FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 9, Part 7.1
Number 9, Part 7.1
(NEW SERIES—2007)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
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NEVER IF NOT NOW
BEFORE TIME RUNS OUT
NEVER IF NOT NOW
BEFORE TIME RUNS OUT
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AMERICA, LAND OF LIES
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POISON SPREADS
POISON SPREADS
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POWER, AUTHORITY
SUSPECT
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TRUST DESTROYED
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RUIN GENERAL ALSO IN ARTS,
LETTERS, PUBLISHING
POWER, AUTHORITY
SUSPECT
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TRUST DESTROYED
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RUIN GENERAL ALSO IN ARTS,
LETTERS, PUBLISHING
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................................................................................The American people are at war with the corporatist media, and
................................................................................we must be victorious in the battle for truth. Since it will never ex-
................................................................................pose 9/11 for what it was, and is, and will only tell lies and hide
................................................................................reality, We the People must become active in the dissemination of
................................................................................truth. We do not have its resources, but we have truth on our
................................................................................side. We do not have its money, but we have strength in numbers.
................................................................................We do not have its power of persuasion, but we have billions of
................................................................................hands and eyes, we have the collective mind of hundreds of mil-
................................................................................lions of human beings, each possessing incredible and diverse
................................................................................talents and abilities. All that is needed is desire, passion and a
................................................................................quest for truth. We do not have its machinations, but we have
................................................................................momentum.
..........................................................................................—Manuel Valenzuela, "A Nation in Silent Anger," May 9, 2007
................................................................................As with the human longing for security, the natural desire for affiliation
................................................................................and acceptance works in favor of the war-mongering, power-hungry elite,
................................................................................for they know only the bravest of the brave will dare risk ostracism for
................................................................................a noble cause.
..........................................................................................—Donna J. Thorne,
.........................................................................................."War and the Police State: Complicity of the American People," April 21, 2007
................................................................................. . . [The] candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule
................................................................................of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants
................................................................................accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don't get the access to lawyers
................................................................................they get when they're on our soil. . . My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo."
................................................................................His remarks were greeted with wild applause.
..........................................................................................—Paul Krugman, "Don't Blame Bush," New York Times, May 18,2007
................................................................................Indeed, I wonder when we'll face up to what has really been going on.
..........................................................................................—National columnist in email to Eric Larsen, Sept. 2006
..........After I posted "Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman?" this past April 28, Richard Collier, in forwarding that piece to his own readers, added a certain misgiving about it that I used as the introductory part of the next "Food for Thought" segment. That segment went up on May 6 and, as you'll know if you followed my email announcement of it, was called by me "Traitors in Our House," after a phrase of Randall Tillotson's. After all, while Collier's words opened that piece, the balance of it consisted of an essay by that same Randall Tillotson, directed actually to Richard Collier but of interest generally, covering the subject of anomalies in Amy Goodman's programming on her radio show, Democracy Now!
..........If you followed Collier and Tillotson through "Traitors in Our House," you'll know how that piece ended. In actuality, however, it didn't end that way, since after it went up on my website, Richard Collier took yet another turn at the keyboard and wrote a response to Randall Tillotson's response to Collier's response to my piece that actually was entitled "Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman?"
..........Complicated, huh? But that's the way it is these modern days, what with email, internet, instant messaging, and the like.
..........But it's also the way it was, say, back in the 18th Century, in the great age of pamphleteering, even though, admittedly, the exchanges then may have gone back and forth at a slightly more stately pace. Either way, then or now, this kind of exchange can be the way some of the most interesting things happen.
..........A person could even call such a thing by its right and proper name—that is, a person could call it debate.
..........And there's a word that raises a red flag. After all, does debate even exist in the United States any more? According to Paul Craig Roberts, it's a dead duck, gone the way (another bird metaphor) of the dodo. Here's what Roberts says about it, in a piece from Feb. 7, 2006, called "My Epiphany: From Reaganaut to Anti-War Radical":
..............................Debate is dead in America for two reasons: One is that the media concentration
....................permitted in the 1990s has put news and opinion in the hands of a few corporate exec-
....................utives who do not dare risk their broadcasting licenses by getting on the wrong side
....................of government, or their advertising revenues by becoming "controversial." The media
....................follows a safe line and purveys only politically correct information.
.............................. The other reason is that Americans today are no longer enthralled by debate.
....................They just want to hear what they want to hear. The right-wing, left-wing, and liber-
....................tarians alike preach to the faithful. Democracy cannot succeed when there is no debate.
..........I'll come back to Paul Craig Roberts in a minute. I think he's right, after all, about "debate." Not only do his words ring true in respect to what I've been arguing all along in these "Food for Thought" pieces about the catastrophe of the "left" Gatekeepers, but they ring true also in respect to the argument throughout all of A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.
..........So without any question we'll come back to Roberts and the question of debate being dead in America. But first there's something else to turn to—namely, Canada, a place where debate still appears to be alive and well, at least judging by the words of Richard Collier.
..........If you'd like to read the whole of Richard Collier's letter to Randall Tillotson (a good idea), you can do it by clicking here. On the other hand, I'll also be doing a lot of synopsizing and quoting right here on these pages.
..........Collier identifies five matters "of opinion or perspective" that appear to be different among Canadians than among people in the US, and he takes these differences up one at a time. Let's do the same. I'll introduce each of the five and then return for some analysis and discussion.
1)
..........First, says Collier, "The degree of fear, anger, and trepidation . . . concerning the current political situation in the US" is "one of the major differences between the US and Canada." He continues:
............................... . . I don't think we share quite the sense of horror that intelligent people in the US
....................experience. Perhaps we should, I don't know. And I don't know if this more optimistic or
....................more easy-going approach is a cultural attribute of Canadians or if we simply have not
....................yet had direct experience with the depth of perfidy occurring in the US; or we may simply
....................be more myopic and not seeing what is taking place.
..............................However, most thoughtful Canadians are appalled at the export of our resources
....................to fuel the US military machine; at the ever-increasing possibility of 'deep integration' with
....................the US, politically and economically; at the Conservatives' butt-kissing the Bush admin-
....................istration; at the shift in our military and foreign affairs from peace keeping to armed battle;
....................and so on and on.
..............................But I don't think we're yet as concerned as you about implanted chips, cameras on
....................street corners, and a massive shift to fascist thought-control. As I said, perhaps we should
....................be: but at this point what you and EL write about—and the quality of abject rage and fear
....................that pervades your writing—seems to us somewhat alien and therefore off-putting and
....................even, well, un-Canadian.
..........As I said, let's come back in a minute to the "abject rage and fear" that Tillotson and I express in our writing—is it justified? based in reality? paranoid, for god's sake?—but right now, on to Collier's second observed difference between Canada and the U.S.
2)
..........Collier's second observation is that "Canada has had a much longer, richer, and bolder tradition of leftwing politics than the US" has had, "or at least it has been more visible and prominent." While in the U.S., he says, "socialist and communist movements have always been underground movements and deeply hidden from public perception" ("not to mention roundly vilified," he adds), there's much greater leftist visibility in Canada and a much greater spread across the political spectrum than there is in the pasteurized and homogenized U.S. "left."
............................... . . After all, even our Tories would make many of your Democrats cringe in fear. I can
....................only imagine (with some pleasure) how your Republicans view our Liberals, NDP, and Greens.
....................And at least two Communist Parties in Canada have run candidates in ridings throughout the
....................country for years, so there is some public familiarity with the entire spectrum of the left.
..........In the U.S., on the other hand, what I've been calling "the left gatekeepers," says Collier, aren't really "left," but are "only vaguely to the left of the Democrats, not really on the left very much at all." He goes further with distinction number two between Canada and the U.S.:
..............................So we are not surprised at all when EL excoriates "the left gatekeepers". . . In
....................a nation [like Canada] with a broad and consistent history of leftwing movements, these
....................so-called gatekeepers would not be keeping any gates at all: they would not have been
....................elevated into that position from among a variety of left-liberal commentators. And we
....................would not have had overweening expectations of them: in other words, why does EL
....................feel he needs to whack Amy Goodman unless she has somehow failed to live up to
....................his expectations and there is no one else to fill the gap she apparently has left?
..........And there's a real crux: What left does remain in the U.S.? As with Collier's other points, more in a moment.
3)
..........Collier's third "difference" derives straight from his second one. Here it is in its entirety:
..............................As a result, his [EL's] attacks on specific Gatekeepers and their work simply be-
....................cause they do not (yet) agree with him on the source of the 9/11 tragedy appear to us
....................excessive, unnecessary, even, well, irrelevant. The Gatekeepers would not have to be
....................found wanting if in fact there was a sufficient tradition of public leftwing analysis avail-
....................able. In effect, it is not Amy Goodman that EL should attack but the whole tradition in the
....................US of a narrow —very narrow—range of permissible political writing and thinking. That
....................kind of attack, using Goodman and others as examples, would to me make a good deal
....................more sense. But without that context, these intense, querulous attacks on Goodman
....................(and others) sound nasty, bullying, lacking in empathy, and ultimately pointless. Worse,
....................they betray what Americans have always been guilty of: bad manners. Here in Canada
....................it is perhaps more important to be polite than to establish turf and prove that one is right.
....................And that's not, I think, a poor measure of one's civilization.
..........I'm not about to say that it's a pleasure to be identified as "querulous," let alone the rest—"nasty, bullying, lacking in empathy, and ultimately pointless." And yet. And yet, and yet—well, as before, let's return in a moment. Maybe we'll even return to that wonderfully nostalgic, old-world-esque—yes, even comforting—remark that being polite "[is] not, I think, a poor measure of one's civilization."
