FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 10, Part 3
Number 10, Part 3
(NEW SERIES—2007)
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..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
A LETTER OF LAMENTATION
TO
AMERICA:
THE UNITED STATES
IS NO LONGER
A SERIOUS PLACE
A LETTER OF LAMENTATION
TO
AMERICA:
THE UNITED STATES
IS NO LONGER
A SERIOUS PLACE
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
................................................................................What [was] really remarkable about [a New York Times article on George W.
................................................................................Bush published a week before the 2001 inauguration] [was] not Bush, but
................................................................................the Times. What [was] the Times trying to tell us? Once it was settled that W.
................................................................................was going to be president, the Times seemed very concerned with making
................................................................................it believable.
..........................................................................................—David Cogswell, "Usurpation: The Coup of 2001 and the Inaugural Cry,"
..........................................................................................a Post-Script to Fortunate Son (2001), by J. H. Hatfield (New York, Soft Skull
..........................................................................................Press)
................................................................................[M]ost of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity
................................................................................that lies behind the Bush administration.
..........................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "The Neoconservative Threat to American Freedom,"
..........................................................................................June 11, 2007
................................................................................Our nation is dying. Our nation is being murdered before our very eyes. And yet,
................................................................................over so long a time and in so many ways has this same nation been degraded by
................................................................................its own internal enemies that it is not only a nation gone blind, acquiescent in its
................................................................................own death, but it is also a nation in which criminality has evolved into custom.
.......................................................................................... —Eric Larsen, "A Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 2
................................................................................Every American must take the time to learn the truth about what is being done in our
................................................................................Every patriotic American must open his or her eyes and see the cold hard truth about
................................................................................our leaders that the rest of the world already knows.
..........................................................................................—Peter Chamberlain, "Let's Kill 'Em All," in The People's Voice
................................................................................Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile, criminal, or delusional?
..........................................................................................—Eric Larsen, "Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 3.
..........
..........My wife and I were out of the country when the Vietnam anti-war movement reached its peak, or one of its peaks. She and I were in Europe from 1968 through 1970, teaching there, while buildings burned down back at the University of Iowa—"our" campus—students took over Columbia University, and the Kent State shootings took place.
..........And now: It's mid-summer 2007. Here I am in my apartment in New York City. Soon, 9/11 will be six years in the past. The War of Great Lies—Iraq—has been going on for almost four and a half years. Paul Craig Roberts calls a recent (July 17) piece "Impeach Now or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy," and his first sentence reads: "Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran." A few days after the Roberts piece, on July 21, Webster Tarpley published "Cheney Determined to Strike in US with WMD this Summer: Only Impeachment, Removal or General Strike Can Stop Him." And Nancy Levant, on July 18, wrote, in "Deathtech Reality," that "Now, we are all fighting dictatorship—the key word being 'now.' We are fighting evil."
..........How can this pitch of affairs have been reached? How can we have allowed so dire a situation to have come about?
..........Well, the American people have been lied to for decades. They have been made compliant, blind, unresisting, and ignorant—and, now, as a result, they put no restraint upon and post no obstacle to an openly and brazenly criminal "government" whose aims and ambitions are to eradicate the republic, establish martial law, and conduct an unending war of conquest elsewhere in the world.
..........John Pilger helps explain what has happened. In a speech he gave before the Chicago Socialism Conference this past June 16 ("The Invisible Government"), he called for a new truthfulness in journalism, for a getting rid of the bankrupt and now-fraudulent mask of what we still call "liberalism" (that is, liberalism as in "Democratic Party" or "Nancy Pelosi"), even though it in fact no longer serves true liberalism or any purpose related to genuine political opposition at all, but is in actuality only part of the single and unified political entity that ought to be called "The American Imperial Party."
..........According to Pilger, as journalists hide behind this hypocritical, false, and corrupted mask of "liberalism," they and their publications both are complicit in the death, suffering, agonies, murders, and ruin that have been and are being brought into existence around the world by the criminal and greed-blinded American juggernaut.
..........Still, in spite of these awful truths, Pilger insists on holding out a degree of hope. "I believe," he writes, that
....................a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people's movement, that monitors, deconstructs,
....................and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news
....................room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part
....................they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity [emphasis added]. Such
....................a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known.
....................This is all possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the National Union of Journalists has
....................undergone a radical change, and has called for a boycott of Israel. The web site Media-
....................lens.org has single-handedly called the BBC to account. In the United States wonderfully
....................free rebellious spirits populate the web—I can't mention them all here—from Tom Feeley's
....................International Clearing House, to Mike Albert's ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the splen-
....................did work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web— Dahr Jamail's cour-
....................ageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe Wilding, who reported the siege of Fallujah.
....................
..........And so, according to Pilger, the "bogus objectivity" that still poses as "liberalism" has brought about the situation whereby the American masses in general—as opposed to the relatively few who do follow Tom Feeley or Alan Miller or the Muckraker Report or Online Journal or The People's Voice—are routinely, ritually, and regularly lied to, euphemized to, whitewashed to, and propagandized to in the name of that same bogus objectivity.
..........Like the rest of the mainstream media, the New York Times is notable above all for the enormous amount of news that isn't in it. Far and away most news is simply left out, as is most of the truth. The paper's failure, for example (or refusal), over the past six years, to report fully and honestly on the behavior, activities, and plans of the Bush administration or on the forces and powers behind the Bush administration—this failure, exactly like that of any journalist following the rule of "bogus objectivity," makes the New York Times unquestionably complicit in the U.S. government's almost unbroken record over that period of committing of crimes both domestically and worldwide and in its purposeful destruction at the very least of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives through its program of ongoing crimes against humanity.
..........I find myself more pessimistic than Pilger seems to be in his hope that such rampant and virulent criminality can be arrested and the perpetrators of it held accountable, although I promise to myself and to any who may be listening that I will hold out some hope as long as he holds out some hope.
..........In Pilger's view—and I agree with him entirely—the truth is the only power that can conceivably have any corrective influence over the present rampantly criminal and admittedly terrifying situation. And here, in two sentences as elegant in their simplicity as they are chilling in their content, Pilger tells the truth:
....................Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all—and I believe
....................that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't
....................true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States.
..........This, then, is the point we in the U.S. have reached so far in the early 21st Century: We have an administration that lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly; we have a Congress that lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly; we have a corporate culture that lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly; and we have a mass media that, from top to bottom, lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly.
..........Considering deceit and criminality this thorough, this pervasive, and this on-going; and considering the successful achievement of the intended aim of the criminality and deceit—namely, its aim of bringing about the removal of popular resistance to the very criminality itself—considering these things, exactly how serious is the situation we've arrived at, precisely what cliff's edge are we looking over, what kind of near future is actually likely or probable?
..........What kind? How dire? How near?
..........Well, for some idea of the probability that the United States will be transformed into a dictatorship within the next year—assuming that impeachment doesn't take place —you can listen to this July 19 Thom Hartmann interview of Paul Craig Roberts. Or you can take a look at this BuzzFlash editorial, "How the White House Will Manipulate Events and Emotions to Maintain GOP Executive Branch Control in 2008"—where the writers suggest that what's about to happen is that the administration either will attack Pakistan's "tribal areas" in a pretense of "getting" Al Qaeda, or it will attack Iran by air, most likely with nuclear weapons, or it will do a repeat performance of 9/11—once again bring about a spectacular and terrifying "attack" somewhere, that is, inside the United States.
