US escalates campaign against North Korea

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Patrick Martin

The Obama administration ratcheted up the pressure Friday on the isolated Stalinist regime in North Korea, with the FBI formally accusing North Korea of responsibility for the hacking attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment and Obama declaring that the US government would carry out an unspecified “proportionate response” against Pyongyang at “a time and place of our own choosing.”

Obama made no mention of the cyberattack or North Korea’s alleged responsibility in his opening statement at his end-of-the-year White House press conference, waiting until a suitable question was posed by the media to raise the issue.

The FBI offered no proof of a North Korean link to the hacking attack on Sony, which led to the studio’s cancellation of the planned December 25 release of the Seth Rogen film The Interview, a comedy whose premise is that two American journalists are contracted by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The FBI statement claimed several similarities between computer code used in the malware deployed against Sony and that used in previous attacks linked to North Korea, but these claims are unsubstantiated and computer security experts interviewed in the press have cast doubt on whether any definitive links can be established.

The American public is asked to take on faith the FBI’s declaration that it “now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions.” The statement continued: “North Korea’s actions were intended to inflict significant harm on a US business and suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves.”

Such language is ironic coming from a federal agency that plays a central role in the build-up of a police state apparatus in America. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal, citing figures from the National Center for State Courts, found that the FBI has accumulated criminal record files on 80 million Americans—more than one-third of the adult population.

Obama likewise provided no evidence of North Korean involvement, merely citing the FBI statement as authoritative. He criticized Sony Pictures for withdrawing The Interview from circulation in response to threats from the hackers, who called themselves “Guardians of Peace.”

“We cannot have a society where some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Obama said, “because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they’ll do when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or news reports that they don’t like.”

He continued, “That’s not what America’s about. Again, I’m sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other. I wish they’d spoken to me first. I would have told them, do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”

This pretense of alarm over the threat to the civil liberties of Americans is just as hypocritical coming from Obama as from the FBI. His administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers for leaking information about government crimes to the press than any other in American history. Obama has presided over dragnet surveillance of the telecommunications and email of every American by the National Security Agency, trampling on the Bill of Rights. And he has asserted the unprecedented “right” of the president to order the drone missile assassination of anyone in the world, including American citizens.

As for censorship, this is a government that doesn’t hesitate to demand that major newspapers and television networks withhold information from the public, including information on massive violations of the Constitution by the government itself, in the name of “national security.” The media routinely complies, allowing the government to vet and/or censor articles and news reports before they are aired.

The latest charges against North Korea have provided yet another example of the American press corps’ readiness to function as a de facto sounding board for state propaganda. There has been no pretense of critical independence in the vast bulk of reporting on the hacking attack on Sony and the alleged responsibility of the North Korean regime, which has denied any involvement. The government’s claims are simply reported as facts, whether by the television networks and cable channels or newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

The government’s record of lying, whether on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, NSA spying, or, more recently, CIA torture, is simply ignored.

The daily newspapers and television networks have largely dropped any reporting on last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report documenting systematic torture by the CIA of prisoners held in secret prisons overseas. Not a single question was raised about the torture report at Obama’s hour-long press conference.

Obama made it clear that the US government would retaliate against North Korea for the alleged hacking attack on Sony. “They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond,” he said. “We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.”

While the tone was matter-of-fact, Obama refused to rule out military action in response to a follow-up question by a reporter, saying only that he would not expand on his previous statement about an indeterminate future response.

White House, Pentagon and intelligence officials were holding daily meetings on North Korea, an Obama spokesman said. Before the FBI issued its finding, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was “very concerned” about the US potentially concluding that a nation-state was behind the attack. “When and if that call is made, it will be a moment to confront that reality” of a state-supported cyberattack on a US corporation, Dempsey said.

The US military buildup in the Asia-Pacific region continues apace. Obama has just signed the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, which provides for expanded efforts to establish a joint missile defense system in northeast Asia, involving South Korea and Japan. This would be directed against North Korea in the first instance, but ultimately against China, the main US target in the region.

On Thursday, Obama approved the sale of four US frigates to Taiwan, under the Naval Vessel Transfer Act, over the vociferous opposition of Beijing. The sale of the guided-missile frigates “blatantly interferes in China’s domestic affairs and undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests,” a Chinese defense ministry spokesman said.

While Obama said the FBI had not linked the Sony attack to any nation other than North Korea, other US officials pointed out that North Korea’s only connection to the World Wide Web is through China, an indication that further escalation of the Sony affair could involve charging China with at least a supporting role.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to surface that the entire Sony Pictures affair, going back to the original decision by the studio to make a film depicting the murder of Kim Jong-un, was a provocation inspired by the US military-intelligence apparatus.

Email communications obtained by the online publication Daily Beast and cited in many columns and commentaries Friday strongly suggest this. Sony Pictures co-chairman Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of the Rand Corporation, a leading private consulting firm for the CIA and Pentagon, and it was Rand’s North Korea specialist, Bruce Bennett, who pushed hard for the Sony film to focus on the assassination of North Korea’s ruler.

According to one of these emails, Seth Rogen, the film’s co-director, had initially intended the film to target an unnamed leader of an unnamed country, and it was Lynton himself “that told them to not use a fictitious name, but to go with Kim Jong-un.” The same message, written by Marisa Liston, a Sony senior vice president, said that Rogen and co-director Evan Goldberg “mention that a former CIA agent and someone who used to work for Hillary Clinton looked at the script.”

An email from Bennett, the Rand analyst, to Lynton suggested that the film could actually help unseat the North Korean regime. “I have been clear that the assassination of Kim Jong Un is the most likely path to a collapse of the North Korean government,” Bennett wrote. “I believe that a story that talks about the removal of the Kim family regime and the creation of a new government by the North Korean people (well, at least the elites) will start some real thinking in South Korea and, I believe, in the North once the DVD leaks into the North (which it almost certainly will).”

Lynton responded, “Bruce—Spoke to someone very senior in State (confidentially). He agreed with everything you have been saying. Everything. I will fill you in when we speak.”

Other emails name two State Department officials—Assistant Secretary Daniel Russel and Ambassador Robert King, US special envoy for North Korea human-rights issues—as providing input to the film.

War, Media Propaganda, and the Police State

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By James F. Tracy

Source: Memory Hole

The following essay is intended to provide a brief overview of topics addressed in a discussion graciously recorded by Julie Vivier at the offices of the Center for Research on Globalization in Montreal Canada on August 5, 2014.-JFT

Modern propaganda techniques utilized by the corporate state to enforce anti-democratic and destructive policies routinely entail the manufacture and manipulation of news events to mold public opinion and, as Edward Bernays put it, “engineer consent” toward certain ends.

Such events include not only overt political appeals, but also acts of seemingly spontaneous terrorism and militarism that traumatize the body politic into ultimately accepting false narratives as political and historical realities.

Western states’ development and utilization of propaganda closely parallels the steady decay of political enfranchisement and engagement throughout the twentieth century. Upon securing a second term in 1916, the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson plunged the United States into the most violent and homicidal war in human history. Wilson, a former Princeton University academician groomed for public office by Wall Street bankers, assembled a group of progressive-left journalists and publicists to “sell the war” to the American people.

