democratic reform and capitalist hegemony the world over. One can see why Israel and the US make such symbiotic bedfellows.

“The fatal war for humanity is the war with Russia and China toward which Washington is driving the US and Washington’s NATO and Asian puppet states.  The bigotry of the US power elite is rooted in its self-righteous doctrine that stipulates America as the “indispensable country” ~ Paul Craig Roberts: Washington Drives the World Towards War.

So why do the American people accept US criminal hegemony, domestic and foreign brutal tyranny & neo-colonialist blood-letting with scant protest? Why do the European vassal states not rise up against this authoritarian regime that flaunts international law and drags its NATO allies down the path to complete lawlessness and diplomatic ignominy?

What is Gaslighting?

The psychological term “Gaslighting” comes from a 1944 Hollywood classic movie called Gaslight.  Gaslighting describes the abuse employed by a narcissist to instil in their victim’s mind, an extreme anxiety and confusion to the extent where they no longer have faith in their own powers of logic, reason and judgement. These gaslighting techniques were adopted by central intelligence agencies in the US and Europe as part of their psychological warfare methods, used primarily during torture or interrogation.

Gaslighting as an abuser’s modus operandi, involves, specifically, the withholding of factual information and its replacement with false or fictional information designed to confuse and disorientate. This subtle and Machiavellian process eventually undermines the mental stability of its victims reducing them to such a depth of insecurity and identity crisis that they become entirely dependent upon their abuser for their sense of reality and even identity.

Gaslighting involves a step by step psychological process to manipulate and destabilize its victim.  It is built up over time and consists of repetitive information feeds that enter the victim’s subconscious over a period of time, until it is fully registered on the subconscious “hard disk” and cannot be overridden by the conscious floppy disk.  Put more simply, it is brainwashing.

“Overall, the main reason for gaslighting is to create a dynamic where the abuser has complete control over their victim so that they are so weak that they are very easy to manipulate.” ~ Alex Myles

Three Stages of Gaslighting: Stage One

The first stage depends upon trust in the integrity and unimpeachable intentions of the abuser, a state of reliance that has been engendered by the abuser’s artful self-promotion and ingratiating propaganda.  Once this trust is gained, the abuser will begin to subtly undermine it, creating situations and environments where the victim will begin to doubt their own judgement.  Eventually the victim will rely entirely upon the abuser to alleviate their uncertainty and to restore their sense of reality which is in fact that of the abuser.

Stage Two

The second stage, defence, is a process by which the abuser isolates the victim, not only from their own sense of identity but from the validation of their peers.  They are made to feel that their opinion is worthless, discredited, down-right weird.  In political circles they would be labelled a conspiracy theorist, a dissident, a terror apologist.  As a consequence, the victim will withdraw from society and cease to express themselves for fear of ridicule, judgement or punishment.

This stage can also be compared to Stockholm Syndrome where a hostage or captive is reduced,by psychological mind games, back to infantile dependency upon their captor.  Narcissistic abuse bonds the victim to the aggressor via trauma.  Stockholm Syndrome bonds the victim to the aggressor via regression to an infantile state where the abuser/aggressor becomes the “parent” who will rescue the victim from imminent annihilation.  Both methods tap into the victim’s survival mechanisms to gain and maintain control.

Stage Three

The final stage is depression.  A life under the tyrannical rule of a narcissist drives the victim into a state of extreme confusion.  They are stripped of dignity & self-reliance.  They, ultimately exist in an information vacuum which is only filled by that which the abuser deems suitable or relevant.  This can eventually invoke symptoms of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder]. Flashbacks, constant apprehension, hyper vigilance, mind paralysis, rage and even violence.  The process is complete and the victim has been reduced to a willing accomplice in the abusers creation of a very distorted reality.

Exceptionalism or Narcissism?

We are currently seeing the transformation of US exceptionalism into an abusive Narcissism.

The gargantuan apparatus of mind bending and controlling is being put into hyper drive by the ruling elite.  We are inundated with propaganda that challenges our sense of reality but only after being “tenderized” by the fear factor.  Fear of “terror”, fear of war, fear of financial insecurity, fear of gun violence, fear of our own shadow.  Once we are suitably quaking in our boots, in comes the rendition of reality that relieves our anxiety.  If we challenge this version of events we are labelled a conspiracy theorist, a threat to security. We are hounded, discredited, slandered and ridiculed.  We are isolated and threatened.

Wars are started in the same way.  Despite the hindsight that should enable us to see it coming, the process swings into motion with resounding success. The ubiquitous dictator, the oligarch who threatens to destroy all that the US and her allies represent which of course is, freedom, equality & civil liberty all wrapped up in the Democracy shiny paper and tied with the exceptionalist ribbon.