..........After all, it's a towering question: Can politeness conceivably survive in a nation so egregiously depraved as the U.S. has come to be? (Note: Hints as to some answers to that question might be found in A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.)
4)
..........Penultimately, Collier suggests that attacking members of a group that's really one's own political group—especially if the attacks entail hair-splitting—will do only harm, not good, will not only aid the enemy but result in a generally ruined situation that I'll let Collier himself define:
..............................Ultimately, if one is not committed to building alliances and common fronts with others
....................with whom you agree mostly, but perhaps not completely, then to what role does that lead
....................one? My experience has been that anything but a commitment to solidarity is counterrevol-
....................utionary and plays right into the hands of the ruling class. Sure, we have to overlook the
....................bad-hair days and the sometimes stupid comments or mental blocks in the people we work
....................with; but at least they're working with us and not against us. The only other option is to be-
....................come a Puritan, someone who knows he/she is one of the Select and that most others are
....................not. It behooves the Select to ensure that his/her group is never ever contaminated by one
....................of the Fallen or Corrupt—and that means most other people: few are worthy, few are
....................chosen. So the Select find that much of what they do is to administer tests to others (who
....................may or may not be applicants to join the Selects' group) to determine their worthiness:
....................tests of fire and water; tests of what is said and written; tests of behaviour and action.
....................So much time is spent testing others in order to determine worthiness that the original
....................goal of revolution or a New Jerusalem or whatever recedes beyond the horizon.
..............................And the problem with such rites of purification is that they drive away potential
....................adherents and eventually isolate the individual or what is left of the original group. This
....................of course is the history of Protestant religion after the Reformation, right? And I've seen
....................this repeated in leftwing politics: the US Communist Party has fragmented and shivered
....................into warring splinters over and over, each splinter thinking it possesses "the word,"
....................but having gotten so refined and diminished that no one takes it seriously at all. And
....................what's the point of being right, if no one listens to you?
..........Once more, I won't say it's pleasant hearing such words—especially when one's self is both occasion for and target of them. Still, let's stick with the plan and postpone response until we've reached the last of Collier's five points.
..........And so:
5)
..............................And where does [all of] this lead? A solitary cell of paranoid suspicion, perhaps.
....................No one can pass all the tests; no one can be righteous enough; no one can be trusted.
....................I think I would rather make mistakes in my trust and correct them when my errors have
....................been made clear to me than worry constantly that my friends, neighbours, associates,
....................and colleagues may all be unreliable, may in fact be stooges or, even worse, counter-
....................intelligence agents recruited by the fascists. My comments on EL's FFT essays are in-
....................tended as an antidote to that frightening drift into solipsism.
..........So ends the letter from Canada, built with craft and care such that its most withering suggestion is also its final one—that I, in the view of my long and dear friend Richard Collier, by taking the approach that I've lately been taking and by setting my bearings in the way I've lately set them, may in fact be heading straight toward the solitude of inconsequentiality, the wasteland of paranoia, and the silent madhouse of solipsism.
..........Needless to say, I don't have the least desire to go to any of those three dread states or places, all of them perfectly real, highly dangerous, and absolutely destructive. Like anybody else, I hope to elude them through any effort I can muster. And yet at the same time I see no way that I can lower the risk of falling prey to them merely by changing the subject I've chosen to write about or by changing the method of my approach to it.
..........And the reason is that if I made those changes I wouldn't achieve any of the good ends that Richard Collier describes, and I wouldn't help bring about any of the salutary conditions that, by the sound of it, he's himself fortunate enough to enjoy. Who ever knew just how far apart—worlds apart—Canada and the U.S. really were? No, here in the 21st Century U.S., if I were to make those changes in subject and manner, it wouldn't mean I'd thereby be better able to help—and help to cohere—a benevolent political, social, or cultural movement of a kind that I'm now supposedly just helping to splinter. It wouldn't mean that I could join in a fruitful debate whose effect over time would be, however gradually, to bring about the good and isolate the bad.
..........Changing my subject or method would bring about neither of those good things nor any imaginable similar good things. No, it would not. And as for the meaning of such change, it would be purely and only this: That I had given up, had thrown in the towel, and had decided to go over to the enemy; that I had decided to join the liars and the corporations; that I had decided to put my own oar in the water in order to pull together, with all of them, fraudulent to the end, in helping speed the demise of the republic and in erecting the Orwellian state that A Nation Gone Blind tried and tried and tried, most probably in vain, to find ways to avoid.
..........It would, in short, be the worst possible thing I could do.
2
RESPONSE TO A LETTER FROM CANADA
..........If you've been sticking with me through these ongoing "Food for Thought" pieces, you may remember the FFT called "Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth" (dated 4/12/07, it was the one with a ten-question "quiz" about lies in the New York Times' lead article for 4/2/07— "Al Qaeda Is Seen as Restoring Leadership").
..........And if you've been sticking with me, you may remember that this is the way that FFT ended:
....................And so we close for now. Next time, I'll take a look at still some more gatekeeping,
....................including a return glance at Amy Goodman, in an attempt to figure out what the real
....................difference might actually be between people and institutions.
....................Is Frank Rich a person, or is he an institution? Ditto, I hardly need say, for Ariana
....................Huffington, Matthew Rothschild, Nicholas Lemann, Christopher Hayes, Alexander
....................Cockburn, usw.) If you'd like to get a head start on this question—and it's a ques-
....................tion, I believe, of matters having to do with nothing less than life and death—I urge
....................you to take a look at this short video of Webster Tarpley speaking at the 9/11
....................Truth Conference at Irvine, California, this past March 11.
..........So. In the hope of linking together that "Food for Thought" with this one, I'd like to suggest that you do now what I suggested back then, and (if you haven't already) take a look at that Webster Tarpley video from March 11 with an eye (or an ear) open to what Tarpley says there about "people" as opposed to "institutions."
..........If that's all right with you, let's meet back here in a couple of minutes.
..........I was told by someone that he'd been promised an hour and was given fifteen minutes. It could be true, I don't know. As is, looks like he got eight minutes and thirty-nine seconds. I think he did a top job, given such constraint. His eight minutes are mighty full ones, whether his eyes bulge or not.
..........But those minutes go fast, few or many, and so I re-played and scribbled fast in order to get down verbatim some of what Tarpley said: I'll cite the result here, and that way we can agree on Tarpley's words as backdrop for the ensuing "Response to a Letter from Canada."
..........1)
..........On 9/11:
..........That the "official" 9/11 story is a "racist, fascist, militarist myth, odious in the eyes of anybody with any self respect or integrity."
..........2)
..........On the 2006 elections:
..........That the 9/11 Truth movement had a "decisive impact" on the elections, especially after C-Span covered ("at least four times") the Alex Jones 9/11 Truth conference of June 2006 in Los Angeles.
..........That the Democrats (with their "parliamentary cretinism") didn't so much win, but rather fell into office "by default" as voters turned in revulsion from Republicans. The vote more anti-Republican than pro-Democratic.
..........3)
..........On popular rejection of the "official" 9/11 story:
..........That "we've got polling that says that about 80% of the U.S. population does not believe the myth. There are about 15 or 16% who do believe the myth, 3% don't know, [so] that means 80% who are either strongly rejecting the myth or who are skeptical in a somewhat more diluted way. Now, that means the American people have understood. The problem you now have is the institutions. Academia, the media, the political parties, publishing. . . "
..........That "the institutions are still under an oligarchical consensus that the way to organize this society is through the global war on terror. . ."
..........
.......... There you are-a reminder of why I said, back in "Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth" that "Next time, I'll take a look at still some more gatekeeping, including a return glance at Amy Goodman, in an attempt to figure out what the real difference might actually be between people and institutions."
..........Let me also suggest a riddle that might possibly make itself useful as we get to work. Here: ARE PEOPLE MADE UP OF INSTITUTIONS? OR ARE INSTITUTIONS MADE UP OF PEOPLE?
..........Warning: Don't forget that I'm an old English prof who used to ask his students either/or questions that didn't have either/or answers—an old prof who did that for the purpose of testing whether his students were thinking for themselves or were just sitting there in a passive and unthinking obeisance to the all-knowing prof.
..........Now let's get to work and respond to my old friend and other old English prof, Richard Collier, of Canada. I'll use the same numbering system as before.
1)
..........Collier's comments on:
.........."The degree of fear, anger, and trepidation" felt by "intelligent people in the U.S.," their "sense of horror" at the "depth of perfidy" politically and culturally there, their concerns "about implanted chips, cameras on street corners, and a massive shift to fascist thought-control."
..........My response:
..........Yes, it's true—both that there are great "fear, anger, and trepidation" and that there's great justification for them. U.S. history from the start has had a particular and built-in tension between individual or popular freedoms and the state's need for order—hence the Bill of Rights itself and many other aspects of the original Constitution, not to mention certain of the later amendments to it. Never before now, though, has that tension been more favorable to the state side of the contest over the individual. This is true in part simply to advances in the means and in the ease of surveillance, monitoring, and control. And it's true, also, to an extremely important and deeply threatening degree, because the nation is now "governed" by the most secretive, malicious, and dishonest administration in its entire history. The enormous lie of 9/11 itself, a murderous and fraudulent "attack" both planned and perpetrated by that same quisling "government," is almost doubtless the most extreme example right now of the determination, ruthlessness, murderous extremity of the willingness of "government" to attack and control its own people. That the American population has not yet responded—and may never do so—by unseating that anti-population "government" and replacing it with an authentic one is also in itself a screamingly obvious indication of the extent to which control of the population has already been successfully achieved. What's actually happening in the U.S. now, or what's failing to happen in the U.S. now, out-Orwells Orwell. Here's an excerpt from A Nation Gone Blind that makes this very lamentation.