George Creel, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and Harold Lasswell all played influential roles in the newly-formed Committee on Public Information, and would go on to be major figures in political thought, public relations, and psychological warfare research.

The sales effort was unparalleled in its scale and sophistication. The CPI was not only able to officially censor news and information, but essentially manufacture these as well. Acting in the role of a multifaceted advertising agency, Creel’s operation “examined the different ways that information flowed to the population and flooded these channels with pro-war material.”

The Committee’s domestic organ was comprised of 19 subdivisions, each devoted to a specific type of propaganda, one of which was a Division of News that distributed over 6,000 press releases and acted as the chief avenue for war-related information. On an average week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns carried data provided through CPI propaganda. The Division of Syndicated Features enlisted the help of popular novelists, short story writers, and essayists. These mainstream American authors presented the official line in a readily accessible form reaching twelve million people every month. Similar endeavors existed for cinema, impromptu soapbox oratory (Four Minute Men), and outright advertising at home and abroad.[1]

With the experiences and observations of these war marketers variously recounted and developed throughout the 1920s (Lippmann, Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, Bernays, Propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Creel, How We Advertised America, Lasswell, Propaganda and the World War), alongside the influence of their elite colleagues and associates, the young publicists’ optimism concerning popular democracy guided by informed opinion was sobered with the realization that public sentiment was actually far more susceptible to persuasion than had been previously understood. The proposed solutions to guarantee something akin to democracy in an increasingly confusing world lay in “objective” journalism guided by organized intelligence (Lippmann) and propaganda, or what Edward Bernays termed “public relations.”

The argument laid out in Lippmann’s Public Opinion was partly motivated by the US Senate’s rejection of membership in the League of Nations. An adviser to the Wilson administration, a central figure behind intelligence gathering that informed postwar geopolitical dynamics laid out at the Paris Peace Conference, and an early member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lippmann increasingly viewed popular democracy as plagued by a hopelessly ill-informed public opinion incapable of comprehending the growing complexities of modern society. Only experts could be entrusted with assessing, understanding, and acting on the knowledge accorded through their respective professions and fields.

Along these lines, journalism should mimic the then-fledgling social sciences by pursuing objectivity and deferring to the compartmentalized expertise of established authority figures. News and information could similarly be analyzed, edited, and coordinated to ensure accuracy by journalists exercising similar technocratic methods. Although Lippmann does not exactly specify what body would oversee such a process of “organized intelligence,” his postwar activities and ties provides a clue.

Edward Bernays’ advocacy for public opinion management is much more practical and overt. Whereas Lippmann suggests a regimented democracy via technocratic news and information processing, Bernays stresses a privileged elite’s overt manipulation of how the populace interprets reality itself. Such manipulation necessitates contrived associations, figures and events that appear authentic and spontaneous. “Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval,” Bernays notes,

“and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal … We reject government authoritarianism or regimentation, but we are willing to be persuaded by the written or spoken word. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.[2]

Bernays demonstrates an affinity with Lippmann’s notion of elite expediency when pursuing prerogatives and decision-making the public at large cannot be entrusted to interpret. In such instances,

democratic leaders must play their part in leading the public through the engineering of consent to socially constructive goals and values. This role naturally imposes upon them the obligation to use educational processes, as well as other available techniques, to bring about as complete an understanding as possible.[3]

Written in the early 1950s, these observations become especially apt in the latter half of the twentieth century, where the US is typically a major aggressor in foreign (and eventually domestic) affairs. Yet what does Bernays mean by, for example, “educational processes”? An indication may be found by noting his central role in the promotion of tobacco use, municipal water fluoridation, and the overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz regime in Guatemala.[4]

With the advent of the national security state in 1947, secret programs emerge where the people are as a matter of course intentionally left unaware of the state’s true rationales and objectives.

Indeed, a wealth of contemporary historical examples suggest how the “engineering of consent” is wholly calculating and anti-democratic, and where the crises requiring such drastic and immediate public relations and military measures are themselves the result of the same leadership’s policies and actions. The US economic provocation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Tonkin Gulf incident precipitating US military occupation of Vietnam are obvious examples of such manufactured events.

Similar techniques are apparent in the major political assassinations of the 1960s, where to this day the public is prompted to partake in the false reality that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole culprit in the murder of President John F. Kennedy, much as Sirhan Sirhan was responsible for the death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

In fact, in each instance overwhelming evidence points to Central Intelligence Agency involvement in orchestrating the assassinations while training and presenting Oswald and Sirhan as the would-be assassins.

The US government’s assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., probably the most influential African American public persona of the twentieth century, is not even open to debate, having been soundly proven in a court of law.[5] Yet as with the Kennedys, it is a genuine public relations achievement that much of the American population is oblivious to the deeper dynamics of these political slayings that are routinely overlooked or inaccurately recounted in public discourse.

Along these lines, in the historical context of Operation Gladio, the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, the events of September 11, 2001, the London 7/7/2005 bombings, and lesser episodes such as the “shoe” and “underwear” bombers, the engineering of consent has reached staggering new heights where state-orchestrated terrorism is used to mold public opinion toward acceptance of militarized policing operations, the continued erosion of civil liberties, and major sustained aggression against moderate Middle Eastern nations to cartelize scarce resources and politically reconfigure an entire region of the world.

Again, the public is essentially compelled to believe that political extremism of one form or another is the cause of each event, even in light of how the sophistication and scope of the Oklahoma City and 9/11 “attacks” suggest high-level forces at work. If one is to delve beneath the public relations narrative of each event, the recent Newtown massacre and Boston Marathon bombing likewise appear to have broader agendas where the public is again purposely misled.

Conventional journalists and academics are reluctant to publicly address such phenomena for fear of being called “conspiracy theorists.” In the case of academe this has severely curtailed serious and potentially crucial inquiry into such deep events and phenomena in lieu of what are often innocuous intellectual exchanges divorced from actually existing social and political realities that cry out for serious interrogation and critique.

The achievements of modern public relations are further evident in the Warren and 9/11 Commissions themselves, both of which have spun the fantastic myths of Allan Dulles and Peter Zelikow respectively, and that today maintain footholds in public discourse and consciousness.

Indeed, the “conspiracy theory” meme, a propaganda campaign waged by the CIA beginning in the mid-1960s to counter criticism of the Warren Commission report, is perhaps as little-known as Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program where hundreds of journalists and publishers actively devoted their services to spread Agency disinformation. The overall effect of these combined operations has been an immensely successful program continues to shape the contours of American political life and mediated reality.[6]

The present socio-political condition and suppression of popular democracy are triumphs of modern propaganda technique. So are they also manifest in the corporate state’s efforts to engineer public acquiescence toward such things as the colossal frauds of genetically modified organisms masquerading as “food,” toxic polypharmacy disguised as “medicine,” and the police state and “war on terror” seeking to preserve “national security.”