Next the false flag to engender fear, terror and to foment sectarian strife. The support of a “legitimate” organic, indigenous “revolution” conveniently emerging in tandem with US ambitions for imposing their model of governance upon a target nation. The arming of “freedom fighters”, the securing of mercenary additions to these manufactured proxy forces.  All this is sold in the name of freedom and democracy to a public that is already in a state of anxiety and insecurity, lacking in judgement or insight into any other reality but that of their “abuser”.

The NGO Complex Deployment

Finally, the Humanitarians are deployed.  The forces for “good”, the vanguard of integrity and ethical intervention.  The power that offers all lost souls a stake-holding in the salvation of sovereign nations that have lost their way and need rescuing.  A balm for a damaged soul, to know they can leave their doubts and fears in such trustworthy hands as HRW, Amnesty International, they can assuage their deep sense of guilt at the suffering being endured by the people of far flung nations because they can depend upon the NGOs to provide absolution with minimal effort on their part.  They don’t realise that NGOs are an integral part of their abuser’s apparatus, operating on the leash of neo-colonialist financing and influence.  NGOs provide the optic through which the abuser will allow the victim to perceive their world and once absorbed into this flawed prism the victim’s own cognitive dissonance will ensure they do not attempt a jail break.

In this state of oppressed consciousness the victim accepts what they are told.  They accept that the US can sell cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia that obliterate human beings and lay waste to essential civilian infrastructure in Yemen.  They accept that the US financially, ideologically & militarily supports the illegal state of Israel and provides the arsenal of experimental weapons that maim and mutilate children and civilians on a scale that is unimaginable.  They accept that a crippling blockade of the already impoverished and starving nation of Yemen is “necessary” to resolve the issues of sectarian divisions that only exist in the minds of their Congressional abusers.

The majority of Americans accept mass murder under the pretext of the right to protect, because their ability to form rational and reasoned opinions has been engineered out of them.  This is now the definition of US exceptionalism.  It is their ability to manipulate the world into accepting their lawlessness and global hegemony agenda.  In seeking to impose its own image upon our world the US has drifted so far from its founding principles, one wonders how they will ever return to them.  They have employed a recognised form of torture to ensure capitulation to their mission of world domination which entails the mental, physical and spiritual torture of target civilian populations.

In conclusion, the US has indeed achieved exceptionalism.  The US has become an exceptional global executioner and persecutor of Humanity.  Imperialism is a euphemism for the depths of abuse the US is inflicting upon the people of this world.

Our only hope is to break the cycle of abuse with empathy for the victim and with appreciation for the years of brainwashing that precedes their agonizing passive-aggressive apathy towards crimes being committed in “their name”.

This was an email I received recently from one courageous young American girl whose epiphany is testament to the resilience and survival instinct of the human spirit.

“My name is Caroline and I am a 22 year old US citizen. I only fairly recently discovered the truth about Empire/NATO’s activities in Syria and Libya and so many other countries (thanks to writers like Andre Vltchek, Cory Morningstar, Forrest Palmer). I am sickened when I remember that I signed some of those Avaaz petitions and I feel horrified at knowing that I have Syrian and Libyan blood on my hands. I want to believe that I’m not “really” guilty because I really thought (as I had been told) that I was not doing something bad at the time, but still, what I did contributed to the suffering of those people and I want to do something to atone in at least some small way, even though I probably can’t “make up” for what I did or erase my crime.

If it’s not too much trouble, could you please tell me what you think I should do, if there is anything?” 

She deserves an answer…

 

***

Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.

 

Related Podcast:

Reality and its enemies

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By Lawrence Davidson

Source: Intrepid Report

There is an ongoing reality that is destroying hundreds of thousands of lives in the Middle East. And though most Americans are ignorant of the fact, and many of those who should be in the know would deny it, the suffering flows directly from decisions taken by Washington over the last 27 years.

Some of the facts of the matter have just been presented by the first Global Conflict Medicine Congress held at the American University of Beirut (AUB) earlier this month (11–14 May 2017). It has drawn attention to two dire consequences of the war policies Americans have carried on in the region: cancer-causing munition material and drug-resistant bacteria.

● Cancer-causing munition material: Materials such as tungsten and mercury are found in the casing of penetrating bombs used in the first and second Gulf wars. These have had long-term effects on survivors, especially those who have been wounded by these munitions. Iraqi-trained and Harvard-educated Dr. Omar Dewachi, a medical anthropologist at AUB fears that “the base line of cancers [appearing in those exposed to these materials] has become very aggressive. . . . When a young woman of 30, with no family history of cancer, has two different primary cancers—in the breast and in the oesophagus—you have to ask what is happening.” To this can be added that doctors are now “overwhelmed by the sheer number of [war] wounded patients in the Middle East.”

● Drug-resistant bacteria: According to Glasgow-trained Professor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at AUB Medical Center, drug resistance was not a problem during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988. However, after the fiasco of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, things began to change. In the period after 1990, Iraq suffered under a vicious sanctions regime imposed by the United Nations at U.S. insistence. During the next 12 years “Iraqis were allowed to use only three antibiotics” and bacterial resistance quickly evolved.