..........General Tommy Frank is already on record as saying that if there were another 9/11, the result would be martial law and a discarding of the Constitution. Let's take a look at what might happen if, instead of another 9/11, Cheney were to get what he really wants and the U.S. did attack Iran. Pilger writes:
....................If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be predicted. The national security
....................and homeland security presidential directive gives Bush power over all facets of govern-
....................ment in an emergency. It is not unlikely the constitution will be suspended—the laws to
....................round up hundreds of thousands of so-called terrorists and enemy combatants are al-
....................ready on the books. . .
..........And will any of these absolutely horrifying things really happen? Will any of them be permitted to happen? Could there really be elements and factions inside government itself that would allow, that would fail to terminate, or that would actively encourage the bringing about of events and results of so horrifying, destructive, reactionary, objectively insane a nature?
..........Has the blinded nation let things get this far out of democratic control, this far away from the premises, values, and controls contained in the nation's founding documents and taken once upon a time as constituting and expressing the highest law of the land?
..........You'll find no answers to these questions—nor will you find responses to them, nor even acknowledgment that such questions exist—on television or on the radio or in the New York Times. But we could go elsewhere and turn for a moment to The People's Voice, one of the internet outlets where substantial and real information and commentary still do exist. More specifically, we could turn to a piece in The People's Voice written by Peter Chamberlain under the very—and intentionally—ugly title of "Let's Kill 'Em All."
..........And what's it about, this excellent and conscience-driven essay by Peter Chamberlain? Well, it's about the same things we've been discussing right here, in this essay, or letter of lamentation. It's about the same things we've been talking about in the majority of my "Food for Thought" pieces over the past year or so.
..........That is, it's about the truth of present United States policy. It's about not only the unscrupulousness of that policy, and not only the sheer terrorism of it, but it's about the plain and clear insanity of it. For we are, now—after long being remiss in keeping our own nation sighted and keeping our own nation spiritually alive—we are, now, with no one to blame but ourselves, under the control of madmen.
..........I quote Peter Chamberlain at some length as he concisely, cogently, and quite, quite accurately cites the sheer apocalyptic megalomania that lies at the very foundation of the American worldwide terrorist program:
....................The immediate effect of American attempts to wage total world war upon Iran and to
....................ignite civil war within Islam is that our threats are pushing everyone else into massive
....................rearmament programs that are meant to counter the threat that we obviously represent
....................to them, or to deal with the chaotic violence that our plans have unleashed. Our intim-
....................idation tactics to strong-arm political concessions amount to forms of terrorism. These
....................intimidation tactics are creating a virtual bonanza for the American arms industries,
....................which provide all the armaments that the frightened world desires. Our threats to the
....................world are fueling a new global arms race, igniting a new Cold War with Russia, and
....................pushing every nation to think about secretly acquiring nuclear weapons. The alter-
....................cation developing between Bush and Putin over the proposed Western ABM deploy-
....................ment is bringing the intermediate range Russian nuclear missiles back to Europe, thus
....................abrogating Reagan's vaunted IMF Treaty, the SALT and START treaties, as well as
....................the ABM Treaty. Purposeful intimidation of sovereign nations with the unspoken threat
....................of nuclear annihilation is nuclear terrorism. We are pushing widespread nuclear pro-
....................liferation, even as we use it as an excuse to wage a campaign of genocide against
....................Iran and all Islamists.
..........Where, one asks, is there to be found a brake on behavior of this kind? From what quarter can there possibly come a significant opposition to this kind of ongoing policy, policy based on the sheer madness of world conquest and world ruin? "Regardless of protestations of denial by White House and congressional spokesmen," writes Chamberlain, "nearly every facet of our government is being deployed to bring about an unprovoked genocidal nuclear attack upon Iran."
..........The policy, Chamberlain suggests, as he alludes to the 1978 mass deaths in Jonestown, is a policy that's knowingly suicidal:
....................It does not matter one whit to apocalyptic Christians or to the agents of Israeli lobbyists
....................in Congress and the White House that their genocidal war will destroy the global economic
....................order and make the oil fields of the Middle East radioactive for a hundred generations. On
....................the contrary, the nihilistic destruction of all order seems to be the outcome that all of these
....................zealots desire. But if Israel really believes that it will survive this catastrophic war, or that
....................future Zionists will be willing to move to this bloody contaminated wasteland, then they
....................must be as delusional as the rest of these "kool-aid drinkers."
..........And here, at this very point, we approach the real news, we approach the actual information, the unavoidable truth, the very essential things that are programmatically, ritualistically, and consistently denied, omitted, repudiated, or, most often of all, ignored absolutely and altogether by every single major media outlook of any kind or form whatsoever in the entire United States, from Pacifica Radio to NPR, from the New York Times to The New Republic, from The Atlantic Monthly to The Nation.
..........The desperately needed but adamantly repressed information in this particular case, the criminally disguised, denied, hidden truth in regard to America's Middle East policy, in this particular case, is that The War of Great Lies—the war in Iraq, or for that matter the whole, utterly phony, entirely trumped up, entirely imaginary "War on Terror" itself—never was intended to have a conclusion or an end, never was intended to bring "democracy" or any other such thing to the region, never was intended to do any bit of good whatsoever to Iraq or to any other non-Israeli part of the Middle East. The purpose of the war was simply and merely to destroy Iraq once and for all, or, more accurately, to keep Iraq in a state of destruction indefinitely, until such time as its destruction—or its purposely maintained state of destruction—would spread to the entirety of the Middle East and allow US-UK control to be exerted—forever—over the whole region.
..........In Chamberlain's words:
....................The purpose of the war was to sow chaos and war as a means to destabilize the
....................entire Middle East, in order to erase the governments and their borders throughout
....................the region (or simply to make the borders porous), opening them up to the same
....................globalist plunder that has been reflected in the Iraqi (American-dictated) "oil law."
....................The same plan is being followed in a somewhat milder form, to destabilize the
....................United States, using economic chaos created by the destruction of America's
....................economic base, to erase our own borders by bringing in a tsunami of illegal im-
....................migrants to be used as "cannon fodder" in their war against American workers.
....................The "regime" that they intend to eliminate here is our democratic Constitutional
....................Republic, where they must still answer ultimately to the American people. It is
....................the power of the American people that is targeted by the Democratic-Repub-
....................lican Party for regime change in the United States.
..........The plan is quite clear, has been written about by numbers of commentators, and is so inhumane, so unscrupulous, so unfeeling, so conscienceless as to be accurately modified by no other adjective than insane. With 9/11 as the trigger-event making it all possible, permanent war—entirely phony—was undertaken against the Middle East and its people, and permanent war—also phony—was undertaken simultaneously against the United States and the people of the United States.
..........Cheney and the neocons, the Trilateralists, the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations Frankensteins—these and others like them are people who care nothing whatsoever for the United States or for any other sovereign or once-sovereign nation that may exist on Earth. They care only for the corporatocracy, for "single-government" control—hegemony—over the world, with some form of corporate/intelligence/military entity at the helm—for ever and ever.