Notes

[1] Aaron Delwiche, “Propaganda: Wartime Propaganda: World War I, The Committee on Public Information,” accessed September 28, 2014 at http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ww1.cpi.html; George Creel, How We Advertised America, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920. Available at http://archive.org/details/howweadvertameri00creerich

[2] Edward Bernays, Public Relations, Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952, 159-160.

[3] Ibid. 160.

[4] “You can get practically any ideas accepted,” Bernays reflected on the campaign to fluoridate New York City’s water supply. “If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it, because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows, or doesn’t know … By the law of averages, you can usually find an individual in any field who will be willing to accept new ideas, and the new ideas then infiltrate the others who haven’t accepted it. Christopher Bryson, The Fluoride Deception, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004, 159.

[5] William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, New York: Verso, 2003.

[6] James F. Tracy, “Conspiracy Theory: Foundations of a Weaponized Term,” Global Research, January 22, 2013.

Propaganda, Brainwashing, Playing Dumb to Avoid the Truth

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Prof. Edward Curtin

Source: Global Research

“And we are all mortal” JFK – June 10, 1963 – American University

Not long after uttering those words in his startling and prophetic commencement address, President John F. Kennedy was publicly executed by terrorists operating from deep within the shadows of the secret state. A symbolic universe was shattered that day and a sense of fear and terror was unleashed into American society. The natural human fear of death was multiplied a thousand-fold as post-traumatic denial settled over the country and the Warren Commission released its fabrications fifty years ago this September 24th. (Did it win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year?)

That fear is the air we breathe today. We are choking on fear; trembling.

In a previous article,, I suggested that Americans are propagandized on two levels: culturally and politically. The elite work to scare and discombobulate regular people in various ways. Call it propaganda, brain-washing, mind-control, double-speak, etc. The result is to try and reduce people to muddled, frightened messes. These manipulative machinations generally work.

But there is a crucial flip side to this. Many, many people want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi): He put it as follows:

“In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.” But with this “lie” to myself, “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.”

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind governments’ and corporate media’s lies and propaganda.

But why? Why this widespread flight from seeking truth? What is at the core of this denial?

For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from alternative sources. It doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves. We are awash in information and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer. The problem is the will to know. But why, why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance, there is that. Willful ignorance, ditto. But there are many very intelligent people who adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies.

I, as do many others, know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down. Why? To take one example of sound, rational advice usually dismissed, last year Professor James Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin wrote, concerning the JFK assassination – and without foreclosing the issue – that one could readily arrive at a fair conclusion by a slow, careful study, including close attention to sources and footnotes. But few dare to follow such advice for an event that is paradigmatic for so much that has followed. Why this lack of will? Why the excuses?

This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe and the Obama administration expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

I believe there is a way to simplify the seeming complexity of this issue without being simplistic.

I think the answer was given forty years ago by Ernest Becker in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning (non-fiction) masterpiece, The Denial of Death. In that book Becker wanted to simplify a great deal of “needless intellectual complexity” about why people behave as they do. He felt we were “choking on truth” as a result of a plethora of brilliant writing and discoveries. He wanted to get to the heart of the matter, to cut through verbosity while “the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career.” He wanted to simplify without being simplistic.

His book is far from simplistic. It is deep and complicated. His conclusion, however, is simple.

It is the terror of death and the consequential denial of that reality that motivates so much human behavior. People kill out of this fear, they shrink from life and truth because of it, and they live in bad faith because of it. Born dying and knowing it, humans devise a thousand and one ways to shield themselves from this truth. And in the forefront of this great fear lie so many smaller “deaths.” Becker uncovers them all. The fear of ultimate death generates many children: the fear of disease and health obsessions, of terrorists, of the powerful, of standing up for oneself without experts, of speaking out, of being an individual, of disagreeing emphatically with government propaganda about major events, etc. The person powerfully motivated by death fear refuses to seek truth; it’s too overwhelming. Excuses are always at hand. Becker writes:

He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the ‘character defenses’: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the ‘ways of the world’ that the child learns and in which he lives later as a kind of grim equanimity – the ‘strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting’ – as (William) James put it. This is the deeper reason that Montaigne’s peasant isn’t troubled until the very end, when the Angel of Death, who has always been sitting on his shoulder, extends his wing. Or at least until he is startled into dumb awareness.

In The Denial of Death Becker distills all manner of exculpatory reasoning to its essence: fear. Fear of death leads to cowardly submission to unjust authority and untruth. The modern person, he writes, “is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.” We need, he concludes, the creation of new heroisms that affirm life. Drawing on Soren Kierkegaard, he suggests that we need to become “knights of faith.” This is easier said than done. He doesn’t say how to do so because he doesn’t know how.

But there are people who do; who have. President John Kennedy was one of them, as James Douglass makes clear in his brilliant work, JFK and the Unspeakable.

“In his final months, the president spoke with his friends about his own death with a freedom and frequency that shocked them. Some found it abnormal. Senator George Smathers said, ‘I don’t know why it was, but death became kind of an obsession with Jack.’ Yet if one understood the pressures for war and Kennedy’s risks for peace, his awareness of his own death was realistic. He understood systemic power. He knew who his enemies were and what he was up against. He knew what he had to do, from the turn away from the Cold War in his American University address, to negotiating peace with Khrushchev and Castro and withdrawing troops from Vietnam. Conscious of the price of peace, he took the risk. Death did not surprise him.”

It is a rare person who will say with JFK, “I have no fear of death.” His favorite poem was, “Rendevous,” by Alan Seeger, whose first and last lines run as follows: “I have a rendezvous with Death….And to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.” Jackie memorized it and would recite it back to him over the years. Five year old Caroline once surprised him in the Rose Garden during a meeting with the National Security Council by reciting by heart the poem to him and a stunned group of advisers. Kennedy was a rare and very courageous individual, one of Kierkegaard’s knights of faith. In his struggle against the forces of war and death, he adopted Lincoln’s prayer as his own which he kept on a slip of paper, “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

Maybe those of us who flee from truth out of fear would do well to meditate on such a man’s courage. And on the cowards who killed him. And on the Warren Commission, accomplices after- the-fact who wrote the fictional account of his murder.

Ernest Becker told us the truth: fear of death is for cowards. But even cowards are responsible. There is no escaping that.

Remember To Use Your Forgettery To Forget All the Trivia Meant To Divert Your Attention from Important Matters

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: OpEdNews.com

What is the explanation for the brainwashing of so many Americans when it involves the nefarious, unspeakable deeds of their government? Why are so many so easily duped time and again? Why is there such a vast ignorance of the truth behind national and international affairs?

I would suggest that the answer lies not just with the specific issues themselves and the lies and propaganda used to befuddle the American people, but with the cultural and social background that frames Americans’ thinking. The latter serves to cut to the root people’s belief in their own power to think freely and clearly about the former. Invade people’s minds over many years with an ongoing series of interconnected memes, occupy their minds with alleged facts that induce a frenzied depression, and then fooling them on specific issues — e.g. Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, etc. – becomes much easier.