..........Other examples? Well, U.S. passports issued since October 2006 have RFID chips in them. The U.S. military "has taken another step forward with its research into 'non-lethal crowd control systems'" that will work by means of "ultra bright strobes" mounted on drone aircraft so that "modulation of high-intensity light. . . will cause immobilisation to all those within the beam." And then, of course, Halliburton is coming right along with its stateside concentration camps (to the tune of a "a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security," presumably so there'll be someplace to stash us all after millions of us have been zapped to the ground by the sky-borne strobe-lights, or after we've been summarily declared "disloyal" or "enemy collaborators," as this piece by Nat Perry, originally written for AlterNet, suggests.
..........Yesterday was Monday (April 14), and, as usual, I began my day and week with coffee and the New York Times—my pack a day, not of cigarettes, but of the omissions, distortions, falsehoods—and froth of varying densities—that in these Bushiscti days constitute all the news that's fit to print, or at least fit for the likes of us soon-to-be chipped and DNA-ed ones.
..........So, was there any news? Well, the front page's left lead told me that "Governor" and 9/11 Liar and Truth Suppressor Eliot Spitzer "Wants DNA Sampling in Most Crimes." Patrick McGeehan wrote that
..............................Gov. Eliot Spitzer is proposing a major expansion of New York's database of DNA
....................samples to include people convicted of most crimes, while making it easier for prisoners
....................to use DNA to try to establish their innocence.
..........That's the good part. Then comes this:
..............................Currently, New York State collects DNA from those convicted
....................of about half of all crimes, typically the most serious.
..............................The governor's proposal would order DNA taken from those
....................found guilty of any misdemeanour, including minor drug offenses, harass-
....................ment or unauthorized use of a credit card, according to a draft of his
....................bill. It would not cover offenses considered violations, like disorderly
....................conduct.
..........I wonder how soon, if the bill were passed, before "any misdemeanour"—think even of that—would come, in the routine doings of cops' and attorneys' daily world, also to include "violations"? And then to include just existing?
..........Let it go. In the middle of the front page was a little smidgen of truth packed in among the many lies of omission, the truth-particle being deemed fit enough for us chippers-to-be, while no way would we or could we ever be given the whole bale of hay. Subject? The liar, hypocrite, and 9/11 insider Rudolph W. Giuliani. The byline? Anthony DePalma. The headline? "Ground Zero Illnesses Cloud Giuliani's Legacy." And that's it for the smidgen of actual news—and that's also the only good part, since anything that stands as an obstacle between Giuliani and electoral office (or office of any kind) has got to be a good thing. If you want the truth about Giuliani's cheap, unconscionable, plainly despicable "victories" over Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley back in his heavyweight days as prosecutor, just give a quick read to Paul Craig Robert's piece of May 11, "Giuliani Would Make a Worse President than Bush."
..........Okay, so the mayor's early career was built on deceit, ambition, and the perfect absence of scruples. How about his later—or current—career? Well, as anyone who's read even a few of the best books about 9/11 well knows, Giuliani was either an original (most probable) insider in the treasonous 9/11 operation or was quickly made one on the day itself of the fake attacks. DePalma is correct in his lead paragraph, as also in his second:
....................Anyone who watched Rudolph W. Giuliani preside over ground zero in the days after
....................9/11 glimpsed elements of his strength: decisiveness, determination, self-confidence.
....................Those qualities were also on display over the months he directed the cleanup of the
....................collapsed World Trade Center. But today, with evidence that thousands of people
....................who worked at ground zero have become sick, many regard Mr. Giuliani's triumph
....................of leadership as having come with a human cost.
..........At exactly this point, however, as we move into paragraph three, omissions and half truths—lies—take over to the exclusion of everything else. Again, anyone who knows even a beginner's amount of 9/11 basics will be rightly enraged at what the Times here "mentions" without in the least way so much as hinting at the really meaningful truth, the true truth, that lies beneath it:
....................An examination of Mr. Giuliani's handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during
....................his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence
....................of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of
....................those who worked in the trade center's ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense
....................of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the
....................attack.
..........The 9/11 beginner no less than the advanced 9/11 scholar knows full well that Giuliani was breaking the law, was tampering with evidence (was destroying evidence) at a crime scene, was shoving out the other "agencies" because he'd been ordered to by his real bosses, and, beyond all, that he gave not even a momentary tinker's damn about "human remains" or "loss of life" but only and solely about destroying evidence that would have proven that the collapse of all three towers occurred by controlled demolition, most probably by thermite reactions.
..........And so new meaning—well, that is, the truth—peers through the Times's boiler-plate code-and-cover-up lie-and-deceit-writing in phrases like "seized control" and "might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution. . ." Speed was the only real concern that Giuliani had—speed being essential for criminal reasons. Both criminality and immorality—giving not a damn about human well-being—are an underlying part of sentences like the one saying "that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators." While now—today, in 2007—" Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing," and while now, today, "health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars," back then, in the aftermath of the fake attacks, here's what Giuliani told workers:
....................[The] administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face
....................penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts
....................and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave
....................flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they
....................privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.
..........Giuliani, then, has all the perfect elements of character for a model presidential candidate in the age of Bush, Cheney, and "post 9/11 America." Let's name them: criminality, inhumanity, immorality, traitorousness, greed, ambition, and, like icing on the cake, a total absence of human fellow feeling, sympathy, or empathy.
..........That one. And, no, it doesn't seem to me that I've drifted from it. It's just that a person sees, in getting closer to it, just how wide and deep and broad it really is and how huge the territory it covers. But, yes, in a word, I'm scared positively shitless. I'm positively brimming, seething, and boiling with abject rage and fear. And I'll say something further: I cannot understand, I am fully and utterly incapable of imagining, conceiving, or understanding how it can possibly be that not everyone else in the entire nation with intelligence, feeling, or human curiosity in excess of that possessed by the average zucchini cannot also be scared positively shitless, cannot also be absolutely brimming, seething, and boiling with abject rage and fear.
..........In fact, with the making of that point, I realize that's probably time to end this particular FFT installment—saving the four remaining Collier-questions for the next time around.
..........So let's do that. After all, I started with Monday's pack of lies, and here it is already Thursday.
..........Yesterday—Wednesday—I finally got around to reading a piece that I'd printed off from Chossudovsky's Global Research site, one of the many internet pieces I print off regularly in order to read them on train, bus, or over coffee. Many such pieces—unlike the near-totality of lies in, say, the New York Times' coverage of the true state of our illness and captivity in this ever more endangered and endangering nation—are most remarkable pieces of writing indeed. Manuel Valenzuela's recent "A Nation in Silent Anger," for example, the Paul Craig Roberts piece on Giuliani that I mentioned earlier, or Chris Hedges' "No One Should Be Above the Law, a speech given in Washington on April 25 calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Hedges is worth pausing with for a moment, for time enough, at least, to look at this, a sentence expressing truth, dignity, passion, patriotism, and logic—a sentence like none you'll read in the New York Times during this poor, sick, depraved, Frank Richian lifetime:
....................And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we do not
....................begin the process of impeachment, we will be complicit in the codification of a new
....................world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.
..........Is anyone mad or quixotic enough to hold their breath until the day when Frank Rich or Matthew Rothschild or Ariana Huffington or Nicholas Lemann or Christopher Hayes or Alexander Cockburn admit to their complicity in the crimes of our murdering and traitorous leaders, both international and domestic?
..........But let's carry that thought over to Donna J. Thorne and her welcome piece dated April 21, "War and the Police State: Complicity of the American People."
..........Thorne has set herself the task of examining what can possibly explain "the scourge of apathy in American society today" at the very time that what's needed is anything but apathy. I'd be happy to recommend A Nation Gone Blind to her, since that book would certainly provide her with some help in her awful task. But for the moment let's take a look at her own way of framing the matter:
....................In this era of perpetual warfare [she writes], escalating domestic tyranny, government-
....................sanctioned torture, and a Nazi-like pursuit of Middle-East domination, one would expect,
....................at the very least, an audible outcry from the People who proclaim resolute devotion to
....................the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Yet for the most part, Mainstream America con-
....................tinues to assume a posture of apathy, bitterness, or eery silence.
..........Indeed so—and in many a case, let's add superiority, smug condescension, and sneering contempt—as with not a few of those very writers, editors, and journalism school heads cited in the list just above.
..........The question defies credibility, and Thorne, as if herself incredulous, repeats it:
....................And now, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent establishment of Homeland
....................Security, previously rigid supporters of civil rights quietly tolerate the piecemeal
....................deconstruction of the U.S. Constitution under the pretext of protection, and to their
....................own peril, disregard increasingly strident warnings and signs of a growing and
....................imminent police state. Clearly, Mainstream America has surrendered to the sub-
....................jugation of a power-crazed, despotic administration whose control continues to
....................expand exponentially with each passing rumor of imminent peril.
..........I, too, find myself simply unable to believe. Those who are true passive consumers, those who don't think, don't read, don't care about anything that reaches beyond the immediate living of life—the "scourge of apathy" among these many millions I can force myself to "understand." But what about people who think—even people whose jobs and careers consist of thinking and require thought? What about people like those—intelligent, educated, intellectual people who still remain apathetic, uninterested in the disaster gathering all around, and above, and below us? What makes them such obvious failures as citizens, as defenders of freedom, opponents of tyranny, murder, high crimes, and treason? What makes them such staunch, superior, fatuous, self-assured deniers of what really happened on 911?