Those resistant bacteria spread throughout the region, particularly after the American invasion of the country in 2003. Today, according to a Medecins Sans Frontieres analysis, “multidrug resistant [MDR] bacteria now accounts for most war wound infections across the Middle East, yet most medical facilities in the region do not even have the laboratory capacity to diagnose MDR, leading to significant delays and clinical mismanagement of festering wounds.”

Insofar as these developments go, it is not that there aren’t contributing factors stemming from local causes such as factual fighting. However, the major triggers for these horrors were set in motion in Washington. As far as I know, no American holding a senior official post has ever accepted any responsibility for this ongoing suffering.

Hiding reality

As the cancers and untreatable infections grow in number in the Middle East, there is here in the United States a distressing effort to rehabilitate George W. Bush—the American president whose decisions and policies contributed mightily to this ongoing disaster. It is this Bush who launched the unjustified 2003 invasion of Iraq and thereby—to use the words of the Arab League—“opened the gates of hell.” His rehabilitation effort began in earnest in April 2013, and coincided with the opening of his presidential library.

In an interview given at that time, Bush set the stage for his second coming with an act of self-exoneration. He said he remained “comfortable with the decision making process” that led to the invasion of Iraq—the one that saw him fudging the intelligence when it did not tell him what he wanted to hear—and so also “comfortable” with the ultimate determination to launch the invasion. “There’s no need to defend myself. I did what I did and ultimately history will judge.”

The frivolous assertion that “history will judge” is often used by people of suspect character. “History” stands for a vague future time. Its alleged inevitable coming allows the protagonist to fantasize about achieving personal glory unchallenged by present, usually significant, ethical concerns.

Those seeking George W. Bush’s rehabilitation now like to contrast him to Donald Trump. One imagines they thereby hope to present him as a “moderate” Republican. They claim that Bush was and is really a very smart and analytical fellow rather than the simpleton most of us suspect him to be. In other words, despite launching an unnecessary and subsequently catastrophic war, he was never as ignorant and dangerous as Trump. He and his supporters also depict him as a great defender of a free press, again in contrast to Donald Trump. However, when he was president, Bush described the media as an aider and abettor of the nation’s enemies. This certainly can be read as a position that parallels Trump’s description of the media as the “enemy of the American people.”

But all of this is part of a public relations campaign and speaks to the power of reputation remodeling—the creation of a facade that hides reality. In order to do this you have to “control the evidence”—in this case by ignoring it. In this endeavor George W. Bush and his boosters have the cooperation of much of the mainstream media.

No sweat here: the press has done this before. Except for the odd editorial the mainstream media also contributed to Richard Nixon’s rehabilitation back in the mid-1980s. These sorts of sleights-of-hand are only possible against the background of pervasive public ignorance.

Closed information environments

Local happenings are open to relatively close investigation. We usually have a more or less accurate understanding of the local context in which events play out, and this allows for the possibility of making a critical judgment. As we move further away, both in space and time, information becomes less reliable, if for no other reason than it comes to us through the auspices of others who may or may not know what they are talking about.

As a society, we have little or no knowledge of the context for foreign events, and thus it is easy for those reporting on them to apply filters according to any number of criteria. What we are left with is news that is customized—stories designed to fit pre-existing political or ideological biases. In this way millions upon millions of minds are restricted to closed information environments on subjects which often touch on, among other important topics, war and its consequences.

So what is likely to be more influential with the locally oriented American public: George W. Bush’s rehabilitated image reported on repeatedly in the nation’s mainstream media, or the foreign-based, horror-strewn consequences of his deeds reported upon infrequently?

This dilemma is not uniquely American, nor is it original to our time. However, its dangerous consequences are a very good argument against the ubiquitous ignorance that allows political criminals to be rehabilitated even as their crimes condemn others to continuing suffering. If reputation remodelers can do this for George W. Bush, then there is little doubt that someday it will be done for Donald Trump. Life, so full of suffering, is also full of such absurdities.

 

Dr. Davidson has done extensive research and published in the areas of American perceptions of the Middle East, and Islamic Fundamentalism. His two latest publications are “Islamic Fundamentalism” (Greenwood Press, 1998) and “America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood” (University Press of Florida, 2001). He has published thirteen articles on various aspects of American perceptions of the Middle East. Dr. Davidson holds a BA from Rutgers, an MA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Alberta.