I am a sociology professor, and my students always laugh when during a discussion of memory, social and personal, I ask them about their forgetties (the actual word is forgetteries, but the shorter rhyme gets more laughs). They think I’m joking. Maybe you do, too. I’m not. But when I suggest that if they “possess” the faculty to remember, then they must “possess” the faculty to forget, they are astonished. You can’t forget, they reply, you just don’t remember; you can’t retrieve the memories that are stored in your brain. In other words, there are no forgottens, just temporarily unavailable memories. From there we are onto a discussion of retrieving (I think of dogs), processing (their word for thinking and mine for making American cheese), and all the computer lingo that has been the surround of their lives. Like fish in water, the mechanistic computer memes have been their environment since birth. They are shocked at the suggestion that there might be more outside the cultural water, and that they could go there.

And they have a lot of company.

This may sound flippant, but it’s crucial for understanding why so many Americans can’t comprehend and pay attention to the ways their minds are scrambled and confused about life and death issues, how their country has fallen victim to the military-industrial-intelligence apparatus that operates deep in the shadows, and oftentimes right in the open.

If we examine the social and cultural context of the last twenty-five years, we can see a number of issues that have dominated Americans’ “thinking.” These issues have been promulgated and repeated ad infinitum by the corporate media, professional classes, and schools at all levels. We have been swimming in these issues for years. I suggest the following five are key: the inability to concentrate or pay attention (ADD/ADHD), memory/forgetting (dementia, Alzheimer’s, technological memory devices), people’s lack of time and constant busyness (a recent email I received from a publisher read: “crazy-busy? use our power-point decks”), drugs legal or illegal as problems or solutions (over 4 billion prescriptions written in the U.S.A. yearly), and technology as our savior.

Together with shopping and the weather, these five topics have been the stuff of endless conversations and media chatter over the years.

When people are questioned about major issues of war and peace; political assassinations, such as those of JFK, MLK, or RFK; the alleged war on terror; the downing of Malaysian airlines; the overthrow of elected governments in the Ukraine or Egypt; the events of 9/11; government spying; economic robbery by the elites — the list is long, it’s common for people to echo the government/corporate media, or, if pressed, to say, I don’t know, I can’t remember, no one knows for sure, it’s impossible to know, we’ll never know, etc.. The confused responses are replete with an unacknowledged despair at ever arriving at clear and certain conclusions, not to say being able to do anything about them. On many issues they bounce between the twin absurdities of Democratic and Republican talking points, thinking they are being perceptive.

Why?

If we set aside the substantive issues, and examine the aforementioned cultural memes, the answers are not hard to find. Here most people speak as if they are certain. “Of course there isn’t a forgettery.” “Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance.” “Memories are all stored in the brain.” “I really am so busy all the time.” “Facts are just opinions.” Americans have internalized the ethos presented to them by the elites. At the core of this is the propaganda of scientific materialism and biological determinism that we are not free but are victims of our genes, neurotransmitters, brain/computers and chemicals, technology, etc. Having lost our minds and fixated on our brains, we have been taught to be determined to be determined, not free. And whether consciously or unconsciously, most have obliged. The linkages between memory, attention, distraction, drugs, technology all point to the brain and the obsessive cultural discussion of brain matters. We have been told interminably that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world.

For years we have been fed philosophical presuppositions smuggled in as fact. It’s an old trick, ever young. Tell people over and over and over again that life is in essence a mindless material/biological trap and over time they will believe it. Of course there are unspoken exceptions — those who are the masters of this con-game, the few, the elite, those who make and reinforce the case. And even some of them are too ignorant to comprehend their questionable presuppositions. They hoist themselves by their own petards while cashing in at the bank.

My students can’t forget because they don’t believe in it. But they can’t remember either. They don’t know why. So, like the older generation, they fall into the careless habit of inaccuracy, to turn Oscar Wilde on his head. They have downloaded their memories, uploaded their trifles, and been tranquilized by trivia.

As the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote over fifty years ago, “Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.” That is truer today than then. A sense of entrapment and determinism pervades our culture. And it extends to public issues as well. We are told either to accept official explanations for public events or be dismissed as crazies.

I would suggest that for people to break through to a true understanding of the important public events of our time, they must also come to understand the false memes of their culture, the way they have been mindwashed to believe that at the most rudimentary level they are not free.

Maybe the first best step toward free thought and out of the propaganda trap would to accept that you “possess” a forgettery . Listen to the American philosopher Paul Simon sing, “When I think back to all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” Use your forgettery and forget the crap. Make haste slowly to question everything. Remember that the corporate media works hand in glove with the ruling elites on two levels of propaganda — cultural and political, and it is necessary to understand how they are intertwined. Freedom is indivisible.

That’s worth remembering.

Rejecting the Vomit of the Government and Corporate-stream Media

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Larry Pinkney

Source: Intrepid Report

“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”—Amilcar Cabral

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”—Thomas Jefferson

Let us get one thing crystal clear: We in the the United States of America, do not live in an informed genuine people’s ‘democracy’ nor do we have a government or mass media that is honest and transparent that serves the needs, interests, and aspirations of everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people.

It is time to cease being in denial and dispense with mythology.

The government of this nation is owned and operated, in real terms, by the power elite of giant avaricious corporations, including the corporate-stream ‘news’ media. In fact, the U.S. government, including so-called ‘elected’ representatives, has become, in reality, nothing more than a corporate clone, replete with self-serving pimping political parasites intent upon keeping everyday ordinary people dis-informed, divided, and controlled on the de facto plantations of the Democrat and Republican parties.

The politicians of this nation from Barack Obama on down, including both Democrats and Republicans, have repeatedly demonstrated that they are adroit at lying, dividing, and manipulating—not truth telling. They are irreconcilably wedded to a corrupt and dishonest corporate-owned political system, taking their cues from the relatively tiny, filthy rich, national and global power elite—always at the enormous economic, physical, and psychological expense of the everyday ordinary people of this nation and those throughout our precious Mother Earth.

These elected so-called people’s ‘representatives’ in the executive and legislative branches of the corporate-owned U.S. government are in essence anything but genuine representatives of the struggling masses of everyday ordinary people of all colors and both genders. They are stage props in the political theater of the absurd—keeping people perpetually divided, manipulated, and controlled in a corrupt political system that has gone absolutely berserk. And the judicial branch, has for the most part, become a terrible and sick joke—acting essentially as ping-pong systemic rubber stamps.

Corporate-stream vomit

The U.S. corporate-stream media, which includes ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, MSNBC, FOX, etc., constantly disinform and lie by omission to the everyday people of this nation by presenting the regurgitated and lopsided narrative of a greedy, war mongering power elite. This is nothing more than packaged corporate-stream vomit being rammed down the throats of everyday ordinary people by the corporate-stream media in service to the thought police and systemic gatekeepers of the Democrat and Republican plantation.

Why does the corporate-stream media continue to serve the masses of people a diet of lies and distortions, i.e., a diet of vomit? What purpose does it serve?