..........If 9/11—the easily-proven and cold-blooded committing of a massive crime calling obviously for prosecution—if 9/11 remains, as I myself am convinced it does, the key to restoring our Constitution, outlawing torture, reclaiming habeas corpus, withdrawing from depraved flirtation with nuclear holocaust, and averting our rapid descent into a totalitarian police state: Well, if all this is true, the great question becomes overwhelming important and overwhelming demanding of an answer: HOW AND WHY COULD ANY MATURE HUMAN BEING IN GOOD CONSCIENCE, WITH A WORKING AND SENTIENT MIND, AND WITH SYMPATHY FOR HIS OR HER FELLOW CREATURES CONTINUE ADAMANTLY TO DENY THIS SALIENT TRUTH?
..........Donna J. Thorne touches on A Nation Gone Blind at one point in her own asking of virtually this same question:
....................Why, when confronted with a black-and-white record of autocratic offenses, are
....................so many sensible Americans ignoring and even endorsing the current administra-
....................tion as it openly paves a tyrannical road to hell? Are we so deluded by rhetoric
....................and weapons-grade propaganda, that we are no longer able to distinguish truth
....................from fiction, thereby allowing, if not abetting our own enslavement ?
..........The touching-point with ANGB lies in Thorne's asking whether we are "no longer able to distinguish truth from fiction," a question that A Nation Gone Blind takes very, very seriously indeed and one that it answers, however unhappily, in what I guess you would call the affirmative, meaning that no, we cannot tell the difference between truth and fiction any longer.
..........Blind already, then, Americans were blinded further by being monstrously and cold-bloodedly scared out of their wits not only on and by 9/11 proper but over the span of every passing day ever since.
..........Thorne:
....................On September 11, 2001, corporate media and the government elite launched an
....................aggressive political and media campaign upon and against the American people.
....................With Madison-Avenue expertise, purveyors of fear heightened our perception of
....................imminent threat by inundating the airwaves with continual, repetitive, easily-
....................learned sound-bytes, words brimming with emotionally-charged meaning, ". . .
....................Bin Laden, Taliban, Axis of Evil, Saddam Hussein, Terror-Threat, Terrorist. . . "
....................with just enough intensity to successfully persuade the American people to
....................procure security at any cost.
..........Without at the very least that first and all-important step, we will be, as a nation, doomed to the totalitarian (whether or not it will look "nice" in its surface); we will be, as an artistic culture, doomed to a condition even worse than the mindless, non-intellectual, lifeless mediocrity we have already declined to; and, as a people, we will be doomed to serve as a model for the entire globe and all of its people, a model of absolute, unmitigated, unforgivable waste; of craven loss; of abject and inexplicable failure; of utter lack of responsibility; of unfathomable and gluttonous ignorance; of fatuousness beyond measure; and of having allowed, through that same fatuity and gross, complacent, stupidity and ignorance, the sheer collapse and total loss of a once-robust experiment in the possibility for achievement in human inventiveness, dignity, freedom, welfare, and expression.
..........When I finished writing A Nation Gone Blind in late spring of 2004, I'd just begun my own 9/11 studies, having been with them for under a year. Crossing the Rubicon hadn't yet been published, so that even though I knew well enough in outline what had happened on the day of bloody treason and high crimes, I still had little grasp either of the enormity of the plot or of the extraordinary detail of its execution—for example, precisely the way in which military jet fighters were kept either on the ground or at least well out of the flight paths so that the big jetliners could find their targets undisturbed. That kind of detail—and much, much more—would be made clear only after mid-2004 by the towering and unflagging scholarship of the very great Mike Ruppert, while the deep history of the attacks—beginning with the U.S.-aided (by CIA backing of Osama bin Laden and building of his new Al Qaeda, and also by the opportunistic use of the mujahideen) 1989 expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan and reaching on up through the failed 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center, through the African embassy bombings, through the event that visited the U.S.S. Cole, leading finally to 9/11—this deep history was made accessible to me only in 2005 through the also-monumental and utterly dedicated scholarship of the great Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed in his The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism, a history prefigured also in his less-thorough but highly important 2002 publication of The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11, 2001.
..........There have followed, since Ruppert and Ahmed, numerous other truly excellent 9/11 truth-revealing books of impeccable and powerfully dedicated scholarship—like the works of David Ray Griffin, Michel Chossudovsky, Webster G. Tarpley, and Barrie Zwicker that I named and talked about in this Food for Thought piece back in January 2007.
..........Absolutely incontrovertible proof, however, of the sheer enormity and virtual seamlessness of the evil, traitorous, morally despicable plot in America against the exposure of 9/11 truth can be seen in the simple fact that none of these invaluable books has ever been reviewed in any mainstream print medium anywhere in the entire United States.
..........We need to end for this time around. But let me ask a small number of questions first. Let me ask that you read these paragraphs by Paul Craig Roberts, and then ask yourself, like I do, how can people not accept 9/11 truth? and how can they not want to act radically on the basis of that knowledge?
....................The United States is undergoing a coup against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil
....................liberties, and democracy itself. The "liberal press" has been co-opted. As everyone must
....................know by now, the New York Times has totally failed its First Amendment obligations,
....................allowing Judith Miller to make war propaganda for the Bush administration, suppressing
....................for an entire year the news that the Bush administration was illegally spying on American
....................citizens, and denying coverage to Al Gore's speech that challenged the criminal deeds
....................of the Bush administration.
....................The TV networks mimic Fox News' faux patriotism. Anyone who depends on print, TV,
....................or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved
....................a de facto Ministry of Propaganda.
....................The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and
....................the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous
....................affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in head-
....................lines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such dis-
....................closures can stand up for the country.
..........Remember Amy Goodman? Remember Frank Rich? Remember Matthew Rothschild? I've got two questions about them, and about all the other "left" or "progressive" gatekeepers: 1) Are they willing to stand up for their country, our country? 2) And, are they institutions, or are they people?
..........I would like now to make a comment about an essential difference between institutions and people. And I'd like to do it, first, by turning back again to Donna J. Thorne, who, like Paul Craig Roberts, points out that "the war-mongering, power-hungry elite" that now holds power in and over the U.S., that this elite knows full well that "only the bravest of the brave will dare risk ostracism for a noble cause."
..........And what does that mean? It means, very simply, that all people—all people—can be divided into one of two categories—those on the one side who are cowards, and those on the one side who are courageous.
..........And what does this have to do with the difference between institutions and people?
..........Let me make a small but important adjustment in that question. Let me ask: And what does this have to do with the difference between institutions and honorable people?
..........And now we're ready, at last, to return to our riddle from some ways back: Are People Made Up Of Institutions? Or Are Institutions Made Up Of People?
..........The riddle, of course, is on the surface of it unanswerable, and that's why I posed it. Still, though unanswerable unless first quite highly qualified, the "riddle" as is nevertheless allows us to make a small handful of extremely useful and empirically-based observations that are of enormous—that are of vital—relevance to this discussion.
..........1)
..........Institutions, in an imaginary pendulum-swing between cowardice and courage, tend usually—perhaps even always and perhaps inevitably-toward cowardice rather than toward courage.
..........2)
..........Now, a corollary. Institutions, by their very nature, are incapable of courage. This is because institutions are things, and things are not capable of courage. Only people are capable of courage.
..........3)
..........Therefore, the only force that could ever or can ever lead an institution to behave with courage rather than with cowardice is or must be the force of those people who work and dwell inside the institution.
..........Manuel Valenzuela, a patriotic and dedicated truth-teller with great courage, makes it clear in "A Nation in Silent Anger" that any person who "hides" inside an institution and thereby chooses cowardice over courage is nevertheless just as guilty of cowardice as he or she would be outside of the institution, since no one, if of sound body and mind, is or can be anything other—inside or outside an instution—than a free agent, responsible for each and every of his or her own choices or actions.
..........Valenzuela is also a compassionate and understanding writer—though he nevertheless casts his lot with truth and courage, not with cowardice and lying. As you read this paragraph, remember who Valenzuela is writing about. He's writing about you and me, yes, the "little people." But he's also writing about the big people, the influential people, the people to whom others look for guidance and right-thinking. He's writing about Frank Rich, about Matthew Rothschild, about Ariana Huffington, about Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia Journalism School, about Christopher Hayes in The Nation, about Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch, about Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, and, of course, about many, many others.
..........Read the Valenzuela passages below. Then answer this quiz question: Consider the people cited in the paragraph above this one and then determine whether each of them is or is not a coward.
..........Valenzuela begins by asking "why [it is] the corporatist media fails time and again to expose truth." From there, he goes on as follows:
....................The answer is not farfetched, nor is it hard to contemplate. The corporatist media
....................are not a bunch of idiots, or buffoons, though they are a bunch of opportunists ad-
....................dicted to power and greed. Most know exactly what the bloggers and the Internet
....................investigators have found [but] they simply ignore it, for this truth will get you burned.
....................Most know 9/11 was an inside job designed to become the New Pearl Harbor,
....................opening up the globe to American hegemony, perpetually enriching the military-indust-
....................rial-energy complex. They understand geostrategic decision-making and the hunger
....................for profiteering through endless war. They understand the system is hungry, its ap-
....................petite needing to be satisfied through the blood of Arabs and the flow of oil. To these
....................individuals in the corporatist media, it is better to make a deal with the devil than to
....................starve at the hand of truth. They understand that during war the state and those in
....................power offer the corporatist media either the chance to be with those in power or
....................against the state. Most chose to be on the side of the state, knowing that censor-
....................ship must increase, dissent must disappear, debate must cease to exist and the
....................views and policies of those holding the reins of power must be given credence
....................above all. You are either with the state or against it, becoming a stenographer, a
....................propagandist and an abettor of lies and deceptions or an enemy of those in power,
....................your life ruined, your career in shambles, your reputation destroyed.