Orwell, Freud, and the Syrian Ruse

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Reality by other means

By Jason Hirthler

Source: Dissident Voice

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

— Karl Rove speaking to a small group of reporters at a cocktail party in 2004…… printed in the Washington Post

The adjective ‘Orwellian’ is so overused mostly because it is so incredibly apt on a daily basis. George Orwell’s basic concept reflects a simple tenet of propaganda: the thing you are hiding is often hid behind its exact opposite. Orwell expressed this concept in 1984 with the government slogans, “War is Peace,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud evidently suggested something similar about human nature: that to discover our true human nature, we need merely to reverse society’s moral maxims: if a commandment forbids adultery, it’s because we want to commit it. In other words, for both Orwell and Freud, we often disguise what we are doing behind claims that we are doing the opposite. We aren’t committing adultery; we’re practicing fidelity. We aren’t precipitating war; we’re pressing for peace. We aren’t seeking our own self-interest; we’re doing it all for others.

When applied to U.S. propaganda, the formula is revealing. To discover what your government is hiding, just reverse the media narrative. If the papers all say Russia is an imperial aggressor, it’s likely because Washington is. If the news networks say that Assad is a murderous monster, it’s likely because the groups we’re backing are. If the mainstream says Communism is a dire threat, it’s likely because capitalism is a dire threat. All of these examples are demonstrably true.

What confuses many readers is the fact that the first premise–that Russia, Assad, and Communism are all threats–usually has an element of truth to it, though not to the degree that it is portrayed. And so intelligent propaganda doesn’t simply traffic in lies, but rather half-truths, distortions, and omissions that themselves further distort a narrative. It is this sophisticated blend of fact, fiction, hyperbole and omission that makes propaganda so difficult to unpack for the average reader, who has little time, inclination, and practice in deciphering state-directed doctrine.

Reversing Reality

If Freud was correct, then we tend to publicly deny our greatest desires when they run counter to prevailing morality, shielding our base wishes behind a curtain of rectitude, even as we quietly pursue them. The modern instances of this in government are boundless. Example: FISA legitimates the surveillance it was designed to deter. Example: Congress abets the executive it was created to check. Example: ‘Defense’ becomes the aggression it was devised to defend against. Example: Healthcare becomes a bureaucracy built on denial of care in the name of its provision. Example. Journalism: the adversarial role of the fourth estate, becomes the adversary of the truth it was intended to protect. Journalists transcribe the diktats of power. Like the senators that notarize the mandates of the executive. Like the federal agents that entrap citizens in order to protect them. Like the drones that destroy lives to save them. Like the citizens who signal liberal values in support of imperial conquerors. Like the social justice warriors who legislate the intolerance they seek to eradicate. It seems to be a socio-political reality that the forcible assertion of one value guarantees a renaissance of its antitheses. Or is it that we forcibly assert a moral value to disguise a flowering of vice?

The process of turning a story into its opposite is fairly straightforward. If the U.S. is aggressively violating human rights, it needs to be rewritten as a defender of human rights. What this means in practice is switching the roles each of the actors assume in the narrative. Heroes become villains; villains become heroes; and victims are either genuine victims or villains depicted as martyrs for a righteous cause. This requires a good bit of romanticizing your side, demonizing the enemy, and eulogizing the victims. And then, as the author of Mein Kampf recommended, keep it simple. Your side wants one thing: peace. Your enemy wants one thing: war. And the victims want one thing: freedom.

Exhibit A

Take Syria as a recent example. The media narrative states that the U.S. and its freedom-loving allies have cautiously backed a loose confederation of rebels who rose up against Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad in 2011. In actuality, the U.S. and its freedom-hating allies have incautiously backed a loose confederation of foreign terrorists who have been paid to overthrow the elected Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Only occasionally is the real backstory hinted at, which includes weakening Shia strongholds and destabilizing independent states in the region.

In turning the truth around to justify its war of aggression, the state and its supplicant media seized upon a handful of facts as the bedrock on which it constructed a false historical narrative. Which is what you’d expect from the Orwell-Freud model. And so…Are there elements of Syrian civil society that protested Assad in 2011? Absolutely. Are there actual Syrians fighting against Assad now? Sure. Are there elements of corruption and repression in Assad’s history? Definitely. But each of these truths are used to disguise the much larger facts of unmitigated U.S. aggression.

Upon this foundation, the typical narrative is constructed. The United States government is romanticized as a virtuous mediator concerned with supporting the freedom fighters and helping them achieve the freedoms they’ve yearned for. Assad is demonized as the autocratic mass murderer who repeatedly denies these freedoms, and tortures thousands before destroying the bodies. And the Syrian people, engine of the largest refugee crisis since World War Two, are shown as the valiant victims of the war, particularly in Aleppo, where the destruction of the city in an attempt to uproot the terrorist army is leveraged to milk as much emotional content from the war as possible and to further cement Assad’s reputation as a moral monster.