The U.S. so-called ‘mainstream’ media are essentially owned and/or controlled by only five major corporations. These corporations are in turn owned and/or controlled by a small and powerful power elite whose objective is not to honestly inform the masses of people—but rather to shape and thereby control public opinion. These corporations are in turn wedded to other corporations that make huge profits of blood money from manufacturing weapons of destruction in the air, in space, on land, and in the seas. Thus, the drums of war are virtually always being pounded—in the name of allegedly protecting an economic, political and social ‘democracy’ that, we the people, of this nation do not in the main enjoy. The objective of the corporate-stream media is to keep pumping the vomit to the people in order to ensure that the blood money from war profits of, for example, Boeing, General Electric, Honeywell, etc., continue unabated. This reality has nothing to do with so-called ‘national security’ or ‘democracy’—but everything to do with the reaping of enormous profits for the national and global power elite, at the immense expense of humanity, both nationally and globally.

Another objective of the corporate-stream media is to seek to discredit those persons who seek to expose the lies, distortions, and/or frame-ups, etc., by the government and its various local, state, and federal police and so-called ‘intelligence’ agencies. The courts, of course, also play a major role in in attempting to legitimize systemic actions to discredit, silence, imprison, or otherwise ‘neutralize’ political activists who are organizers and truth-tellers in this nation. There are no limits to the depths of dirty tricks and set-ups that the government, with the support of the corporate-stream media and the courts, will utilize in attempts to neutralize, discredit, and silence persons who oppose its agenda. They just keep pumping out the vomit to be consumed by everyday ordinary people.

Finally, another potent objective of the corporate-stream media (including the ‘entertainment’ industry) is to distract from the truth and to distort it in every conceivable fashion. U.S. and British television networks are particularly notorious in, for example, propagating drama shows and so-called sitcoms that attempt to distract people from the obvious while utterly distorting historical and contemporary reality. The corporate-stream media moguls are keenly aware of how the narrative and agenda of the power elite can be stealthily propagated in the seemingly innocuous name of ‘entertainment.’ Being entertained is one thing but being subliminally brainwashed is quite another.

Lie after lie after lie

The immense damage and impact of and by the corporate-stream media on the minds and daily lives of everyday people should never be underestimated.

The words of the martyred South African political activist Steve Biko are worth remembering and internalizing: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

If we do not critically think for ourselves then we are slaves—systemic slaves of all colors.

Whether it’s about this nation, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Somalia, or the Ukraine (Obama Regime Engaged in MH17 Cover Up, by Donn Marten), etc., we the ‘American’ people, are fed a diet of lie after lie, after lie, after lie by the corporate-owned U.S. government and the corporate-stream U.S. media.

Even as joblessness, home foreclosures, prison incarceration, homelessness, the so-called ‘national debt,’ and corporate glut and domination, etc., reach virtually unprecedented heights, the corporate-stream media would tell us that conditions are somehow getting better for the masses of everyday people in drone man Obama’s NDAA, NSA, ‘kill list,’ surveillance/de facto police state. We are expected to suck up the corporate-stream media’s vomit despite what we see and experience firsthand in our families and communities. I reiterate: If we do not critically think for ourselves then we are slaves!

Moreover, those relatively ‘fortunate’ few in this nation who are able to attend colleges and universities are also force-fed a diet of corporate-stream vomit by ‘educational’ institutions that are increasingly corporate owned and/or controlled and are largely beholden to promoting a corporate narrative and agenda. This is not real education and it is certainly not an environment wherein critical thinking is seriously encouraged, supported, and promoted. Indeed, critical thinking, just as in the larger U.S. society, is, in actuality, considered to be subversive. Notwithstanding the outrageous debt that most students are compelled to incur in order to attend these colleges and universities, far from being educated, they are being brainwashed to be systemic cogs—good little obedient, non-critically thinking corporate slaves.

As bloody conflicts and wars persist, at the behest of the national and global corporate power elite, decimating our planet’s natural environment, ravaging Mother Earth and her people, the time is upon us to creatively, consistently, and collectively act in the interest of ourselves and the rest of everyday ordinary humanity. This is not a matter of choice—it is a matter of absolute necessity.

We in this nation are not Democrats or Republicans—we are victims of the Democrats and Republicans. It is time to stop being their victims and find the ways and means together to relegate those pimping political parasites (and their corporate-stream media) to the dustbin of history.

What must we the people do?

The situation in this nation is dire but not hopeless. Here are some ideas of what we can do as individuals and collectively:

We should immediately start to utilize critical thinking. To do so is, in and of itself, a necessary and revolutionary step. Thomas Jefferson correctly stated that, “Every generation needs a new revolution.” This 21^st century generation must act now if there is even to be yet another generation.
We should treat the corporate-stream media for what it is, understanding that its objective is to keep us disinformed, manipulated, and controlled. However, we should also share our insights with our friends, neighbors, and other associates—while simultaneously listening to their perspectives with a view towards creatively ways to develop and/or support viable alternatives to the corporate-stream media and be consistent.
We should remember to use plain, simple, down-to-earth language when communicating our observations, ideas, and goals—keeping in mind that if we truly want to change this rotten system, we must endeavor to be in ourselves that which we want to see in a more humane and just society for which we are striving.

It is important to remember that this cynical political system thrives upon and exacerbates human weaknesses. Thus, we should strive to recognize our own strengths, weaknesses, and limitations as we organize and communicate with one another.

We everyday ordinary people must consistently utilize a very large dose of creativity as we aid one another to debunk and disengage from the poisonous vomit of the corporate-stream media. The task before us is an imperative one for this nation and humankind as a whole. In the paraphrased words of Amilcar Cabral, we must “tell no lies to the people and claim no easy victories.”

Remember: Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward then, my sisters and brothers. Onward!!!

Intrepid Report Associate Editor Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities, Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. Pinkney is a former university instructor of political science and international relations, and his writings have been published in various places, including The Boston Globe, the San Francisco BayView newspaper, the Black Commentator, Global Research (Canada), LINKE ZEITUNG (Germany), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.)

Beyond Propaganda: Discourse of War and Doublethink. “When the Lie Becomes the Truth”

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Jean-Claude Paye and Tülay Umay

Source: Global Research

Since the attacks of September 11, we are witnessing a transformation of the way the media report the news. They lock us in the unreal. They base truth not on the coherence of a presentation, but on its shocking character. Thus, the observer remains petrified and cannot establish a relation to reality.

The media are lying to us, but at the same time, they show us that they are lying. It is no longer a matter of changing our perception of facts in order to get our support, but to lock us in the spectacle of the omnipotence of power. Showing the annihilation of reason is based on images that serve to replace facts. Information no longer focuses on the ability to perceive and represent a thing, but the need to experience it, or rather to experience oneself through it.

From Bin Laden to Merah, through the “tyrant” Bashar al-Assad, media discourse has become the permanent production of fetishes, ordering surrender to what is “given to see.” The injunction does not aim, as propaganda, to convince. It simply directs the subject to give flesh to the image of the “war of civilizations”. The discursive device of “War of Good against Evil,” updating the Orwellian doublethink process must become a new reality that de-structures our entire existence, of everyday life in global political relations.

Such an approch has become ubiquitous, especially regarding the war in Syria. It consists of cancelling a statement at the same time as it is pronounced, while maintaining what has been previously given to see and hear. The individual must have the ability to accept opposing elements, without raising the existing contradiction. Language is thus reduced to communication and cannot fulfill its function of representation. The deconstruction of the faculty to symbolize prevents any protection vis-à-vis the real to which we are in submission.