..........Those are words written by an understanding and perceptive human being. And they are strong words, citing, for example, what may be a terrible double bind: as the cost of being courageous and speaking truth, one may well become "an enemy of those in power, your life ruined, your career in shambles, your reputation destroyed." Yet, on the other hand, if one remains inside the lying institution, and lies for the institution, the result is or may—or even should—be the same: you will become an enemy of those out of power, those hoping to save the republic, save freedom, save dignity—with the result that, in the eyes of those holding truth as their greatest value, "your life [will be] ruined, your career in shambles, your reputation destroyed."
..........Frightening, yes, even terrifying. So what choice is to be made? Valenzuela is unbudging in his insistence that every person's choice must be on the side of the human, not on the side of the institutional—that it must be on the side of courage and truth, not of cowardice and lies. If it isn't, a person dies a moral death, and the nation dies alongside.
..........Valenzuela:
.................... In times of war, the corporatist media is the Ministry of Truth and the Department
....................of Propaganda fused together, lest the people be made aware what is done in
....................their name, lest we see the horrors and destruction our leaders unleash upon
....................humankind. Mobilized and conscripted to unleash psychological warfare against
....................the people of America, the corporatist media thus becomes a most important
....................weapon the state possesses, a way to hide the criminality and mass murder of
....................the state, and our leaders.
..........That is, the journalist who fails to speak the truth not only dies a moral death but becomes immediately and inevitably nothing less than a tool of the surrounding "institution." And still, in Valenzuela's judgment—and mine—the morally failed "journalist" remains a free agent, and, as such, remains responsible for what he or she has done:
....................For the many pseudo-journalists not banished or fired or censored for standing up to
....................principle, those that remain and sell their souls to war and death and destruction, be-
....................coming manipulators, liars and propagandists, the silence and deceptions and lies they
....................promulgate make them complicit in the worst crimes being committed by the state and
....................its leaders. Betraying the foundations and principles of their profession, these little
....................Goering's become complicit in the same crimes they help cover up as well as those
....................they help create.
....................In hiding truth and altering reality, in remaining silent and indifferent to the decimation
....................of America's rights and freedoms and liberties, to the death of 3,000 of her sons and
....................daughters, to the creation of an illegal and immoral war based on lies and deceptions,
....................the destruction of the foundations of America itself, they have become treasonous
....................criminals to the principles and virtues of America, betraying 300 million Americans in
....................the process. In a more perfect world, they would be held accountable for their crimes.
..........We close. "In a more perfect world," says Valenzuela, "they would be held accountable for their crimes."
..........Indeed. I remember Webster Tarpley speaking about Rudolph Giuliani, the traitor and criminal who betrayed the police, betrayed the firemen, betrayed the workers and employees in WTC 1 and WTC 2, betrayed the families of them all, and then hastened in a way shameful beyond any measure of shame to destroy the evidence of what he had done.
..........Coward or courageous? Person or institution?
..........Tarpley asks:
.................... "Why did you destroy the crime scene? Why aren't you in JAIL, Mr. Mayor?"
..........Giuliani. Just now the leading contender, it is said, among the gray flock of Republican candidates for president. Coward, criminal, traitor. Kept out of prison, kept safe and free by the cowards and quislings who sneak and rustle and hide—openly—everywhere among us, the blind.
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—May 18, 2007
>READ, PRINT, OR DOWNLOAD IN PDF FORMAT>>
>EMAIL ERIC LARSEN>>
................................................................................we must be victorious in the battle for truth. Since it will never ex-
................................................................................pose 9/11 for what it was, and is, and will only tell lies and hide
................................................................................reality, We the People must become active in the dissemination of
................................................................................truth. We do not have its resources, but we have truth on our
................................................................................side. We do not have its money, but we have strength in numbers.
................................................................................We do not have its power of persuasion, but we have billions of
................................................................................hands and eyes, we have the collective mind of hundreds of mil-
................................................................................lions of human beings, each possessing incredible and diverse
................................................................................talents and abilities. All that is needed is desire, passion and a
................................................................................quest for truth. We do not have its machinations, but we have
................................................................................momentum.
..........................................................................................—Manuel Valenzuela, "A Nation in Silent Anger," May 9, 2007
................................................................................As with the human longing for security, the natural desire for affiliation
................................................................................and acceptance works in favor of the war-mongering, power-hungry elite,
................................................................................for they know only the bravest of the brave will dare risk ostracism for
................................................................................a noble cause.
..........................................................................................—Donna J. Thorne,
.........................................................................................."War and the Police State: Complicity of the American People," April 21, 2007
................................................................................. . . [The] candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule
................................................................................of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants
................................................................................accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don't get the access to lawyers
................................................................................they get when they're on our soil. . . My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo."
................................................................................His remarks were greeted with wild applause.
..........................................................................................—Paul Krugman, "Don't Blame Bush," New York Times, May 18,2007
................................................................................Indeed, I wonder when we'll face up to what has really been going on.
..........................................................................................—National columnist in email to Eric Larsen, Sept. 2006
..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
THE TRAITORS IN OUR HOUSE
(CONTINUED)
1
A LETTER FROM CANADA
(CONTINUED)
1
A LETTER FROM CANADA
..........After I posted "Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman?" this past April 28, Richard Collier, in forwarding that piece to his own readers, added a certain misgiving about it that I used as the introductory part of the next "Food for Thought" segment. That segment went up on May 6 and, as you'll know if you followed my email announcement of it, was called by me "Traitors in Our House," after a phrase of Randall Tillotson's. After all, while Collier's words opened that piece, the balance of it consisted of an essay by that same Randall Tillotson, directed actually to Richard Collier but of interest generally, covering the subject of anomalies in Amy Goodman's programming on her radio show, Democracy Now!
..........If you followed Collier and Tillotson through "Traitors in Our House," you'll know how that piece ended. In actuality, however, it didn't end that way, since after it went up on my website, Richard Collier took yet another turn at the keyboard and wrote a response to Randall Tillotson's response to Collier's response to my piece that actually was entitled "Does the CIA Own Amy Goodman?"
..........Complicated, huh? But that's the way it is these modern days, what with email, internet, instant messaging, and the like.
..........But it's also the way it was, say, back in the 18th Century, in the great age of pamphleteering, even though, admittedly, the exchanges then may have gone back and forth at a slightly more stately pace. Either way, then or now, this kind of exchange can be the way some of the most interesting things happen.
..........A person could even call such a thing by its right and proper name—that is, a person could call it debate.
..........And there's a word that raises a red flag. After all, does debate even exist in the United States any more? According to Paul Craig Roberts, it's a dead duck, gone the way (another bird metaphor) of the dodo. Here's what Roberts says about it, in a piece from Feb. 7, 2006, called "My Epiphany: From Reaganaut to Anti-War Radical":
..............................Debate is dead in America for two reasons: One is that the media concentration
....................permitted in the 1990s has put news and opinion in the hands of a few corporate exec-
....................utives who do not dare risk their broadcasting licenses by getting on the wrong side
....................of government, or their advertising revenues by becoming "controversial." The media
....................follows a safe line and purveys only politically correct information.
.............................. The other reason is that Americans today are no longer enthralled by debate.
....................They just want to hear what they want to hear. The right-wing, left-wing, and liber-
....................tarians alike preach to the faithful. Democracy cannot succeed when there is no debate.
..........I'll come back to Paul Craig Roberts in a minute. I think he's right, after all, about "debate." Not only do his words ring true in respect to what I've been arguing all along in these "Food for Thought" pieces about the catastrophe of the "left" Gatekeepers, but they ring true also in respect to the argument throughout all of A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.
..........So without any question we'll come back to Roberts and the question of debate being dead in America. But first there's something else to turn to—namely, Canada, a place where debate still appears to be alive and well, at least judging by the words of Richard Collier.
·
..........If you'd like to read the whole of Richard Collier's letter to Randall Tillotson (a good idea), you can do it by clicking here. On the other hand, I'll also be doing a lot of synopsizing and quoting right here on these pages.
..........Collier identifies five matters "of opinion or perspective" that appear to be different among Canadians than among people in the US, and he takes these differences up one at a time. Let's do the same. I'll introduce each of the five and then return for some analysis and discussion.
1)
..........First, says Collier, "The degree of fear, anger, and trepidation . . . concerning the current political situation in the US" is "one of the major differences between the US and Canada." He continues:
............................... . . I don't think we share quite the sense of horror that intelligent people in the US
....................experience. Perhaps we should, I don't know. And I don't know if this more optimistic or
....................more easy-going approach is a cultural attribute of Canadians or if we simply have not
....................yet had direct experience with the depth of perfidy occurring in the US; or we may simply
....................be more myopic and not seeing what is taking place.
..............................However, most thoughtful Canadians are appalled at the export of our resources
....................to fuel the US military machine; at the ever-increasing possibility of 'deep integration' with
....................the US, politically and economically; at the Conservatives' butt-kissing the Bush admin-
....................istration; at the shift in our military and foreign affairs from peace keeping to armed battle;
....................and so on and on.
..............................But I don't think we're yet as concerned as you about implanted chips, cameras on
....................street corners, and a massive shift to fascist thought-control. As I said, perhaps we should
....................be: but at this point what you and EL write about—and the quality of abject rage and fear
....................that pervades your writing—seems to us somewhat alien and therefore off-putting and
....................even, well, un-Canadian.
..........As I said, let's come back in a minute to the "abject rage and fear" that Tillotson and I express in our writing—is it justified? based in reality? paranoid, for god's sake?—but right now, on to Collier's second observed difference between Canada and the U.S.
2)
..........Collier's second observation is that "Canada has had a much longer, richer, and bolder tradition of leftwing politics than the US" has had, "or at least it has been more visible and prominent." While in the U.S., he says, "socialist and communist movements have always been underground movements and deeply hidden from public perception" ("not to mention roundly vilified," he adds), there's much greater leftist visibility in Canada and a much greater spread across the political spectrum than there is in the pasteurized and homogenized U.S. "left."