The MSM didn’t stop there. It followed with a series of attempts to further demonize Assad. A massive cache of photos purportedly detailing “regime” torture. This cache was delivered from somebody named “Caesar,” a defector not unlike the fake defector, “Curveball” from the run-up to the Iraq War. Twice false flags have been utilized to claim that the evil optometrist in Damascus has in a fit of pique demanded that innocent Syrians be sprayed with chemical weapons. Now a “crematorium” where Assad supposedly cremates all the Syrian citizens he is slaughtering (supposedly because he hates humanity so much). It doesn’t particularly matter if these stories eventually unravel when evidence is shown to be lacking. The damage is done to the psyche of readers and listeners, who absorb the media reports with the uncritical acceptance of animals entering an abattoir.

The takfiri mercenaries brought in by the West to topple Assad are likewise romanticized by the press. Instead of labeling the terrorists we backed as extremists, the New York Times peddled a story that they were moderates. Beheading of children, tossing gays from rooftops, using citizens as human shields, staging rescue operations, and many other atrocities failed to prevent the media from intransigently pushing this storyline.

No Quick Fix

As you can see, there is no shortage of opportunities to apply the Orwellian label to modern reportage. That said, I’m not suggesting that the authors at The New York Times and the Washington Post are all conniving propagandists consciously preparing deceitful reportage. For every Edward Bernays, there are a dozen Brian Williams. Often, they have simply internalized the values of the institution that employs them. They recognize, perhaps consciously or subconsciously, that their careers depend on their willingness to follow a particular narrative. And they make their choice, rationalizing themselves into a clean conscience.

Which is no surprise. The human species could give a master class in self-deception. And there are psychological needs that appear more urgent for us than truth. Namely, the need to feel good about oneself and believe in one’s tribe. Set aside the need to situate the world in a comprehensible narrative, the need to fit in with one’s peer group, and the need to do meaningful work and self-actualize in society. The point is that all of these needs are undermined by the counter-narratives of the left. Counter-narratives destabilize our cleanly delineated understanding of the world; they often ostracize us from our peer group; and they threaten our ability to contribute to society in a manner approved of by society (i.e., generally contributing to the machinery of consumerism). Who has time for a reconstruction of one’s worldview, especially if it might lead to social alienation? This is why just throwing facts at heavily propagandized people doesn’t often work. There are other forces in play, which may remind us that politics is often little more than a value signaling device for human beings.

So most of us, whatever inklings we may receive of an alternative reality, will settle for doing nothing untoward, recusing ourselves from political debates, and hewing as closely to inoffensive blandishments in our speech as we can. (The only other major path is to adopt the ideologically bankrupt cop-out of lesser evilism and rant about how horrible the other party is. This provides the frisson of feeling at one with the herd, but does nothing to improve society.) In other words, we shackle ourselves to political groupthink and play the role of the conscientious centrist like any good straight man would. We have no time for the revolutionary urgency of the disenfranchised. It was Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who argued that people don’t want intellectual freedom, but rather to be told what to believe. Only then will they be happy. Otherwise, we ruin our peace of mind through choice paralysis or some variety of existential angst, or through a lack of religious faith that leaves us with no guiding myth to sustain us. Given all these apolitical factors that inform whether or not one challenges the received narrative, is it any surprise that mental slavery and ignorance are as prevalent today as in Orwell’s time?

Non-Alignment and Dissent to Challenge US-Russia-China’s New World Order

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By Gilbert Mercier

(News Junkie Post)

In groups of people there are always bullies who feel entitled, for no particular reason, to want more than the rest and to dominate the others in complete disregard of the common good. Fortunately for convivial people, bullies tend to have the psychological subtlety of dominant male gorillas who beat loudly on their chests and fight over food and females. Therefore bullies often annihilate each other. The more serious social problems occur when they collaborate to gang up on others. A primal impulse to dominate is the motivation for the insatiable quest for wealth and power, and it is a curse of the human condition. Altruism and the common global good are not why big world powers like the United States, Russia and China try to impose their rule on smaller countries; raw geopolitical dominance is the reason, and this is similar to the British, French and Spanish imperial-colonial era when countries were arbitrarily determined on maps drawn in London, Paris or Madrid. Our challenge is to break away, as countries and individuals, from the cynical and degrading notion, “to the victor belongs the spoils,” which seems to govern most behaviors. Our esteemed colleague Dady Chery initiated this important discussion in her essay, “Other People’s Countries.” To extract ourselves from the despair of corporate neocolonialism, courtesy of what looks like a new grand-bargaining era between the US, Russia and China, where other nations’ resources are assigned to spheres of influences, a two-fold solution should be considered: first, revamp the nonaligned movement (NAM); second, mount a concerted and systematic dissent, and ultimately a worldwide rebellion, against the global ruling elite apparatus.

Nonaligned movement redux

The nonaligned movement has to be understood in the context of the cold war. Even though most leaders of its founding nations were Marxists or neo-Marxists, the movement was clearly an effort to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union. The NAM officially started in Belgrade in 1961. It was founded by Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and Nkrumah, then the respective leaders of Yugoslavia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Ghana. The intention was for those countries, in joining forces with each other, to distance themselves from the spheres of influence of both the US and USSR. The nonaligned doctrine was probably best defined by a champion of the movement, Fidel Castro, who said that the organization’s goal was to guarantee “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of non-aligned countries in their struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great powers.”