Enunciating a Statement And its Opposite at the Same Time

In the reports on the conflict in Syria, the double think procedure is omnipresent. Stating at the same time a thing and its opposite produces a decay of consciousness. It is no longer possible to perceive and analyze reality. Unable to put emotion at a distance, we cannot but feel the real and thus be submitted to it.

Opponents of the regime of Bashar al-Assad are dubbed “freedom fighters” and Islamic fundamentalist enemies of democracy at the same time. It is the same with regard to the use of chemical weapons by belligerents. The media, in the absence of evidence, express certainty as to the Syrian regime’s responsability, although they mention the use of such weapons by the “rebels”. In particular, they relayed the statements of magistrate Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN independent commission of inquiry into violence in Syria, who said, on May 5, 2013 on Swiss television, “According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas.” This magistrate, who is also the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia can hardly be called indulgent toward the “regime of Bashar Assad.” “Our investigations should be further developed, verified and confirmed through new evidence, but according to what we have established so far, it is the opponents who used sarin,” she added. [1]

The White House, for its part, did not want to consider this evidence and has always expressed an opposite position. Thus, as regards the August 21 Ghouta massacre, it released a statement explaining that there is “little doubt” of the use by Syria of chemical weapons against its opposition. The statement added that the Syrian agreement to allow the UN inspectors in the area is “too late to be credible.”

Reduction of qualitative to quantitative.

Following the use, August 21, 2013, of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, Kerry reiterated the “strong certainty” of the United States concerning the liability of the Syrian regime. A U.S. intelligence report, released by the White House and said to rely on “multiple” sources, also said that the Syrian government used nerve gas in the attack, the use of which by the rebels is “highly unlikely”. [2]

The individual is placed outside the differentiating power of language. That which is qualitative, that which is certain, is reduced to that which is quantitative, to the “different degrees of certainty” expressed previously by Obama or the “high certainty” pronounced by J. Kerry. The “very little doubt”, as to the liability of the Syrian regime, also mirrors the “highly unlikely” responsibility attributed to opponents. Quality is thereby restricted to a quantitative difference. Quality, that which is, becomes at the same time, that which is not or at least that which may not be, because it no longer expresses a certainty, but a certain amount or degree of certainty or doubt. The opposites, “certainty” and “doubt” become equivalent. The qualitative difference is reduced to a quantitative gap. There is no longer any quality other than that of measurement.

This reduction of qualitative to quantitative has otherwise already invaded our daily lives. We no longer refer to the poor but to the “less fortunate”. Similarly, we no longer encounter invalids, but “less able persons”. The least skilled jobs are now given names that deny de-qualification. Thus, a cleaning woman becomes a ” housekeeper”, the cashier disappears in favour of the “sales assistant” and garbage Collector are now called « sanitation worker ».

The separating power of language is annihilated. Words are turned into verbal phrases that build a homogenized world. We are in a world in which everyone is advantaged. No more are there qualitative differences between human beings, but only quantitative differences. The vision of a world of perfect homogeneity where only equals exist, no longer differing other than quantitatively, was already foreseen by George Orwell in Animal Farm: « All are equal, but some would be more so than others » « [3].

Absolute Certainty in the Absence of Evidence.

The word, which describes and differentiates things, is replaced by an image, by that which is everything at the same time as being nothing. Instead of a word referring to an object, degrees of certainty concern only the feelings of the speaker. These verbal phrases are not intended to designate objective things, but to place the person who receives the message in the perspective of the speaker, to lock them in the warped meaning created by the latter.

Expressed certainty can detach itself from facts and present itself as purely subjective. It does not refer to an observation, but refers to a condition posing as objective through a quantization operation.

The certainty of U.S. and French authorities also distinguishes itself in that it is built on equivocal data, on the invocation of evidence of liability of the Syrian regime, although they recall the impossibility of knowing who struck and how chemical weapons were used. It is no longer possible to construct an objective certainty, because the observation of facts is defused and leaves room for the stupefaction of the observer. Expressed certainty no longer separates true from false, since the ability to judge is suspended.

Precisely, subjective and objective certainty is undifferentiated. It is not a matter of believing what is stated, but of believing the authority who speaks, no matter what he says. Statements of Presidents Obama and Holland are immediately given as absolute certainty, ie: they occupy the place that Descartes gives to God “as a principle guaranteeing the objective truth of subjective experience…” [4]. The matter of going through the steps of objective verification, through the judgment of existence, does not arise to the extent that certainty is set free from all spatial and temporal constraints. It is posited in the absence of limits, in the absence of what psychoanalysis calls the “Third Person”, the place of the Other. [5]

Removal of the “Third Person”

Absolute certainty, posing as the be all and end all, installs a denial of reality, that which escapes us. It does not recognize loss. Constituting “we” is no longer possible because it can only be formed from that which is missing. The monad, for its part, lacks nothing because it is fused with state power. Fetishes fabricated by “the news” fill the void of reality, occupy the place of that which is missing and operate a denial of the third party.

Absolute certainty is opposed to the establishment of a symbolic order integrating the “third person” [6], the domain of language. The proper function of language is to signify that which is real, knowing that the word is not reality itself, but that by which it is represented. Jacques Lacan expresses this necessity with his aphorism “the thing must be lost in order to be represented”. [7]

On the contrary, absolute certainty attaches words to things and does not take into account their relationships. In the absence of a ’third person’, it prevents any real articulation with the symbolic. This absence of linkage is the formation of a social psychosis wherein that which is stated by power becomes reality. The deficiency also allows the emergence of a perverse structure that reverses the speech act and prevents identifying the reality of the psychosis.

Enrolling us in psychosis, the discourse of French and American authorities originates in perverse denial. It constitutes a coup against language “coup because disavowal is situated at the logical basis of language” [8]. Denial of reality is realized by a commodification of words and a procedure of cleavage. The cynical coup is this: “pervert that by which law is articulated, make language the reasonable discourse of unreason” [9] as with “humanitarian war” or “counter-terrorism”.

Counter-terrorism legislation is presented as rational actions to dismantle the law in favour of the fabrication of images. U.S. law is particularly rich in these pictorial constructions, such as the “lone wolf”, a lone terrorist related to an international movement, the “enemy combatant” or “unlawful belligerent” that exist, because they are designated as such by the U.S. President. The enemy combatant, as illegal belligerent, may be a U.S. citizen who has never been on a battlefield and whose “military action” amounts to an act of protest against a military engagement. Deviation from that which is stated by the powers that be is no longer possible. Similarly, any protection against its real threat is removed. The reality manifests itself without dissimilation and can henceforth petrify us.

The suppression of the Third Person reducing the individual to a monad, no longer having an Other outside of state power, allows authority, especially as regards discourse on the war in Syria, to produce a new reality. Evidence of the guilt of the Syrian regime exists, because authority says so.

A “disturbing strangeness”.