..........If you don't believe this, because you can't believe it, I suggest—among the many, many, many other intelligent and scholarly descriptions, proofs, and analyses of it and related subjects—that you read Stephen Lendman's extraordinary and terrifyingly informative piece (07/20/07) called "The Militarization and Annexation of North America: The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Unmasked."
..........But if you don't believe it, because you can't believe it, and then if you still don't look up and read the Lendman essay—then here's what you are: you are an unwitting collaborator of the very neocon and corporatacracy fascists who want to destroy you and millions like you both in the Middle East and on the North American continent the better to serve and to serve only what they firmly believe to be their own superior interests.
..........Everyone who cares about the future, about liberty, about humanity should read the Lendman essay.
..........Now, before closing Part 3 of this "Letter of Lamentation to America," take a look at this one additional paragraph from Peter Chamberlain (I'll tell you a secret: I also think you should read the whole essay):
....................We are asked to believe a lot in this war of terror, that it is a "necessary evil" for us
....................to peacefully surrender our rights and freedoms, to facilitate the search for secret
....................terrorists. Our national media is complicit in all of this, echoing every government
....................claim without question, as is our nation's religious leadership. It has been impossible
....................to find any national leadership willing to question or to oppose the fascist forces
....................seeking to cause global genocide for the sake of US corporate profit. Our trusted
....................leaders sit stone-faced and silent as our military industrial machine bankrupts our
....................economy and destabilizes the world, killing American soldiers and destroying our
....................conventional forces, to maximize profits in the name of patriotism and "defending
....................freedom." If the secret war is promoting the sectarian warfare that is killing a lot
....................of American soldiers (justifying the "surge" sent to contain it), isn't that the same
....................as killing our troops outright?
..........And I ask, in closing, as I have asked many times before: How can this be? Why is this the case? How can this be happening?
..........And the answer is simple and short: I don't know. A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit went a long way toward analyzing and demonstrating just how it is that the American people, over the past six decades or so, were "conditioned" in such a way as to make them adapt to and even unknowingly encourage the continuous broadening and omnipresence of the inert and ungenerative mass social condition that we call "consumerism." It's true that the book alluded to the ever-increasing likelihood that a social condition of this kind might be increasingly susceptible to fascism and increasingly defenseless against it.
..........But the book didn't predict it. It's now obvious that it should have. It's now obvious that destructive political and cultural forces were then far more advanced, and that American society was in a state of far greater ruin than I believed when I wrote A Nation Gone Blind. Even with its virulent condemnations of American intellectuals, academics, writers, artists, publishers, and media; even with its virulent condemnations of so-called American political life; and even with its virulent condemnation of the hypocrisy and non-thinking intellectual fraud of "victimology" and the various self-pitying solipsisms that are a part of the attitudes of victimology and that accompany it—even with all these condemnations, A Nation Gone Blind underestimated the full extent of the intellectual rot that had already taken place; it underestimated the full extent of the emotional and cultural inertness that had already come into existence; and it underestimated, perhaps above all, the full extent of moral decay, the full extent of outright moral collapse, that had spread, as if in a cancer-ridden body, throughout the entire nation.
..........No one does anything to fight against it, to avert disaster, to help. And meanwhile everyone lies, covers up, hides the truth, serves the enemy, either actively or passively.
..........That, in any case, is the way it seems. Possibly this behavior in a nation is just cowardice rather than strictly and solely a moral failure, unless cowardice is a moral failure; or possibly it's the simple, understandable human desire for protection from dangers both known and unknown; or possibly it's behavior that comes from overt and explicit threats of recrimination, firings, and blacklistings (though wouldn't we have heard of more of these by now?); or possibly it's a true, literal blindness in people that really does make them incapable of seeing the truth, with the correspondent result that they're incapable of conceiving or admitting the existence of the truth. Clearly enough, the last of these cases will result, almost always, in one form or another of infantilism.
..........On the other hand, it may be all of these reasons rolled together, or some of them at some times, others at others, or, at some moments, single reasons in single cases. What we're talking about first and foremost, of course, is the absolute silence of the mainstream media in the United States, the impossibility, in Chamberlain's words, of finding "any national leadership willing to question or to oppose the fascist forces seeking to cause global genocide for the sake of US corporate profit." We're talking, that is, about the solid and absolutely unbroken stone wall, the line of silence maintained by every single part of the major media in every single one of the cities in every single one of the states in the entire country. This is the unbroken silence about 9/11 truth, the unbroken silence about the simple, sheer, plain criminality of the present administration. This is the unbroken silence that takes the forms, also, of euphemism, melioration, smear, and hedging. This is the unbroken silence that will not name things associated with the administration for what they actually are, that will not, for example, name torture for what it is, but will euphemize it only as "harsh treatment," offering us in so doing with one very good example of infantilism. This is the unbroken silence that will not name murder murder, war crimes war crimes, invasion invasion, genocide genocide, crimes against humanity crimes against humanity, and so on. This is the unbroken silence that will not accept, tolerate, entertain, or condone any use of history or of historic parallels for the purpose of identifying the exact nature of what the present administration really is or what the present administration's behavior really is. In absurdity after absurdity, when parallels with Hitler are invoked, shame, contumely, and calumniation fall not upon the administration but upon whomever has invoked the comparison—not upon the ones justly deserving of grave accusation, but upon the ones innocently bringing a perfectly fair parallel to light.
..........What can the causes be—other than outright tyranny on the one hand, or the most advanced case of infantilism on the other—that will rule out and disallow the adult and perfectly reasonable comparison between one tyrant and another? Is it because the two, Hitler and Bush, are separated by, say, seventy years? That's too stupid a reason even for a junior high school classroom. Is it because one is more monstrous than the other, at least at this point, by merit of sheer numbers killed than the other? Well, it's equally stupid to declare things incomparable just because they differ in degree but not in kind. By that logic, the murderer of one is less guilty than the murderer of two and should be acquitted. Or is it because people really can't and won't believe the evidence that's right there for them to see with their own eyes? Perhaps so. And that's about as stupid as you can get, stupid like lemmings, except that while even lemmings have some reason for their self-destruction whereas we have none. No, our stupidity is worse, far, far worse, for our stupidity is the "mass delusion" of the "kool-aid drinkers." And, if we can't grow up, if we can't regain our adult ability to judge reality by means of simple empirical evidence—if we can't do that, we'll be destroyed by our very own criminal leaders, the ones we—or our media, or our "representative government"—refuse to see for what he is. As for whether or not we'll really be destroyed—well, if you're in any doubt at all, be sure to read Stephen Lendman's essay on the "North American Union."
..........Frank Rich, for example: Which is it—criminality, infantilism, or delusion—that leads him (July 15, 2007), with a perfectly straight face, to scorn and belittle President Bush on the grounds that "This president is never one to let facts get in the way of a political agenda," as if we hadn't ourselves watched Frank Rich, whether it was through infantilism or delusion or outright criminality, twist and wriggle and snipe and smear and falsify for precisely the identical end?