The NAM still exists and includes 120 members, but it has largely lost its impact and forgotten its core ideology of presenting a united front against the dominant economic powers or permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). One can easily argue that the creation of BRICS, which includes the superpowers Russia and China, in addition to Brazil, India and South Africa, has helped to undermine the NAM. The reality that all NAM nations should consider from the recent events in Syria and North Korea, is that a triumvirate deal was apparently reached  despite some unconvincing rhetoric of outrage, and that Russia and China, respectively, can throw their allies unceremoniously under the proverbial bus. One can easily speculate that Iran and Venezuela, both targets for regime-change by Washington, have learned their lesson and seriously doubt that Moscow and Beijing would valiantly rescue them from US attack.

US-Russia-China: corporate imperialism’s new world order

The Alternative Right in the West fancies itself as being nationalist and therefore anti-globalist. Its discourse is so sketchy and inarticulate, however, that it fails to acknowledge that one cannot be anti-globalist without also being anti-capitalist. Capitalism, and especially supra-national capitalism, is a problem that the AltRight movement seems unable to identify. In the ideological fog of the nationalist right, globalism is wrongly identified as being a leftist notion. After a succession of meaningless palace intrigues, the incidental tenant of the White House has become an empty suit tailored from the flag of corporate imperialism. Gone are the vague populist promises of less US interventionism. A father-figure to represent the common man, a mad-dog general, and an oil-man diplomat have been given carte blanche by the military-industrial complex.

What deals were made with Russia to greenlight the April 7, 2017 US missile strike in Syria? Could it have been: if you promise to lift the economic sanctions, we’ll let you bomb Bashar al-Assad to boost Trump in the polls and, to sweeten the deal, Exxon will get favored treatment in Russian oil-extraction ventures. The US no longer philosophically clashes with China and Russia. Despite their communist heritage, the latter have more or less scrapped any remotely Marxist principle from their governing ideology. Just like in the West, Russia and China have their class of oligarchs. As long as all the world’s elite agree on how to carve the global pie, there’s no reason to fight. In recent weeks, the number of inquiries about World War III have skyrocketed on search engines worldwide. Is the fear justified or is this a psychological operation to force people into despair and submission? Would China retaliate against the US, Japan and South Korea if the US would break the taboo of using a nuclear bomb against China’s ally North Korea, or would Russia risk World War III in case of a joint attack against Iran by the US and Israel? Probably not.

The virtue of dissent and rebellion

Superpowers tend to call independent nations “rogue.” This is the spirit of nonalignment. Once in a while, a small nation like Cuba or Vietnam dares to give an imperialist geopolitical bully like Spain, the US, Japan, or France a bloody nose. Bullies fear even the slightest resistance. The little guy does have a chance, against all odds. Oppression can be overcome. The fear of war, and continuously fabricated threat of terrorism in everybody’s daily life, is a good way for government to get a society to accept policing and militarization, and continue to feed the voracious beast that is the global military-industrial complex. The state and corporate controlled media’s various flavors of propaganda serve only to induce passivity and the acceptance of a brutal world order. These can only be overcome with dissent, global rebellion and the refusal to become shadows of what we once were; the refusal to become humans without basic decency, self respect and love for our neighbors; the refusal to become humans without quality; the refusal to settle for survival in a cannibalistic world order.

 

Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photograph one by Thomas Ricker; photograph two from the archive of Zeinab Mohamed; composites three and five by Mark Rain; photograph four by David Shankbone; composite six by New 1lluminati; and photograph seven by Joe Brusky.

Manufactured Reality: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

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(Editor’s note: though this article was originally published in 2008 it remains sadly relevant. We’ve appended it with a more recent video from Truthstream Media which needs to be seen and shared.)

Source: Global Research

In order to force a new reality upon any targeted populace, the masters of the universe follow a simple strategy – they immediately make things twice as bad as they intend to keep them, only to take one step back after a short while, so that the new manufactured reality will be easier to accept.  This strategy holds constant from the manipulation of oil prices to the military strategy to rule the world by force.

In the terror war, nuclear terrorism has become the weapon of both first choice and last resort for American war planners.  It was more important to create the impression that nuclear war was imminent than it was to convince the world that we intended to use nuclear weapons as our ace in the hole.  The world had to be terrorized into believing that our insane cowboy president was about to unleash nuclear war upon the world, so that it could be held over the people’s heads.  The world had to be shocked and awed by American military supremacy into submitting to Bush’s demands.