The absence of a “third person” settles us in transparency, in a never-never land beyond language. It removes the relationship between interior and exterior. The expression of the omnipotence of the U.S. President, his will to break free from the constraints of language and of any judicial order, reveals our condition, its reduction to “naked life.” There then occurs “a special kind of scary” Freud calls Unheimliche [10], a term which has no equivalent in French and which can as well be translated as “disturbing strangeness” and as “disturbing familiarity.”

It would be, as defined by Schelling, something that should have remained hidden and which has reappeared. Unveiled, worldly things appear in their raw presence as Real. Where the individual believed himself at home, he suddenly feels driven from his home and becomes strangely foreign to himself. The inside of our condition, our annihilation is thrown out and appears to us as a plaything of the U.S. executive branch. The staging of our division, “disturbing strangeness”, becoming that which is most familiar to us, suppresses intimateness by replacing it.

Freud suggests a dissociation of the ego. The latter is then pulverised and can no longer display the Real, the threat that petrifies it. Freud speaks of the formation of a stranger “I” that can turn itself into moral conscience and treat the other part as an object [11].

This mechanism reappears as the return of the repressed archaic, that which is intended to hide the distress of the nursing child. The “disturbing strangeness”, produced by Obama’s speech is of the same order. It instrumentalises what happened in Iraq in order to prevent us from forgetting our impotence. Thus, it reinforces “the permanent return of the same” constitutive of a sense of “disturbing strangeness” or disturbing familiarity. The process of repetition presents itself as an inexorable process, like a power that we cannot confront.

Jacques Lacan confirms this reading. Echoing the work of Freud on the “disturbing strangeness”, he shows that anxiety arises when the subject is facing the “lack of lack” that is to say, an all-powerful otherness that invades the self to the point of destroying every faculty of desire. [12]

In fact, the two translations, the first highlighting the strangeness, the second its familiar character, make each highlight one aspect of this particular anxiety that one can also deal with thanks to the notion of transparency. Interior and exterior confusing themselves, the individual is at once struck by the strangeness of seeing his impotence, by his interior deprivation exhibited outside himself and by the colonization of his intimacy by the spectacle, become familiar, of the enjoyment of the other.

Denial and Splitting of the Ego.

Dissociation is an archaic defense attempt when faced with a power with which one cannot cope. This disintegration of the Ego allows the return of a “déjà vu”. The Superego calls one to see oneself as an infant, as one who does not speak, thus causing a feeling of “disturbing strangeness”.

Faced with the imperative need to believe in the responsibility of Bashar Assad, the individual must suspend contrary information and treat it as if it did not exist. He proceeds to a denial of all that is different, then couched in the regressive position, that of the umbilical union with the mother, a stage preceding language, before the appearance of the function of the father. [13]

The denial of the contradiction between a thing and its opposite, the responsibility of the Syrian government and the use of chemical weapons by the rebels, is the act of denying the reality of perception seen as dangerous because the individual would then have to face the omniscience displayed by the powers that be. To contain the anxiety produced by the “disturbing strangeness”, the subject is forced to juxtapose two opposing and parallel ways of reasoning. The individual then has two incompatible unlinked visions. The denial of the opposition between these two elements removes any confliction; because there coexists within oneself two opposing statements that are juxtaposed without influencing each other. This denial rests on what psychoanalysis calls the “splitting of the ego.”

The cleavage gives one the opportunity to live on two different levels, placing side by side, on the one hand, “knowledge”, the use of sarin gas by the rebels, and on the other hand a dodging of confrontation with a suspension of information. This is to prevent any struggle, any symbolism in order to enjoy the full omnipotence of the powers that be. In the absence of a perceived lack in what one is told, one finds oneself beneath the conflict in an annulment of any judgment.

Orwell has also highlighted this procedure in his definition of “doublethink.” It consists in the following: “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,” while being able to forget, « whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed ». Then one must forget, ie: “consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you have just performed. ” [14]

Cleavage is recurrent in the speech surrounding the war in Syria. Things here are regularly affirmed, at the same time as that which contradicts them without a relationship being established between the different enunciations. Contrary to statements by Carla Del Ponte, Washington would first have arrived, “with varying degrees of certainty,” at the conclusion that the Syrian government forces had used sarin gas against their own people. However, Barack Obama, at the same time, said the United States didn’t know ” how [these weapons] were used, when they were used or who used them” [15]. The operation places the subject in fragmentation, unable to react to the nonsense of what is said and shown. One cannot cope with a certainty that is claimed in the absence of evidence.

The logical reversal of language building becomes a manifestation of the power of the U.S. executive. It exhibits a capacity to overcome any language organisation and thus all symbolic order. The absurdity reclaimed by the statement is as a coup against the logical basis of language. It henceforth has a petrification effect on people and captivates them in psychosis.

Notes

[1] « Les rebelles syriens ont utilisé du gaz sarin, selon Carla Del Ponte », Le Monde.fr avec Reuters, le 6 mai 2013.

[2] « Syrie : les États-Unis ont la “forte certitude” que Damas a eu recours à des armes chimiques », Le Monde.fr, le 30 août 2013.

[3] « All are equal but some than others », Georges Orwell, in Animal Farm.

[4] Charles-Éric de Saint Germain, L’Avènement de la vérité Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, L’Harmattan 2003, p. 37.

[5]Dominique Temple, “Lacan et la réciprocité”, 2008, http://dominique.temple.free.fr/reciprocite.php?page=reciprocite_2&id_article=202

[6] Le « Tiers » est ce qui défusionne l’enfant de la mère, lui donnant ainsi accès au champ du langage et de la parole. Il permet l’assujettissement du sujet à un ordre symbolique.

[7] Jacques Lacan, « Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse » – in : Écrits 1, Le Seuil, Paris, 1966.

[8] Houriya Abdellouahed, « La tactilité d’une parole. Le pervers et la substance », in Cliniques méditerranéennes N° 72, Érès , p.5, http://www.cairn.info/revue-cliniques-mediterraneennes-2005-2.htm

[9] Op. Cit., p. 8.

[10] Unheimliche est un adjectif substantivé, formé à partir de deux termes : le préfixe Un, exprimant la privation et l’adjectif heimlich (familier). La traduction « l’inquiétante étrangeté », d’abord proposée par Marie Bonaparte, ne tient compte ni de la familiarité signifié par heimlich, ni de la négation marquée par le Un. Aussi d’autres traductions ont été proposées telle que « l’inquiétante familiarité ». Lire les remarques préliminaires de François Stirn à la traduction de Une inquiétante étrangeté, par Marie Bonaparte et E. Marty, Profil Textes Philosophiques, Philosophie, octobre 2008, www.esparedes.pt/escola/images/freud_etrangete.pdf

[11] Le partage en deux éléments séparés a pour conséquence « que l’un participe au savoir, aux sentiments et aux expériences de l’autre, de l’unification à une autre personne, de sorte que l’on ne sait plus à quoi s’en tenir quant au moi propre, ou qu’on met le moi étranger à la place du Moi propre —donc dédoublement du Moi, division du Moi, permutation du Moi— et enfin, le retour permanent du même », S. Freud, « Inquiétante étrangeté et clivage », in L’Inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais, Gallimard 1988, p. 236.