..........And then the New York Times itself, or, if you will, its editorial board: Which are they, criminal or infantile or delusional? Like Frank Rich, they too castigate President Bush, this time on July 25 in a lead editorial criticizing Bush for having "No Exit Strategy" in Iraq. Have they conveniently forgotten the whole history of their own Judith Miller in providing some of the very lies that helped bring about that War of Great Lies? And have they forgotten that they themselves are among the most massive of boulders constituting the stone wall of lies about 9/11 truth—that, the truth about 9/11, being the absolute best exit strategy anywhere, for, as Michel Chossudovsky has pointed out, "Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards."
..........Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile, criminal, or delusional? Which force is it that brings you to do all you can to help keep the War of Great Lies going while you simultaneously berate the president for not knowing how to end it? Hypocrisy and lies, lies upon lies, lies built on a foundation of lies, a whole house of lies.
..........I remember Robert Jensen's "Impeach the System" in Counterpunch last April 10. Some of what he said is à propos here:
....................When reporters from two of the most authoritative newspapers in the United States concede
....................that in the course of doing their jobs—playing by the commonly understood rules of the game
....................—they will be little more than delivery systems for the propaganda of the powerful, it seems
....................that contemporary corporate commercial journalism should be impeached for its failure to ful-
....................fill its role as a check on concentrated power.
..........And then there's Amy Goodman, unforgettable for her mastery of sustained hypocrisy, whether that gift be fruit of the delusional, the criminal, or the infantile. Goodman is especially good at, and especially good at sustaining, a tone of high moral indignation and righteousness—a tone that, in light of the solid place she holds in the stone wall of 9/11 silence and cover-up, can raise her to virtually championship levels for sanctimoniousness. A piece by Goodman in The Progressive Populist for August 1, 2007, is called "High Cost of Libby's Silence," and, just as Rich castigates Bush for his Richian sins, and just as the Times castigates Bush for his Times-ian flaws, so Goodman castigates Libby, and also castigates Bush for the commutation, in effect attacking both for worsening a bad situation that Goodman herself—along with her colleagues Rich, Corn, Silvers, Posner, Rothschild, Huffington, Tremblay, Steyn, de Zengotita, Chomsky, Lemann, Lerner, Weisberg, Keller, Rosenthal, Wieseltier, et alia—holds it in her own power to meliorate and heal.
..........The commutation, she says, "also allows the Bush administration to remain silent." She goes on:
.................... So the commutation ensures that Libby will not cooperate with Fitzgerald, and will
....................not cooperate with Congress. Why does this matter? Because this case is not about
....................obstruction of justice, it is not about perjury. Ultimately, this case is about war.
..........Absolutely so. And what, one must ask, is the Goodman case about? Well, Goodman gets two out of a possible three, since her case is about obstruction of justice, and it's also about war.
..........Goodman is appalled by Fred Thompson's narrowness of view, and she's appalled by the hideous, monstrous, unnecessary butchery, maiming,and loss of life being brought about in Iraq, by the War of Great Lies:
....................Thompson released a statement after the commutation, saying, "This will allow a good Amer-
....................ican, who has done a lot for his country to resume his life." Good Americans sent to war, and
....................who died, now number close to 3,600. They will not be getting on with their lives. And let's not
....................forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. More than 20,000 Americans are wounded,
....................some with limbs lost, some blinded, some brain-damaged. They have no choice but to get on
....................with their lives, but without a star-studded fundraising committee.
..........The War of Great Lies, without question, just as Goodman suggests, is a needless and inhumane atrocity, the product of an act of treason and a crime against humanity. Those who brought the war into existence are criminal, just exactly as those who choose to place impediments in the way of bringing it to a close are also criminal.
..........And, regarding an end to the war, what was it that Michel Chossudovsky pointed out? Wasn't it that "Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards"?
..........And yet even so, Amy Goodman—like Frank Rich and Nicholas Lemann and Jacob Weisberg and the many other obstructionist gatekeepers we've seen—rather than blowing the whistle on 9/11 and thereby taking the wind out of the regime's sails and bringing the War of Great Lies at last to an end ("Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards"), instead of doing that, Amy Goodman, whether out of infantilism, criminality, or delusion, chooses to wax wroth, to fling phrases and figures in tones of high and righteous indignation at other criminals—Bush, Libby, Thompson—while herself keeping ever so quiet, remaining quite silent, doing the nothing that makes her herself complicit with the very criminals she's splattering with her bogus outrage.
..........In Destroying World Order, the great, dedicated, conscience-driven Francis A. Boyle writes that "Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its foreign accomplices by all nonviolent means possible."
..........Knowing that a crime took place and saying nothing about it makes one complicit. Knowing how to end a crime and doing nothing to do so makes one complicit. Complicity, aiding and abetting: These also are crimes.
..........Last time, in "A Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 2, I wrote these paragraphs:
....................Our nation is dying. Our nation is being murdered before our very eyes. And yet, over
....................so long time and in so many ways has this same nation been degraded by its own internal
....................enemies that it is not only a nation gone blind, but it is also a nation in which criminality has
....................evolved into custom.
....................This is part, but only part, of the reason why traitors and criminals ranging from the very
....................topmost Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi and Scooter Libby down through the middle regions
....................of Bill Keller and Frank Rich to the foul pits of a hundred-thousand Bill O'Reillys—why these
....................traitors and criminals routinely, consistently, and conventionally go unpunished.
..........If these people and others like them behave as they do because they are infantile, they should immediately be removed from positions of any public responsibility or authority whatsoever. If these people and others like them behave as they do because they are delusionary, they should immediately be removed from positions of any public responsibility or authority whatsoever and at once be committed. And, if these people and others like them behave as they do because they are criminal, they should immediately be removed from positions of any public responsibility or authority whatsoever and at once be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in such way or ways as would be appropriate to the nature and severity of their crimes.
..........With every passing day, hour, minute, with every passing second, the heinous crimes in question become even more intolerable in their nature; and with every passing day, hour, minute, with every passing second, they become even more appalling in their severity.
..........The well-being of millions upon millions, the well-being of the nation, very possibly of the world itself, are at stake. What's despicable, what's unforgivable, is for anyone to do nothing if they are in a position to do something.
..........Worse, it's criminal. Because, what does it come down to, really? No matter how many of them there are, from Goodman to Rich to Cockburn to Silver to Keller to Pelosi to the foul pits of a hundred-thousand Bill O'Reillys—every single one of them is either dumb as a stump, delusionary, infantile, or, in the plainest words, on the side of the criminals, on the side of the fascists.
..........So what do you think? I know what I think. Forget about infantile and delusionary and about being dumb as a stump. No, here's what they are, all of them, every last one: They're on the side of the criminals, on the side of the bad guys, on the side of the regime. They're crooks, quislings, traitors.
..........But I know one other thing as well. I know that if they were to come around, if they were to leave the criminals and mend their ways and come over to our side and start telling the truth, I'd welcome them. I'd embrace them and celebrate them. The truth is, I'd even forgive them.
..........After all, who wouldn't? We're talking about the highest stakes there are. You'd have to be crazy, or delusional, not to.
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
....................................................................................................—July 29, 2007
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................................................................................Bush published a week before the 2001 inauguration] [was] not Bush, but
................................................................................the Times. What [was] the Times trying to tell us? Once it was settled that W.
................................................................................was going to be president, the Times seemed very concerned with making
................................................................................it believable.