America took two giant steps forward militarily, intending in the end to take one step back from the precipice of actual global thermonuclear war, to a more limited approach that only called for a limited use of “tactical” nukes.  A two-track approach to the war was undertaken; one path leading to immediate global nuclear war and another “democratic” approach, which put-off the use of nuclear weapons until some future action, in order to create unlimited opportunities for subversion where America’s full military might could be brought to bear upon more specific targets.  (Have they already been used?)  http://webwarper.net/ww/~av/www.redress.cc/global/dhalpin20080517

The threat that full-scale nuclear war in the center of the world’s primary energy basket was imminent created a global atmosphere of mortal fear and dread, while covert limited wars were simultaneously pursued.  This was intended to cow both the American people and the people in the targeted countries into submission to presidential dictates. The threat of general nuclear war was used to intimidate the targeted governments into “playing nice” diplomatically, while America interfered in their national affairs, introducing its revolutionary “democratic” form of politics, which included backing extremist groups.

Fear of US nuclear forces provided cover to American agitation in the Middle East region along the lines of “Operation Gladio,” which was used against our own allies in Europe.   In both operations, sympathetic right-wing leaders were found who could be bought, to be groomed by the CIA, to cultivate and organize local opposition groups.  From these agitated groups more violent radicals were found and hired to stage terrorist (“false flag”) attacks upon civilians and the governments, to be blamed upon their local opposition, which were usually actual patriot groups.

The second leg of the neoconservative war doctrine is the spreading of subversion under the cover of implanting democracy by force, and its companion, the spreading of force through democratic means.  Divisive political campaigns in targeted nations (including staged attacks by extremists) were engineered, to split the tribal societies into heavily-armed polarized factions waiting for retribution.

We have this apt description of this divisive American strategy from former Pakistani  ISI agent, turned human rights activist, Khalid Khawaja:

“Many of us call it a battle between East and West, between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian world, but it is neither of these. It is in fact the ruling regimes that want to dictate their will…

Ninety percent of people accept to be ruled, but there always remain some elements who refuse to succumb. They fight for freedom and resist till their last. However, in this conflict of two minorities – those who impose their will and those who resist it – the majority remains the sole victim. Yet people talk about Islam versus Christianity or Judaism. The basic theme remains the same. There is a group of people who want to impose their will, whether they happen to be Christian or Muslim, and there is a group of people who want to resist, and there is a silent majority which is trampled in between.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GF22Df04.html

Mr. Khawaja continues to delve into the under-discussed cause of the whole war on terror:

“In Afghanistan’s case, a similar game was carried out on a massive scale when Muslim youths from all over the world were brought in by Pakistan and the US [to fight against the Soviets in the 1980s]. They were tools for the empires’ proxy war. The name of jihad was used…it is a question of a state imposing its will. The message is clear: if you are against us, we will kill you and your sympathizers. In this state terrorism, there is no exception, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Pakistan, India, the US or Israel. All are the same.

When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets crushed. When two elephants make love, it is again the grass that gets crushed. Whether states fight with each other or make friendships, it is only the tools who became victims.”

The same deception has been practiced in both Iraq and Afghanistan, to prolong both of those wars until the doctrine could be spread beyond them.  Both countries had been targeted for regime change, but nonetheless, even after the first regime was replaced, the doctrine of creating surrogate militias to promote democratic revolution was still developed in each one, targeting the new regimes.  In each country violent extremist groups, usually identified as “al Qaida related,” were put on the American payroll to fight against US troops and US installed governments.  The hiring and training of these “militia” mercenary groups falls within the recognized definition of treason, “levying war against [the United States].”

That destabilizing doctrine is now being exported into Iran from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where beachheads have been established for a planned assault upon the entire neighborhood. These training centers are terrorist camps, plain and simple.  These are the American trained terrorists who will carry the limited warfare scenario into Iran under cover of the greater threat of nuclear terrorism.  The United States of America is the world’s number one supporter and exporter of terrorism; it always has been.

In order to carry out the Israeli-centric PNAC (Project for a New American Century) terror war plan that they have committed to, Bush and Cheney have doggedly undermined America’s national interests at home and all over the world.  America’s national interest has always been based on advancing liberty and human rights to the whole world, but now, under the neocon plan, these are rights that must be earned.  Bush was sent unto the world to turn reality upon its head.

On a rotating basis, America and Israel took turns slinging threats of nuclear annihilation and libelous invective at Iran and Syria, hyping the threats to intensify the notion that a nuclear attack was becoming imminent.  As Israel and America ramp-up the war-mongering against Iran and Syria, Israel sings out the threats first, then America will provide the chorus and hopefully the highly desired “money shot” afterwards.

As a final machination, to seal America and Israel’s position, the neocon doctrine unlocked the prohibition of the offensive use of nuclear weapons, even in civilian areas.  It is this new free use of nuclear weapon doctrine that is the icing on the cake for those who are plotting to seize the world under the threat of American nuclear terrorism.  Because it is now possible, it is easy to convince us all that our cowboy administration of religious zealots is about to commit an insane act, i.e., unleashing nuclear war to eliminate the possibility of a nuclear war.