............................... . . After all, even our Tories would make many of your Democrats cringe in fear. I can
....................only imagine (with some pleasure) how your Republicans view our Liberals, NDP, and Greens.
....................And at least two Communist Parties in Canada have run candidates in ridings throughout the
....................country for years, so there is some public familiarity with the entire spectrum of the left.
..........In the U.S., on the other hand, what I've been calling "the left gatekeepers," says Collier, aren't really "left," but are "only vaguely to the left of the Democrats, not really on the left very much at all." He goes further with distinction number two between Canada and the U.S.:
..............................So we are not surprised at all when EL excoriates "the left gatekeepers". . . In
....................a nation [like Canada] with a broad and consistent history of leftwing movements, these
....................so-called gatekeepers would not be keeping any gates at all: they would not have been
....................elevated into that position from among a variety of left-liberal commentators. And we
....................would not have had overweening expectations of them: in other words, why does EL
....................feel he needs to whack Amy Goodman unless she has somehow failed to live up to
....................his expectations and there is no one else to fill the gap she apparently has left?
..........And there's a real crux: What left does remain in the U.S.? As with Collier's other points, more in a moment.
3)
..........Collier's third "difference" derives straight from his second one. Here it is in its entirety:
..............................As a result, his [EL's] attacks on specific Gatekeepers and their work simply be-
....................cause they do not (yet) agree with him on the source of the 9/11 tragedy appear to us
....................excessive, unnecessary, even, well, irrelevant. The Gatekeepers would not have to be
....................found wanting if in fact there was a sufficient tradition of public leftwing analysis avail-
....................able. In effect, it is not Amy Goodman that EL should attack but the whole tradition in the
....................US of a narrow —very narrow—range of permissible political writing and thinking. That
....................kind of attack, using Goodman and others as examples, would to me make a good deal
....................more sense. But without that context, these intense, querulous attacks on Goodman
....................(and others) sound nasty, bullying, lacking in empathy, and ultimately pointless. Worse,
....................they betray what Americans have always been guilty of: bad manners. Here in Canada
....................it is perhaps more important to be polite than to establish turf and prove that one is right.
....................And that's not, I think, a poor measure of one's civilization.
..........I'm not about to say that it's a pleasure to be identified as "querulous," let alone the rest—"nasty, bullying, lacking in empathy, and ultimately pointless." And yet. And yet, and yet—well, as before, let's return in a moment. Maybe we'll even return to that wonderfully nostalgic, old-world-esque—yes, even comforting—remark that being polite "[is] not, I think, a poor measure of one's civilization."
..........After all, it's a towering question: Can politeness conceivably survive in a nation so egregiously depraved as the U.S. has come to be? (Note: Hints as to some answers to that question might be found in A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.)
4)
..........Penultimately, Collier suggests that attacking members of a group that's really one's own political group—especially if the attacks entail hair-splitting—will do only harm, not good, will not only aid the enemy but result in a generally ruined situation that I'll let Collier himself define:
..............................Ultimately, if one is not committed to building alliances and common fronts with others
....................with whom you agree mostly, but perhaps not completely, then to what role does that lead
....................one? My experience has been that anything but a commitment to solidarity is counterrevol-
....................utionary and plays right into the hands of the ruling class. Sure, we have to overlook the
....................bad-hair days and the sometimes stupid comments or mental blocks in the people we work
....................with; but at least they're working with us and not against us. The only other option is to be-
....................come a Puritan, someone who knows he/she is one of the Select and that most others are
....................not. It behooves the Select to ensure that his/her group is never ever contaminated by one
....................of the Fallen or Corrupt—and that means most other people: few are worthy, few are
....................chosen. So the Select find that much of what they do is to administer tests to others (who
....................may or may not be applicants to join the Selects' group) to determine their worthiness:
....................tests of fire and water; tests of what is said and written; tests of behaviour and action.
....................So much time is spent testing others in order to determine worthiness that the original
....................goal of revolution or a New Jerusalem or whatever recedes beyond the horizon.
..............................And the problem with such rites of purification is that they drive away potential
....................adherents and eventually isolate the individual or what is left of the original group. This
....................of course is the history of Protestant religion after the Reformation, right? And I've seen
....................this repeated in leftwing politics: the US Communist Party has fragmented and shivered
....................into warring splinters over and over, each splinter thinking it possesses "the word,"
....................but having gotten so refined and diminished that no one takes it seriously at all. And
....................what's the point of being right, if no one listens to you?
..........Once more, I won't say it's pleasant hearing such words—especially when one's self is both occasion for and target of them. Still, let's stick with the plan and postpone response until we've reached the last of Collier's five points.
..........And so:
5)
..............................And where does [all of] this lead? A solitary cell of paranoid suspicion, perhaps.
....................No one can pass all the tests; no one can be righteous enough; no one can be trusted.
....................I think I would rather make mistakes in my trust and correct them when my errors have
....................been made clear to me than worry constantly that my friends, neighbours, associates,
....................and colleagues may all be unreliable, may in fact be stooges or, even worse, counter-
....................intelligence agents recruited by the fascists. My comments on EL's FFT essays are in-
....................tended as an antidote to that frightening drift into solipsism.
..........So ends the letter from Canada, built with craft and care such that its most withering suggestion is also its final one—that I, in the view of my long and dear friend Richard Collier, by taking the approach that I've lately been taking and by setting my bearings in the way I've lately set them, may in fact be heading straight toward the solitude of inconsequentiality, the wasteland of paranoia, and the silent madhouse of solipsism.
..........Needless to say, I don't have the least desire to go to any of those three dread states or places, all of them perfectly real, highly dangerous, and absolutely destructive. Like anybody else, I hope to elude them through any effort I can muster. And yet at the same time I see no way that I can lower the risk of falling prey to them merely by changing the subject I've chosen to write about or by changing the method of my approach to it.
..........And the reason is that if I made those changes I wouldn't achieve any of the good ends that Richard Collier describes, and I wouldn't help bring about any of the salutary conditions that, by the sound of it, he's himself fortunate enough to enjoy. Who ever knew just how far apart—worlds apart—Canada and the U.S. really were? No, here in the 21st Century U.S., if I were to make those changes in subject and manner, it wouldn't mean I'd thereby be better able to help—and help to cohere—a benevolent political, social, or cultural movement of a kind that I'm now supposedly just helping to splinter. It wouldn't mean that I could join in a fruitful debate whose effect over time would be, however gradually, to bring about the good and isolate the bad.
..........Changing my subject or method would bring about neither of those good things nor any imaginable similar good things. No, it would not. And as for the meaning of such change, it would be purely and only this: That I had given up, had thrown in the towel, and had decided to go over to the enemy; that I had decided to join the liars and the corporations; that I had decided to put my own oar in the water in order to pull together, with all of them, fraudulent to the end, in helping speed the demise of the republic and in erecting the Orwellian state that A Nation Gone Blind tried and tried and tried, most probably in vain, to find ways to avoid.
..........It would, in short, be the worst possible thing I could do.
2
RESPONSE TO A LETTER FROM CANADA
..........If you've been sticking with me through these ongoing "Food for Thought" pieces, you may remember the FFT called "Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth" (dated 4/12/07, it was the one with a ten-question "quiz" about lies in the New York Times' lead article for 4/2/07— "Al Qaeda Is Seen as Restoring Leadership").
..........And if you've been sticking with me, you may remember that this is the way that FFT ended:
....................And so we close for now. Next time, I'll take a look at still some more gatekeeping,
....................including a return glance at Amy Goodman, in an attempt to figure out what the real
....................difference might actually be between people and institutions.
....................Is Frank Rich a person, or is he an institution? Ditto, I hardly need say, for Ariana
....................Huffington, Matthew Rothschild, Nicholas Lemann, Christopher Hayes, Alexander
....................Cockburn, usw.) If you'd like to get a head start on this question—and it's a ques-
....................tion, I believe, of matters having to do with nothing less than life and death—I urge
....................you to take a look at this short video of Webster Tarpley speaking at the 9/11
....................Truth Conference at Irvine, California, this past March 11.
..........So. In the hope of linking together that "Food for Thought" with this one, I'd like to suggest that you do now what I suggested back then, and (if you haven't already) take a look at that Webster Tarpley video from March 11 with an eye (or an ear) open to what Tarpley says there about "people" as opposed to "institutions."
..........If that's all right with you, let's meet back here in a couple of minutes.
·
..........And so hello again. Poor Webster Tarpley, forced to hurry and rush that way, harried by the pressures of video-time, those hounds to his fox making him an easy laughing stock to his schoolyard-bully enemies—thanks to his bug-eyes, hasty speech, his heated and pressing earnestness so utterly unforgiven by the "cool" medium of tape, screen, or TV...........I was told by someone that he'd been promised an hour and was given fifteen minutes. It could be true, I don't know. As is, looks like he got eight minutes and thirty-nine seconds. I think he did a top job, given such constraint. His eight minutes are mighty full ones, whether his eyes bulge or not.
..........But those minutes go fast, few or many, and so I re-played and scribbled fast in order to get down verbatim some of what Tarpley said: I'll cite the result here, and that way we can agree on Tarpley's words as backdrop for the ensuing "Response to a Letter from Canada."
..........1)
..........On 9/11:
..........That the "official" 9/11 story is a "racist, fascist, militarist myth, odious in the eyes of anybody with any self respect or integrity."
..........2)
..........On the 2006 elections:
..........That the 9/11 Truth movement had a "decisive impact" on the elections, especially after C-Span covered ("at least four times") the Alex Jones 9/11 Truth conference of June 2006 in Los Angeles.