..........................................................................................—David Cogswell, "Usurpation: The Coup of 2001 and the Inaugural Cry,"
..........................................................................................a Post-Script to Fortunate Son (2001), by J. H. Hatfield (New York, Soft Skull
..........................................................................................Press)
................................................................................[M]ost of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity
................................................................................that lies behind the Bush administration.
..........................................................................................—Paul Craig Roberts, "The Neoconservative Threat to American Freedom,"
..........................................................................................June 11, 2007
................................................................................Our nation is dying. Our nation is being murdered before our very eyes. And yet,
................................................................................over so long a time and in so many ways has this same nation been degraded by
................................................................................its own internal enemies that it is not only a nation gone blind, acquiescent in its
................................................................................own death, but it is also a nation in which criminality has evolved into custom.
.......................................................................................... —Eric Larsen, "A Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 2
................................................................................Every American must take the time to learn the truth about what is being done in our
................................................................................Every patriotic American must open his or her eyes and see the cold hard truth about
................................................................................our leaders that the rest of the world already knows.
..........................................................................................—Peter Chamberlain, "Let's Kill 'Em All," in The People's Voice
................................................................................Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile, criminal, or delusional?
..........................................................................................—Eric Larsen, "Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 3.
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
6
THE UNITED STATES:
NATION OF COMPLICITY
THE UNITED STATES:
NATION OF COMPLICITY
..........
1
..........My wife and I were out of the country when the Vietnam anti-war movement reached its peak, or one of its peaks. She and I were in Europe from 1968 through 1970, teaching there, while buildings burned down back at the University of Iowa—"our" campus—students took over Columbia University, and the Kent State shootings took place.
..........And now: It's mid-summer 2007. Here I am in my apartment in New York City. Soon, 9/11 will be six years in the past. The War of Great Lies—Iraq—has been going on for almost four and a half years. Paul Craig Roberts calls a recent (July 17) piece "Impeach Now or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy," and his first sentence reads: "Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran." A few days after the Roberts piece, on July 21, Webster Tarpley published "Cheney Determined to Strike in US with WMD this Summer: Only Impeachment, Removal or General Strike Can Stop Him." And Nancy Levant, on July 18, wrote, in "Deathtech Reality," that "Now, we are all fighting dictatorship—the key word being 'now.' We are fighting evil."
..........How can this pitch of affairs have been reached? How can we have allowed so dire a situation to have come about?
..........Well, the American people have been lied to for decades. They have been made compliant, blind, unresisting, and ignorant—and, now, as a result, they put no restraint upon and post no obstacle to an openly and brazenly criminal "government" whose aims and ambitions are to eradicate the republic, establish martial law, and conduct an unending war of conquest elsewhere in the world.
..........John Pilger helps explain what has happened. In a speech he gave before the Chicago Socialism Conference this past June 16 ("The Invisible Government"), he called for a new truthfulness in journalism, for a getting rid of the bankrupt and now-fraudulent mask of what we still call "liberalism" (that is, liberalism as in "Democratic Party" or "Nancy Pelosi"), even though it in fact no longer serves true liberalism or any purpose related to genuine political opposition at all, but is in actuality only part of the single and unified political entity that ought to be called "The American Imperial Party."
..........According to Pilger, as journalists hide behind this hypocritical, false, and corrupted mask of "liberalism," they and their publications both are complicit in the death, suffering, agonies, murders, and ruin that have been and are being brought into existence around the world by the criminal and greed-blinded American juggernaut.
..........Still, in spite of these awful truths, Pilger insists on holding out a degree of hope. "I believe," he writes, that
....................a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people's movement, that monitors, deconstructs,
....................and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news
....................room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part
....................they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity [emphasis added]. Such
....................a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known.
....................This is all possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the National Union of Journalists has
....................undergone a radical change, and has called for a boycott of Israel. The web site Media-
....................lens.org has single-handedly called the BBC to account. In the United States wonderfully
....................free rebellious spirits populate the web—I can't mention them all here—from Tom Feeley's
....................International Clearing House, to Mike Albert's ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the splen-
....................did work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web— Dahr Jamail's cour-
....................ageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe Wilding, who reported the siege of Fallujah.
....................
..........And so, according to Pilger, the "bogus objectivity" that still poses as "liberalism" has brought about the situation whereby the American masses in general—as opposed to the relatively few who do follow Tom Feeley or Alan Miller or the Muckraker Report or Online Journal or The People's Voice—are routinely, ritually, and regularly lied to, euphemized to, whitewashed to, and propagandized to in the name of that same bogus objectivity.
..........Like the rest of the mainstream media, the New York Times is notable above all for the enormous amount of news that isn't in it. Far and away most news is simply left out, as is most of the truth. The paper's failure, for example (or refusal), over the past six years, to report fully and honestly on the behavior, activities, and plans of the Bush administration or on the forces and powers behind the Bush administration—this failure, exactly like that of any journalist following the rule of "bogus objectivity," makes the New York Times unquestionably complicit in the U.S. government's almost unbroken record over that period of committing of crimes both domestically and worldwide and in its purposeful destruction at the very least of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives through its program of ongoing crimes against humanity.
..........I find myself more pessimistic than Pilger seems to be in his hope that such rampant and virulent criminality can be arrested and the perpetrators of it held accountable, although I promise to myself and to any who may be listening that I will hold out some hope as long as he holds out some hope.
..........In Pilger's view—and I agree with him entirely—the truth is the only power that can conceivably have any corrective influence over the present rampantly criminal and admittedly terrifying situation. And here, in two sentences as elegant in their simplicity as they are chilling in their content, Pilger tells the truth:
....................Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all—and I believe
....................that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't
....................true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States.
2
..........This, then, is the point we in the U.S. have reached so far in the early 21st Century: We have an administration that lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly; we have a Congress that lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly; we have a corporate culture that lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly; and we have a mass media that, from top to bottom, lies deliberately, programmatically, and unceasingly.
..........Considering deceit and criminality this thorough, this pervasive, and this on-going; and considering the successful achievement of the intended aim of the criminality and deceit—namely, its aim of bringing about the removal of popular resistance to the very criminality itself—considering these things, exactly how serious is the situation we've arrived at, precisely what cliff's edge are we looking over, what kind of near future is actually likely or probable?
..........What kind? How dire? How near?
..........Well, for some idea of the probability that the United States will be transformed into a dictatorship within the next year—assuming that impeachment doesn't take place —you can listen to this July 19 Thom Hartmann interview of Paul Craig Roberts. Or you can take a look at this BuzzFlash editorial, "How the White House Will Manipulate Events and Emotions to Maintain GOP Executive Branch Control in 2008"—where the writers suggest that what's about to happen is that the administration either will attack Pakistan's "tribal areas" in a pretense of "getting" Al Qaeda, or it will attack Iran by air, most likely with nuclear weapons, or it will do a repeat performance of 9/11—once again bring about a spectacular and terrifying "attack" somewhere, that is, inside the United States.