Patriotic anti-government voices in this country and in the targeted countries, helped to create a strong public perception that nuclear war was imminent.  Antiwar voices of protest like mine sound a warning to alert the people to the crimes being planned that must be heard, but in so doing, we play into the government scheme by helping to hype the threat.  It is both necessary and natural that patriots arise to defend their nations in the face of American invasion or aggression.  We play a vital role in the planned drama, as it unfolds.  We have convinced the world that Bush and Cheney were insane enough to radiate the Middle Eastern oil fields, in order to steal the world’s oil.  We now may have to convince the world that the crazies themselves are the source of most of the terrorism which we fight.

It is pretty obvious that they really are that insane, but it should be even more obvious that their greedy masters don’t want their world destroyed, they only want to control it.  Why should they actually nuke Iran, if they can persuade the locals to overthrow the regime for us, causing less collateral damage (it would be difficult to operate the Middle East oil facilities, if they were all radioactive).  We have to convince the American people that Bush even though the little dictator is both stupid and insane, the real deciders are neither of those things.  It is their wills which will prevail, meaning that there are other less final, less costly ways to takeover the oil reserves and the pipeline routes.

We have to concentrate on stopping the secret war, without being blinded by the glare of nuclear terrorism.  Exposure of American sponsorship of world terrorism (some of the very “terrorism” we are fighting) must become our top priority.  Legal actions must be taken to stop the illegal support of terrorism upon civilians by our government.  Further legal actions must be taken to separate American foreign policy from Israel, in order to bring the terror war to an end.

Israel has been the primary source for most of the “intelligence” that launched the war on Iraq, the Iranian reactors and hypothetical nuclear weapons, as well as the alleged Syrian reactors.  America turned Israel’s evidence into grounds for waging war, even nuclear war.  They are behind the new push to find other Syrian nuclear facilities as well as the alleged Iranian warhead blueprint.

Israel is behind every military move against Iran that is being brought-up in the press.  It was the first to suggest taking out Iranian reactors, the first to recommend a naval blockade of Iran and an embargo on air flights between Iran and Syria and Lebanon.  American Zionist Congressional leaders gladly took up the torches lit by Israel, to create Israeli security at America’s expense.  A Congressional resolution is awaiting passage in the Senate, which demands that our government carry-out these acts of war, both the naval blockade and the air embargo, House Resolution 1194.

The American people must rise-up in outrage to the terrorists who rule over us and stop the planned escalation, as a first step to de-escalating the war.  It is time for us to take our own two steps forward, to force the aggressors to take one step back and begin to tear-down their manufactured reality.

 

Contact author: peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com

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The Price of Resistance

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Statues at the Museum of Myths and Traditions. (León)

By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.

These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits–a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the standards they set.

You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.

To resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.

Ruling institutions–the state, the press, the church, the courts, academia–mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. In times of national distress–one has only to look at Nazi Germany–all of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. And our own institutions, which have surrendered to corporate power and the utopian ideology of neoliberalism, are no different. The lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these institutions, as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era, are purged and turned into pariahs.

All institutions, including the church, Paul Tillich once wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make. To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.

The theologian James H. Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”

Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life–that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power–white power–with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”

Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”

This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.

Daniel Berrigan told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it, and then let it go.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his great essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.

“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Havel wrote. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin–and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”

The long, long road of sacrifice and suffering that led to the collapse of the communist regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their tiny protests, ignored by the state-controlled media, would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot of the state.

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubisova approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubisova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubisova. [Editor’s note: To see YouTube photographs of the 1989 revolution and hear Kubisova sing the song in a studio recording, click here.]

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’e’tat carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state.

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague” is not driven by ideology. He is driven by empathy, the duty to minister to suffering, no matter the cost. Empathy, or what the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman called “simple human kindness,” becomes in all despotisms a subversive act. To act on this empathy–the empathy for human beings locked in cages less than an hour from us [here in Princeton], the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers being torn from their children on the streets of our cities, the empathy for Muslims who are demonized and banned from our shores, fleeing the wars we created, the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our streets, the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution, the empathy for all those who suffer at the hands of a state intent on militarization and imposing a harsh cruelty on the vulnerable, the empathy for the earth that gives us life and that is being contaminated and pillaged for profit–becomes political and even dangerous.

Evil is real. But so is love. And in war–especially when the heavy shells landed on crowds in Sarajevo, sights so gruesome that to this day I cannot eat a piece of meat–you could feel, as frantic family members desperately sought out loved ones among the wounded and dead, the concentric circles of death and love, death and love, like rings from the blast of a cosmic furnace.

Flannery O’Connor recognized that a life of faith is a life of confrontation: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

Accept sorrow–for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem–but know that in resistance there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive.

“My faith has been tempered in Hell,” wrote Vasily Grossman in his masterpiece “Life and Fate.” “My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”