..........That the Democrats (with their "parliamentary cretinism") didn't so much win, but rather fell into office "by default" as voters turned in revulsion from Republicans. The vote more anti-Republican than pro-Democratic.
..........3)
..........On popular rejection of the "official" 9/11 story:
..........That "we've got polling that says that about 80% of the U.S. population does not believe the myth. There are about 15 or 16% who do believe the myth, 3% don't know, [so] that means 80% who are either strongly rejecting the myth or who are skeptical in a somewhat more diluted way. Now, that means the American people have understood. The problem you now have is the institutions. Academia, the media, the political parties, publishing. . . "
..........That "the institutions are still under an oligarchical consensus that the way to organize this society is through the global war on terror. . ."
..........
.......... There you are-a reminder of why I said, back in "Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth" that "Next time, I'll take a look at still some more gatekeeping, including a return glance at Amy Goodman, in an attempt to figure out what the real difference might actually be between people and institutions."
..........Let me also suggest a riddle that might possibly make itself useful as we get to work. Here: ARE PEOPLE MADE UP OF INSTITUTIONS? OR ARE INSTITUTIONS MADE UP OF PEOPLE?
..........Warning: Don't forget that I'm an old English prof who used to ask his students either/or questions that didn't have either/or answers—an old prof who did that for the purpose of testing whether his students were thinking for themselves or were just sitting there in a passive and unthinking obeisance to the all-knowing prof.
..........Now let's get to work and respond to my old friend and other old English prof, Richard Collier, of Canada. I'll use the same numbering system as before.
·
1)
..........Collier's comments on:
.........."The degree of fear, anger, and trepidation" felt by "intelligent people in the U.S.," their "sense of horror" at the "depth of perfidy" politically and culturally there, their concerns "about implanted chips, cameras on street corners, and a massive shift to fascist thought-control."
..........My response:
..........Yes, it's true—both that there are great "fear, anger, and trepidation" and that there's great justification for them. U.S. history from the start has had a particular and built-in tension between individual or popular freedoms and the state's need for order—hence the Bill of Rights itself and many other aspects of the original Constitution, not to mention certain of the later amendments to it. Never before now, though, has that tension been more favorable to the state side of the contest over the individual. This is true in part simply to advances in the means and in the ease of surveillance, monitoring, and control. And it's true, also, to an extremely important and deeply threatening degree, because the nation is now "governed" by the most secretive, malicious, and dishonest administration in its entire history. The enormous lie of 9/11 itself, a murderous and fraudulent "attack" both planned and perpetrated by that same quisling "government," is almost doubtless the most extreme example right now of the determination, ruthlessness, murderous extremity of the willingness of "government" to attack and control its own people. That the American population has not yet responded—and may never do so—by unseating that anti-population "government" and replacing it with an authentic one is also in itself a screamingly obvious indication of the extent to which control of the population has already been successfully achieved. What's actually happening in the U.S. now, or what's failing to happen in the U.S. now, out-Orwells Orwell. Here's an excerpt from A Nation Gone Blind that makes this very lamentation.
..........Other examples? Well, U.S. passports issued since October 2006 have RFID chips in them. The U.S. military "has taken another step forward with its research into 'non-lethal crowd control systems'" that will work by means of "ultra bright strobes" mounted on drone aircraft so that "modulation of high-intensity light. . . will cause immobilisation to all those within the beam." And then, of course, Halliburton is coming right along with its stateside concentration camps (to the tune of a "a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security," presumably so there'll be someplace to stash us all after millions of us have been zapped to the ground by the sky-borne strobe-lights, or after we've been summarily declared "disloyal" or "enemy collaborators," as this piece by Nat Perry, originally written for AlterNet, suggests.
..........Yesterday was Monday (April 14), and, as usual, I began my day and week with coffee and the New York Times—my pack a day, not of cigarettes, but of the omissions, distortions, falsehoods—and froth of varying densities—that in these Bushiscti days constitute all the news that's fit to print, or at least fit for the likes of us soon-to-be chipped and DNA-ed ones.
..........So, was there any news? Well, the front page's left lead told me that "Governor" and 9/11 Liar and Truth Suppressor Eliot Spitzer "Wants DNA Sampling in Most Crimes." Patrick McGeehan wrote that
..............................Gov. Eliot Spitzer is proposing a major expansion of New York's database of DNA
....................samples to include people convicted of most crimes, while making it easier for prisoners
....................to use DNA to try to establish their innocence.
..........That's the good part. Then comes this:
..............................Currently, New York State collects DNA from those convicted
....................of about half of all crimes, typically the most serious.
..............................The governor's proposal would order DNA taken from those
....................found guilty of any misdemeanour, including minor drug offenses, harass-
....................ment or unauthorized use of a credit card, according to a draft of his
....................bill. It would not cover offenses considered violations, like disorderly
....................conduct.
..........I wonder how soon, if the bill were passed, before "any misdemeanour"—think even of that—would come, in the routine doings of cops' and attorneys' daily world, also to include "violations"? And then to include just existing?
..........Let it go. In the middle of the front page was a little smidgen of truth packed in among the many lies of omission, the truth-particle being deemed fit enough for us chippers-to-be, while no way would we or could we ever be given the whole bale of hay. Subject? The liar, hypocrite, and 9/11 insider Rudolph W. Giuliani. The byline? Anthony DePalma. The headline? "Ground Zero Illnesses Cloud Giuliani's Legacy." And that's it for the smidgen of actual news—and that's also the only good part, since anything that stands as an obstacle between Giuliani and electoral office (or office of any kind) has got to be a good thing. If you want the truth about Giuliani's cheap, unconscionable, plainly despicable "victories" over Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley back in his heavyweight days as prosecutor, just give a quick read to Paul Craig Robert's piece of May 11, "Giuliani Would Make a Worse President than Bush."
..........Okay, so the mayor's early career was built on deceit, ambition, and the perfect absence of scruples. How about his later—or current—career? Well, as anyone who's read even a few of the best books about 9/11 well knows, Giuliani was either an original (most probable) insider in the treasonous 9/11 operation or was quickly made one on the day itself of the fake attacks. DePalma is correct in his lead paragraph, as also in his second:
....................Anyone who watched Rudolph W. Giuliani preside over ground zero in the days after
....................9/11 glimpsed elements of his strength: decisiveness, determination, self-confidence.
....................Those qualities were also on display over the months he directed the cleanup of the
....................collapsed World Trade Center. But today, with evidence that thousands of people
....................who worked at ground zero have become sick, many regard Mr. Giuliani's triumph
....................of leadership as having come with a human cost.
..........At exactly this point, however, as we move into paragraph three, omissions and half truths—lies—take over to the exclusion of everything else. Again, anyone who knows even a beginner's amount of 9/11 basics will be rightly enraged at what the Times here "mentions" without in the least way so much as hinting at the really meaningful truth, the true truth, that lies beneath it:
....................An examination of Mr. Giuliani's handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during
....................his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence
....................of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of
....................those who worked in the trade center's ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense
....................of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the
....................attack.
..........The 9/11 beginner no less than the advanced 9/11 scholar knows full well that Giuliani was breaking the law, was tampering with evidence (was destroying evidence) at a crime scene, was shoving out the other "agencies" because he'd been ordered to by his real bosses, and, beyond all, that he gave not even a momentary tinker's damn about "human remains" or "loss of life" but only and solely about destroying evidence that would have proven that the collapse of all three towers occurred by controlled demolition, most probably by thermite reactions.
..........And so new meaning—well, that is, the truth—peers through the Times's boiler-plate code-and-cover-up lie-and-deceit-writing in phrases like "seized control" and "might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution. . ." Speed was the only real concern that Giuliani had—speed being essential for criminal reasons. Both criminality and immorality—giving not a damn about human well-being—are an underlying part of sentences like the one saying "that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators." While now—today, in 2007—" Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing," and while now, today, "health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars," back then, in the aftermath of the fake attacks, here's what Giuliani told workers:
....................[The] administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face
....................penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts
....................and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave
....................flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they
....................privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.
..........Giuliani, then, has all the perfect elements of character for a model presidential candidate in the age of Bush, Cheney, and "post 9/11 America." Let's name them: criminality, inhumanity, immorality, traitorousness, greed, ambition, and, like icing on the cake, a total absence of human fellow feeling, sympathy, or empathy.
·
..........What about the question, though, a person might ask—have I drifted from the question? It was only the first of Collier's five questions—or five observations—the one about the "sense of horror" that people like me and Tillotson feel in reaction to the "depth of perfidy" in the U.S., both politically and culturally, a sense of perfidy and horror that accounts for "the quality of abject rage and fear that pervades [our] writing."..........That one. And, no, it doesn't seem to me that I've drifted from it. It's just that a person sees, in getting closer to it, just how wide and deep and broad it really is and how huge the territory it covers. But, yes, in a word, I'm scared positively shitless. I'm positively brimming, seething, and boiling with abject rage and fear. And I'll say something further: I cannot understand, I am fully and utterly incapable of imagining, conceiving, or understanding how it can possibly be that not everyone else in the entire nation with intelligence, feeling, or human curiosity in excess of that possessed by the average zucchini cannot also be scared positively shitless, cannot also be absolutely brimming, seething, and boiling with abject rage and fear.
..........In fact, with the making of that point, I realize that's probably time to end this particular FFT installment—saving the four remaining Collier-questions for the next time around.
..........So let's do that. After all, I started with Monday's pack of lies, and here it is already Thursday.