..........General Tommy Frank is already on record as saying that if there were another 9/11, the result would be martial law and a discarding of the Constitution. Let's take a look at what might happen if, instead of another 9/11, Cheney were to get what he really wants and the U.S. did attack Iran. Pilger writes:
....................If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be predicted. The national security
....................and homeland security presidential directive gives Bush power over all facets of govern-
....................ment in an emergency. It is not unlikely the constitution will be suspended—the laws to
....................round up hundreds of thousands of so-called terrorists and enemy combatants are al-
....................ready on the books. . .
..........And will any of these absolutely horrifying things really happen? Will any of them be permitted to happen? Could there really be elements and factions inside government itself that would allow, that would fail to terminate, or that would actively encourage the bringing about of events and results of so horrifying, destructive, reactionary, objectively insane a nature?
..........Has the blinded nation let things get this far out of democratic control, this far away from the premises, values, and controls contained in the nation's founding documents and taken once upon a time as constituting and expressing the highest law of the land?
..........You'll find no answers to these questions—nor will you find responses to them, nor even acknowledgment that such questions exist—on television or on the radio or in the New York Times. But we could go elsewhere and turn for a moment to The People's Voice, one of the internet outlets where substantial and real information and commentary still do exist. More specifically, we could turn to a piece in The People's Voice written by Peter Chamberlain under the very—and intentionally—ugly title of "Let's Kill 'Em All."
..........And what's it about, this excellent and conscience-driven essay by Peter Chamberlain? Well, it's about the same things we've been discussing right here, in this essay, or letter of lamentation. It's about the same things we've been talking about in the majority of my "Food for Thought" pieces over the past year or so.
..........That is, it's about the truth of present United States policy. It's about not only the unscrupulousness of that policy, and not only the sheer terrorism of it, but it's about the plain and clear insanity of it. For we are, now—after long being remiss in keeping our own nation sighted and keeping our own nation spiritually alive—we are, now, with no one to blame but ourselves, under the control of madmen.
..........I quote Peter Chamberlain at some length as he concisely, cogently, and quite, quite accurately cites the sheer apocalyptic megalomania that lies at the very foundation of the American worldwide terrorist program:
....................The immediate effect of American attempts to wage total world war upon Iran and to
....................ignite civil war within Islam is that our threats are pushing everyone else into massive
....................rearmament programs that are meant to counter the threat that we obviously represent
....................to them, or to deal with the chaotic violence that our plans have unleashed. Our intim-
....................idation tactics to strong-arm political concessions amount to forms of terrorism. These
....................intimidation tactics are creating a virtual bonanza for the American arms industries,
....................which provide all the armaments that the frightened world desires. Our threats to the
....................world are fueling a new global arms race, igniting a new Cold War with Russia, and
....................pushing every nation to think about secretly acquiring nuclear weapons. The alter-
....................cation developing between Bush and Putin over the proposed Western ABM deploy-
....................ment is bringing the intermediate range Russian nuclear missiles back to Europe, thus
....................abrogating Reagan's vaunted IMF Treaty, the SALT and START treaties, as well as
....................the ABM Treaty. Purposeful intimidation of sovereign nations with the unspoken threat
....................of nuclear annihilation is nuclear terrorism. We are pushing widespread nuclear pro-
....................liferation, even as we use it as an excuse to wage a campaign of genocide against
....................Iran and all Islamists.
..........Where, one asks, is there to be found a brake on behavior of this kind? From what quarter can there possibly come a significant opposition to this kind of ongoing policy, policy based on the sheer madness of world conquest and world ruin? "Regardless of protestations of denial by White House and congressional spokesmen," writes Chamberlain, "nearly every facet of our government is being deployed to bring about an unprovoked genocidal nuclear attack upon Iran."
..........The policy, Chamberlain suggests, as he alludes to the 1978 mass deaths in Jonestown, is a policy that's knowingly suicidal:
....................It does not matter one whit to apocalyptic Christians or to the agents of Israeli lobbyists
....................in Congress and the White House that their genocidal war will destroy the global economic
....................order and make the oil fields of the Middle East radioactive for a hundred generations. On
....................the contrary, the nihilistic destruction of all order seems to be the outcome that all of these
....................zealots desire. But if Israel really believes that it will survive this catastrophic war, or that
....................future Zionists will be willing to move to this bloody contaminated wasteland, then they
....................must be as delusional as the rest of these "kool-aid drinkers."
..........And here, at this very point, we approach the real news, we approach the actual information, the unavoidable truth, the very essential things that are programmatically, ritualistically, and consistently denied, omitted, repudiated, or, most often of all, ignored absolutely and altogether by every single major media outlook of any kind or form whatsoever in the entire United States, from Pacifica Radio to NPR, from the New York Times to The New Republic, from The Atlantic Monthly to The Nation.
..........The desperately needed but adamantly repressed information in this particular case, the criminally disguised, denied, hidden truth in regard to America's Middle East policy, in this particular case, is that The War of Great Lies—the war in Iraq, or for that matter the whole, utterly phony, entirely trumped up, entirely imaginary "War on Terror" itself—never was intended to have a conclusion or an end, never was intended to bring "democracy" or any other such thing to the region, never was intended to do any bit of good whatsoever to Iraq or to any other non-Israeli part of the Middle East. The purpose of the war was simply and merely to destroy Iraq once and for all, or, more accurately, to keep Iraq in a state of destruction indefinitely, until such time as its destruction—or its purposely maintained state of destruction—would spread to the entirety of the Middle East and allow US-UK control to be exerted—forever—over the whole region.
..........In Chamberlain's words:
....................The purpose of the war was to sow chaos and war as a means to destabilize the
....................entire Middle East, in order to erase the governments and their borders throughout
....................the region (or simply to make the borders porous), opening them up to the same
....................globalist plunder that has been reflected in the Iraqi (American-dictated) "oil law."
....................The same plan is being followed in a somewhat milder form, to destabilize the
....................United States, using economic chaos created by the destruction of America's
....................economic base, to erase our own borders by bringing in a tsunami of illegal im-
....................migrants to be used as "cannon fodder" in their war against American workers.
....................The "regime" that they intend to eliminate here is our democratic Constitutional
....................Republic, where they must still answer ultimately to the American people. It is
....................the power of the American people that is targeted by the Democratic-Repub-
....................lican Party for regime change in the United States.
..........The plan is quite clear, has been written about by numbers of commentators, and is so inhumane, so unscrupulous, so unfeeling, so conscienceless as to be accurately modified by no other adjective than insane. With 9/11 as the trigger-event making it all possible, permanent war—entirely phony—was undertaken against the Middle East and its people, and permanent war—also phony—was undertaken simultaneously against the United States and the people of the United States.
..........Cheney and the neocons, the Trilateralists, the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations Frankensteins—these and others like them are people who care nothing whatsoever for the United States or for any other sovereign or once-sovereign nation that may exist on Earth. They care only for the corporatocracy, for "single-government" control—hegemony—over the world, with some form of corporate/intelligence/military entity at the helm—for ever and ever.
..........If you don't believe this, because you can't believe it, I suggest—among the many, many, many other intelligent and scholarly descriptions, proofs, and analyses of it and related subjects—that you read Stephen Lendman's extraordinary and terrifyingly informative piece (07/20/07) called "The Militarization and Annexation of North America: The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Unmasked."