[12] Régine Detambel, « Sigmund Freud, L’inquiétante étrangeté autres essais, http://www.detambel.com/f/index.php?sp=liv&livre_id=656

[13] « Inquiétante étrangeté et clivage », http://theses.univ-lyon2.fr/documents/getpart.php?id=lyon2.2002.ravit_m&part=66598

[14] « Retenir simultanément deux opinions qui s’annulent alors qu’on les sait contradictoires et croire à toutes deux… Oublier tout ce qu’il est nécessaire d’oublier, puis le rappeler à sa mémoire quand on en a besoin, pour l’oublier plus rapidement encore. Surtout, appliquer le même processus au processus lui-même. Là, était l’ultime subtilité. Persuader consciemment l’inconscient, puis devenir ensuite inconscient de l’acte d’hypnose que l’on vient de perpétrer. La compréhension même du mot « double pensée » impliquait l’emploi de la double pensée. », George Orwell, 1984, première partie, chapitre III, Gallimard Folio 1980, p.55

[15] « Les rebelles syriens ont utilisé du gaz sarin, selon Carla Del Ponte », Op. Cit.

This article was first published on our French language website www.mondialisation.ca

Article in French :

Discours de la guerre et double pensée. L’exemple de la Syrie. Mondialisation.ca, 29 of June of 2014

Will Ukraine Be NYT’s Waterloo?

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

For Americans interested in foreign policy, the New York Times has become the last U.S. newspaper to continue devoting substantial resources to covering the world. But the Times increasingly betrays its responsibility to deliver anything approaching honest journalism on overseas crises especially when Official Washington has a strong stake in the outcome.

The Times’ failures in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War are, of course, well known, particularly the infamous “aluminum tube” story by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller. And, the Times has shown similar bias on the Syrian conflict, such as last year’s debunked Times’ “vector analysis” tracing a sarin-laden rocket back to a Syrian military base when the rocket had less than one-third the necessary range.

But the Times’ prejudice over the Ukraine crisis has reached new levels of extreme as the “newspaper of record” routinely carries water for the neocons and other hawks who still dominate the U.S. State Department. Everything that the Times writes about Ukraine is so polluted with propaganda that it requires a very strong filter, along with additives from more independent news sources, to get anything approaching an accurate understanding of events.

From the beginning of the crisis, the Times sided with the “pro-democracy” demonstrators in Kiev’s Maidan square as they sought to topple democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, who had rebuffed a set of Western demands that would have required Ukraine to swallow harsh austerity measures prescribed by the International Monetary Fund. Yanukovych opted for a more generous offer from Russia of a $15 billion loan with few strings attached.

Along with almost the entire U.S. mainstream media, the Times cheered on the violent overthrow of Yanukovych on Feb. 22 and downplayed the crucial role played by well-organized neo-Nazi militias that surged to the front of the Maidan protests in the final violent days. Then, with Yanukovych out and a new coup regime in, led by U.S. hand-picked Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the IMF austerity plan was promptly approved.

Since the early days of the coup, the Times has behaved as essentially a propaganda organ for the new regime in Kiev and for the State Department, pushing “themes” blaming Russia and President Vladimir Putin for the crisis. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine, Though the US ‘Looking Glass.’”]

In the Times’ haste to perform this function, there have been some notable journalistic embarrassments such as the Times’ front-page story touting photographs that supposedly showed Russian special forces in Russia and then the same soldiers in eastern Ukraine, allegedly proving that the popular resistance to the coup regime was simply clumsily disguised Russian aggression.

Any serious journalist would have recognized the holes in the story – since it wasn’t clear where the photos were taken or whether the blurry images were even the same people – but that didn’t bother the Times, which led with the scoop. However, only two days later, the scoop blew up when it turned out that a key photo – supposedly showing a group of soldiers in Russia who later appeared in eastern Ukraine – was actually taken in Ukraine, destroying the premise of the entire story.

Soldiering On

The Times, however, continued to soldier on with its bias, playing up stories that made Russia and the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine look bad and playing down anything that might make the post-coup regime in Kiev look bad.

On Saturday, for instance, the dominant story from Ukraine was the killing of more than 30 ethnic Russian protesters by fire and smoke inhalation in Ukraine’s southern port city of Odessa. They had taken refuge in a building after a clash with a pro-Kiev mob which reportedly included right-wing thugs.

Even the neocon-dominated Washington Post led its Saturday editions with the story of “Dozens killed in Ukraine fighting” and described the fatal incident this way: “Friday evening, a pro-Ukrainian mob attacked a camp where the pro-Russian supporters had pitched tents, forcing them to flee to a nearby government building, a witness said. The mob then threw gasoline bombs into the building. Police said 31 people were killed when they choked on smoke or jumped out of windows.

“Asked who had thrown the Molotov cocktails, pro-Ukrainian activist Diana Berg said, ‘Our people – but now they are helping them [the survivors] escape the building.’”

By contrast, here is how the New York Times reported the event in its Saturday editions as part of a story by C.J. Chivers and Noah Sneider focused on the successes of the pro-coup armed forces in overrunning some eastern Ukrainian rebel positions.

“Violence also erupted Friday in the previously calmer port city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, where dozens of people died in a fire related to clashes that broke out between protesters holding a march for Ukrainian unity and pro-Russian activists. The fighting itself left four dead and 12 wounded, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said. Ukrainian and Russian news media showed images of buildings and debris burning, fire bombs being thrown and men armed with pistols.”

Note how the Times evades placing any responsibility on the pro-coup mob for trying to burn the “pro-Russian activists” out of a building, an act that resulted in the highest single-day death toll since the actual coup which left more than 80 people dead from Feb. 20-22. From reading the Times, you wouldn’t know who had died in the building and who had set the fire.

Normally, I would simply attribute this deficient story to some reporters and editors having a bad day and not bothering to assemble relevant facts. However, when put in the context of the Times’ unrelenting bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis – how the Times hypes every fact (and even non-facts) that reflect negatively on the anti-coup side – you have to think that the Times is spinning its readers, again.

For those who write for the Times – and the many more people who read it – the question must be whether the Times is so committed to its prejudices here that the newspaper will risk whatever credibility it has left. The coup regime from Kiev may succeed in slaughtering many ethnic Russians in the rebellious east — as the Times signals its approval — but will this bloody offensive become a Waterloo for whatever’s left of the newspaper’s journalistic integrity?

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

The Alleged Assassination of Osama Bin Laden

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Today marks the 3rd anniversary of the alleged assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I emphasize the word “alleged” because claims from medical experts such as Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik assert he died in 2001 from Marfan syndrome. Others such as Pakistan President Benazir Bhutto (who was later assassinated) claimed Bin Laden was assassinated in 2002 by Omar Sheikh. Though it remains inconclusive exactly how Bin Laden died, what we may conclude with certainty is that the official story of his death is a lie. Ample evidence dismantling the official story of how Bin Laden died as well as some of the evidence “proving” Bin Laden was the mastermind behind 9/11 are contained in the following articles from WhatReallyHappened.com:

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/bin_laden_death.html

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/galleryoffakebinladens.php

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The Alleged Assassination of Osama Bin Laden