..........But if you don't believe it, because you can't believe it, and then if you still don't look up and read the Lendman essay—then here's what you are: you are an unwitting collaborator of the very neocon and corporatacracy fascists who want to destroy you and millions like you both in the Middle East and on the North American continent the better to serve and to serve only what they firmly believe to be their own superior interests.
..........Everyone who cares about the future, about liberty, about humanity should read the Lendman essay.
..........Now, before closing Part 3 of this "Letter of Lamentation to America," take a look at this one additional paragraph from Peter Chamberlain (I'll tell you a secret: I also think you should read the whole essay):
....................We are asked to believe a lot in this war of terror, that it is a "necessary evil" for us
....................to peacefully surrender our rights and freedoms, to facilitate the search for secret
....................terrorists. Our national media is complicit in all of this, echoing every government
....................claim without question, as is our nation's religious leadership. It has been impossible
....................to find any national leadership willing to question or to oppose the fascist forces
....................seeking to cause global genocide for the sake of US corporate profit. Our trusted
....................leaders sit stone-faced and silent as our military industrial machine bankrupts our
....................economy and destabilizes the world, killing American soldiers and destroying our
....................conventional forces, to maximize profits in the name of patriotism and "defending
....................freedom." If the secret war is promoting the sectarian warfare that is killing a lot
....................of American soldiers (justifying the "surge" sent to contain it), isn't that the same
....................as killing our troops outright?
·
.........."It has been impossible," writes Chamberlain, speaking the inescapable truth, "to find any national leadership willing to question or to oppose the fascist forces seeking to cause global genocide for the sake of US corporate profit."..........And I ask, in closing, as I have asked many times before: How can this be? Why is this the case? How can this be happening?
..........And the answer is simple and short: I don't know. A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit went a long way toward analyzing and demonstrating just how it is that the American people, over the past six decades or so, were "conditioned" in such a way as to make them adapt to and even unknowingly encourage the continuous broadening and omnipresence of the inert and ungenerative mass social condition that we call "consumerism." It's true that the book alluded to the ever-increasing likelihood that a social condition of this kind might be increasingly susceptible to fascism and increasingly defenseless against it.
..........But the book didn't predict it. It's now obvious that it should have. It's now obvious that destructive political and cultural forces were then far more advanced, and that American society was in a state of far greater ruin than I believed when I wrote A Nation Gone Blind. Even with its virulent condemnations of American intellectuals, academics, writers, artists, publishers, and media; even with its virulent condemnations of so-called American political life; and even with its virulent condemnation of the hypocrisy and non-thinking intellectual fraud of "victimology" and the various self-pitying solipsisms that are a part of the attitudes of victimology and that accompany it—even with all these condemnations, A Nation Gone Blind underestimated the full extent of the intellectual rot that had already taken place; it underestimated the full extent of the emotional and cultural inertness that had already come into existence; and it underestimated, perhaps above all, the full extent of moral decay, the full extent of outright moral collapse, that had spread, as if in a cancer-ridden body, throughout the entire nation.
3
..........No one does anything to fight against it, to avert disaster, to help. And meanwhile everyone lies, covers up, hides the truth, serves the enemy, either actively or passively.
..........That, in any case, is the way it seems. Possibly this behavior in a nation is just cowardice rather than strictly and solely a moral failure, unless cowardice is a moral failure; or possibly it's the simple, understandable human desire for protection from dangers both known and unknown; or possibly it's behavior that comes from overt and explicit threats of recrimination, firings, and blacklistings (though wouldn't we have heard of more of these by now?); or possibly it's a true, literal blindness in people that really does make them incapable of seeing the truth, with the correspondent result that they're incapable of conceiving or admitting the existence of the truth. Clearly enough, the last of these cases will result, almost always, in one form or another of infantilism.
..........On the other hand, it may be all of these reasons rolled together, or some of them at some times, others at others, or, at some moments, single reasons in single cases. What we're talking about first and foremost, of course, is the absolute silence of the mainstream media in the United States, the impossibility, in Chamberlain's words, of finding "any national leadership willing to question or to oppose the fascist forces seeking to cause global genocide for the sake of US corporate profit." We're talking, that is, about the solid and absolutely unbroken stone wall, the line of silence maintained by every single part of the major media in every single one of the cities in every single one of the states in the entire country. This is the unbroken silence about 9/11 truth, the unbroken silence about the simple, sheer, plain criminality of the present administration. This is the unbroken silence that takes the forms, also, of euphemism, melioration, smear, and hedging. This is the unbroken silence that will not name things associated with the administration for what they actually are, that will not, for example, name torture for what it is, but will euphemize it only as "harsh treatment," offering us in so doing with one very good example of infantilism. This is the unbroken silence that will not name murder murder, war crimes war crimes, invasion invasion, genocide genocide, crimes against humanity crimes against humanity, and so on. This is the unbroken silence that will not accept, tolerate, entertain, or condone any use of history or of historic parallels for the purpose of identifying the exact nature of what the present administration really is or what the present administration's behavior really is. In absurdity after absurdity, when parallels with Hitler are invoked, shame, contumely, and calumniation fall not upon the administration but upon whomever has invoked the comparison—not upon the ones justly deserving of grave accusation, but upon the ones innocently bringing a perfectly fair parallel to light.
..........What can the causes be—other than outright tyranny on the one hand, or the most advanced case of infantilism on the other—that will rule out and disallow the adult and perfectly reasonable comparison between one tyrant and another? Is it because the two, Hitler and Bush, are separated by, say, seventy years? That's too stupid a reason even for a junior high school classroom. Is it because one is more monstrous than the other, at least at this point, by merit of sheer numbers killed than the other? Well, it's equally stupid to declare things incomparable just because they differ in degree but not in kind. By that logic, the murderer of one is less guilty than the murderer of two and should be acquitted. Or is it because people really can't and won't believe the evidence that's right there for them to see with their own eyes? Perhaps so. And that's about as stupid as you can get, stupid like lemmings, except that while even lemmings have some reason for their self-destruction whereas we have none. No, our stupidity is worse, far, far worse, for our stupidity is the "mass delusion" of the "kool-aid drinkers." And, if we can't grow up, if we can't regain our adult ability to judge reality by means of simple empirical evidence—if we can't do that, we'll be destroyed by our very own criminal leaders, the ones we—or our media, or our "representative government"—refuse to see for what he is. As for whether or not we'll really be destroyed—well, if you're in any doubt at all, be sure to read Stephen Lendman's essay on the "North American Union."
·
..........Criminal, infantile, or deluded? Next time we'll take a closer look at this question and at the cultural simplification, inertness, and emptiness that are ever and increasingly brought into being by those in the media, in the arts, in publishing—and in government—who lie and lie and lie, whether or not we'll ever know whether they lie and lie and lie because they're criminal, or because they're infantile, or because they're deluded, or because of all three...........Frank Rich, for example: Which is it—criminality, infantilism, or delusion—that leads him (July 15, 2007), with a perfectly straight face, to scorn and belittle President Bush on the grounds that "This president is never one to let facts get in the way of a political agenda," as if we hadn't ourselves watched Frank Rich, whether it was through infantilism or delusion or outright criminality, twist and wriggle and snipe and smear and falsify for precisely the identical end?
..........And then the New York Times itself, or, if you will, its editorial board: Which are they, criminal or infantile or delusional? Like Frank Rich, they too castigate President Bush, this time on July 25 in a lead editorial criticizing Bush for having "No Exit Strategy" in Iraq. Have they conveniently forgotten the whole history of their own Judith Miller in providing some of the very lies that helped bring about that War of Great Lies? And have they forgotten that they themselves are among the most massive of boulders constituting the stone wall of lies about 9/11 truth—that, the truth about 9/11, being the absolute best exit strategy anywhere, for, as Michel Chossudovsky has pointed out, "Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards."
..........Oh, New York Times, oh, New York Times, are you infantile, criminal, or delusional? Which force is it that brings you to do all you can to help keep the War of Great Lies going while you simultaneously berate the president for not knowing how to end it? Hypocrisy and lies, lies upon lies, lies built on a foundation of lies, a whole house of lies.
..........I remember Robert Jensen's "Impeach the System" in Counterpunch last April 10. Some of what he said is à propos here:
....................When reporters from two of the most authoritative newspapers in the United States concede
....................that in the course of doing their jobs—playing by the commonly understood rules of the game
....................—they will be little more than delivery systems for the propaganda of the powerful, it seems
....................that contemporary corporate commercial journalism should be impeached for its failure to ful-
....................fill its role as a check on concentrated power.
..........And then there's Amy Goodman, unforgettable for her mastery of sustained hypocrisy, whether that gift be fruit of the delusional, the criminal, or the infantile. Goodman is especially good at, and especially good at sustaining, a tone of high moral indignation and righteousness—a tone that, in light of the solid place she holds in the stone wall of 9/11 silence and cover-up, can raise her to virtually championship levels for sanctimoniousness. A piece by Goodman in The Progressive Populist for August 1, 2007, is called "High Cost of Libby's Silence," and, just as Rich castigates Bush for his Richian sins, and just as the Times castigates Bush for his Times-ian flaws, so Goodman castigates Libby, and also castigates Bush for the commutation, in effect attacking both for worsening a bad situation that Goodman herself—along with her colleagues Rich, Corn, Silvers, Posner, Rothschild, Huffington, Tremblay, Steyn, de Zengotita, Chomsky, Lemann, Lerner, Weisberg, Keller, Rosenthal, Wieseltier, et alia—holds it in her own power to meliorate and heal.
..........The commutation, she says, "also allows the Bush administration to remain silent." She goes on:
.................... So the commutation ensures that Libby will not cooperate with Fitzgerald, and will
....................not cooperate with Congress. Why does this matter? Because this case is not about
....................obstruction of justice, it is not about perjury. Ultimately, this case is about war.
..........Absolutely so. And what, one must ask, is the Goodman case about? Well, Goodman gets two out of a possible three, since her case is about obstruction of justice, and it's also about war.
..........Goodman is appalled by Fred Thompson's narrowness of view, and she's appalled by the hideous, monstrous, unnecessary butchery, maiming,and loss of life being brought about in Iraq, by the War of Great Lies:
....................Thompson released a statement after the commutation, saying, "This will allow a good Amer-
....................ican, who has done a lot for his country to resume his life." Good Americans sent to war, and
....................who died, now number close to 3,600. They will not be getting on with their lives. And let's not
....................forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. More than 20,000 Americans are wounded,
....................some with limbs lost, some blinded, some brain-damaged. They have no choice but to get on
....................with their lives, but without a star-studded fundraising committee.
..........The War of Great Lies, without question, just as Goodman suggests, is a needless and inhumane atrocity, the product of an act of treason and a crime against humanity. Those who brought the war into existence are criminal, just exactly as those who choose to place impediments in the way of bringing it to a close are also criminal.
..........And, regarding an end to the war, what was it that Michel Chossudovsky pointed out? Wasn't it that "Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards"?
..........And yet even so, Amy Goodman—like Frank Rich and Nicholas Lemann and Jacob Weisberg and the many other obstructionist gatekeepers we've seen—rather than blowing the whistle on 9/11 and thereby taking the wind out of the regime's sails and bringing the War of Great Lies at last to an end ("Their entire National Security construct collapses like a deck of cards"), instead of doing that, Amy Goodman, whether out of infantilism, criminality, or delusion, chooses to wax wroth, to fling phrases and figures in tones of high and righteous indignation at other criminals—Bush, Libby, Thompson—while herself keeping ever so quiet, remaining quite silent, doing the nothing that makes her herself complicit with the very criminals she's splattering with her bogus outrage.
..........In Destroying World Order, the great, dedicated, conscience-driven Francis A. Boyle writes that "Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its foreign accomplices by all nonviolent means possible."
..........Knowing that a crime took place and saying nothing about it makes one complicit. Knowing how to end a crime and doing nothing to do so makes one complicit. Complicity, aiding and abetting: These also are crimes.
..........Last time, in "A Letter of Lamentation to America," Part 2, I wrote these paragraphs:
....................Our nation is dying. Our nation is being murdered before our very eyes. And yet, over
....................so long time and in so many ways has this same nation been degraded by its own internal
....................enemies that it is not only a nation gone blind, but it is also a nation in which criminality has
....................evolved into custom.
....................This is part, but only part, of the reason why traitors and criminals ranging from the very
....................topmost Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi and Scooter Libby down through the middle regions
....................of Bill Keller and Frank Rich to the foul pits of a hundred-thousand Bill O'Reillys—why these
....................traitors and criminals routinely, consistently, and conventionally go unpunished.
..........If these people and others like them behave as they do because they are infantile, they should immediately be removed from positions of any public responsibility or authority whatsoever. If these people and others like them behave as they do because they are delusionary, they should immediately be removed from positions of any public responsibility or authority whatsoever and at once be committed. And, if these people and others like them behave as they do because they are criminal, they should immediately be removed from positions of any public responsibility or authority whatsoever and at once be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in such way or ways as would be appropriate to the nature and severity of their crimes.
..........With every passing day, hour, minute, with every passing second, the heinous crimes in question become even more intolerable in their nature; and with every passing day, hour, minute, with every passing second, they become even more appalling in their severity.
..........The well-being of millions upon millions, the well-being of the nation, very possibly of the world itself, are at stake. What's despicable, what's unforgivable, is for anyone to do nothing if they are in a position to do something.
..........Worse, it's criminal. Because, what does it come down to, really? No matter how many of them there are, from Goodman to Rich to Cockburn to Silver to Keller to Pelosi to the foul pits of a hundred-thousand Bill O'Reillys—every single one of them is either dumb as a stump, delusionary, infantile, or, in the plainest words, on the side of the criminals, on the side of the fascists.
..........So what do you think? I know what I think. Forget about infantile and delusionary and about being dumb as a stump. No, here's what they are, all of them, every last one: They're on the side of the criminals, on the side of the bad guys, on the side of the regime. They're crooks, quislings, traitors.
..........But I know one other thing as well. I know that if they were to come around, if they were to leave the criminals and mend their ways and come over to our side and start telling the truth, I'd welcome them. I'd embrace them and celebrate them. The truth is, I'd even forgive them.
..........After all, who wouldn't? We're talking about the highest stakes there are. You'd have to be crazy, or delusional, not to.
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
....................................................................................................—July 29, 2007
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