..........Yesterday—Wednesday—I finally got around to reading a piece that I'd printed off from Chossudovsky's Global Research site, one of the many internet pieces I print off regularly in order to read them on train, bus, or over coffee. Many such pieces—unlike the near-totality of lies in, say, the New York Times' coverage of the true state of our illness and captivity in this ever more endangered and endangering nation—are most remarkable pieces of writing indeed. Manuel Valenzuela's recent "A Nation in Silent Anger," for example, the Paul Craig Roberts piece on Giuliani that I mentioned earlier, or Chris Hedges' "No One Should Be Above the Law, a speech given in Washington on April 25 calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Hedges is worth pausing with for a moment, for time enough, at least, to look at this, a sentence expressing truth, dignity, passion, patriotism, and logic—a sentence like none you'll read in the New York Times during this poor, sick, depraved, Frank Richian lifetime:
....................And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we do not
....................begin the process of impeachment, we will be complicit in the codification of a new
....................world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.
..........Is anyone mad or quixotic enough to hold their breath until the day when Frank Rich or Matthew Rothschild or Ariana Huffington or Nicholas Lemann or Christopher Hayes or Alexander Cockburn admit to their complicity in the crimes of our murdering and traitorous leaders, both international and domestic?
..........But let's carry that thought over to Donna J. Thorne and her welcome piece dated April 21, "War and the Police State: Complicity of the American People."
..........Thorne has set herself the task of examining what can possibly explain "the scourge of apathy in American society today" at the very time that what's needed is anything but apathy. I'd be happy to recommend A Nation Gone Blind to her, since that book would certainly provide her with some help in her awful task. But for the moment let's take a look at her own way of framing the matter:
....................In this era of perpetual warfare [she writes], escalating domestic tyranny, government-
....................sanctioned torture, and a Nazi-like pursuit of Middle-East domination, one would expect,
....................at the very least, an audible outcry from the People who proclaim resolute devotion to
....................the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Yet for the most part, Mainstream America con-
....................tinues to assume a posture of apathy, bitterness, or eery silence.
..........Indeed so—and in many a case, let's add superiority, smug condescension, and sneering contempt—as with not a few of those very writers, editors, and journalism school heads cited in the list just above.
..........The question defies credibility, and Thorne, as if herself incredulous, repeats it:
....................And now, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent establishment of Homeland
....................Security, previously rigid supporters of civil rights quietly tolerate the piecemeal
....................deconstruction of the U.S. Constitution under the pretext of protection, and to their
....................own peril, disregard increasingly strident warnings and signs of a growing and
....................imminent police state. Clearly, Mainstream America has surrendered to the sub-
....................jugation of a power-crazed, despotic administration whose control continues to
....................expand exponentially with each passing rumor of imminent peril.
..........I, too, find myself simply unable to believe. Those who are true passive consumers, those who don't think, don't read, don't care about anything that reaches beyond the immediate living of life—the "scourge of apathy" among these many millions I can force myself to "understand." But what about people who think—even people whose jobs and careers consist of thinking and require thought? What about people like those—intelligent, educated, intellectual people who still remain apathetic, uninterested in the disaster gathering all around, and above, and below us? What makes them such obvious failures as citizens, as defenders of freedom, opponents of tyranny, murder, high crimes, and treason? What makes them such staunch, superior, fatuous, self-assured deniers of what really happened on 911?
..........If 9/11—the easily-proven and cold-blooded committing of a massive crime calling obviously for prosecution—if 9/11 remains, as I myself am convinced it does, the key to restoring our Constitution, outlawing torture, reclaiming habeas corpus, withdrawing from depraved flirtation with nuclear holocaust, and averting our rapid descent into a totalitarian police state: Well, if all this is true, the great question becomes overwhelming important and overwhelming demanding of an answer: HOW AND WHY COULD ANY MATURE HUMAN BEING IN GOOD CONSCIENCE, WITH A WORKING AND SENTIENT MIND, AND WITH SYMPATHY FOR HIS OR HER FELLOW CREATURES CONTINUE ADAMANTLY TO DENY THIS SALIENT TRUTH?
..........Donna J. Thorne touches on A Nation Gone Blind at one point in her own asking of virtually this same question:
....................Why, when confronted with a black-and-white record of autocratic offenses, are
....................so many sensible Americans ignoring and even endorsing the current administra-
....................tion as it openly paves a tyrannical road to hell? Are we so deluded by rhetoric
....................and weapons-grade propaganda, that we are no longer able to distinguish truth
....................from fiction, thereby allowing, if not abetting our own enslavement ?
..........The touching-point with ANGB lies in Thorne's asking whether we are "no longer able to distinguish truth from fiction," a question that A Nation Gone Blind takes very, very seriously indeed and one that it answers, however unhappily, in what I guess you would call the affirmative, meaning that no, we cannot tell the difference between truth and fiction any longer.
..........Blind already, then, Americans were blinded further by being monstrously and cold-bloodedly scared out of their wits not only on and by 9/11 proper but over the span of every passing day ever since.
..........Thorne:
....................On September 11, 2001, corporate media and the government elite launched an
....................aggressive political and media campaign upon and against the American people.
....................With Madison-Avenue expertise, purveyors of fear heightened our perception of
....................imminent threat by inundating the airwaves with continual, repetitive, easily-
....................learned sound-bytes, words brimming with emotionally-charged meaning, ". . .
....................Bin Laden, Taliban, Axis of Evil, Saddam Hussein, Terror-Threat, Terrorist. . . "
....................with just enough intensity to successfully persuade the American people to
....................procure security at any cost.
·
..........I know perfectly well that the ending of my own book a year ago, A Nation Gone Blind, was neither optimistic nor encouraging about the consciousness or emotional-intellectual health of the American public—and yet even I, the same author and the same person now that I was then, feel compelled to ask whether my own book can't somehow be judged wrong, whether there can't be some possibility of a learning curve among Americans across the land, some small bit of an awakening? We're dead as doornails and our nation is doomed, our society destined for another totalitarian junk heap of history, unless we can forge a way to hold the Bush administration accountable for what it did on and before, and has done since, 9/11. This has got to be done by impeachment, trial, and conviction in the Senate, first, and then, once Bush and Cheney at the barest minimum are out of office, by trial in open court, conviction there, and sentencing. Obviously, many, many, many others over time must also be prosecuted—tried, convicted, and sentenced as their guilt and complicity are proven and shown—but the initial removal and then subsequent trial of Bush and Cheney alone will at least begin a reclamation of the U.S. from the elite class of criminals, profiteers, traitors, and murderers who now have the land and its future entirely within their own grip...........Without at the very least that first and all-important step, we will be, as a nation, doomed to the totalitarian (whether or not it will look "nice" in its surface); we will be, as an artistic culture, doomed to a condition even worse than the mindless, non-intellectual, lifeless mediocrity we have already declined to; and, as a people, we will be doomed to serve as a model for the entire globe and all of its people, a model of absolute, unmitigated, unforgivable waste; of craven loss; of abject and inexplicable failure; of utter lack of responsibility; of unfathomable and gluttonous ignorance; of fatuousness beyond measure; and of having allowed, through that same fatuity and gross, complacent, stupidity and ignorance, the sheer collapse and total loss of a once-robust experiment in the possibility for achievement in human inventiveness, dignity, freedom, welfare, and expression.
..........When I finished writing A Nation Gone Blind in late spring of 2004, I'd just begun my own 9/11 studies, having been with them for under a year. Crossing the Rubicon hadn't yet been published, so that even though I knew well enough in outline what had happened on the day of bloody treason and high crimes, I still had little grasp either of the enormity of the plot or of the extraordinary detail of its execution—for example, precisely the way in which military jet fighters were kept either on the ground or at least well out of the flight paths so that the big jetliners could find their targets undisturbed. That kind of detail—and much, much more—would be made clear only after mid-2004 by the towering and unflagging scholarship of the very great Mike Ruppert, while the deep history of the attacks—beginning with the U.S.-aided (by CIA backing of Osama bin Laden and building of his new Al Qaeda, and also by the opportunistic use of the mujahideen) 1989 expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan and reaching on up through the failed 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center, through the African embassy bombings, through the event that visited the U.S.S. Cole, leading finally to 9/11—this deep history was made accessible to me only in 2005 through the also-monumental and utterly dedicated scholarship of the great Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed in his The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism, a history prefigured also in his less-thorough but highly important 2002 publication of The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked on September 11, 2001.
..........There have followed, since Ruppert and Ahmed, numerous other truly excellent 9/11 truth-revealing books of impeccable and powerfully dedicated scholarship—like the works of David Ray Griffin, Michel Chossudovsky, Webster G. Tarpley, and Barrie Zwicker that I named and talked about in this Food for Thought piece back in January 2007.
..........Absolutely incontrovertible proof, however, of the sheer enormity and virtual seamlessness of the evil, traitorous, morally despicable plot in America against the exposure of 9/11 truth can be seen in the simple fact that none of these invaluable books has ever been reviewed in any mainstream print medium anywhere in the entire United States.
·
..........And that, then, is what our "free press" has come to. That is how the institutions mentioned by Tarpley in the video you watched earlier—that is how American institutions—press, academia, publishing, media, government—that is how the "great" institutions stand behind, how they honor, and how they support and serve the first amendment to the Constitution. That is what leads to the writing of a book like A Nation Gone Blind, and that is what leads a man like the eminent and unimpeachable Paul Craig Roberts, with his long and deep experience both of and within those institutions themselves, to declare unequivocally that "Debate is dead in America"—and to add that "Democracy cannot succeed when there is no debate."..........We need to end for this time around. But let me ask a small number of questions first. Let me ask that you read these paragraphs by Paul Craig Roberts, and then ask yourself, like I do, how can people not accept 9/11 truth? and how can they not want to act radically on the basis of that knowledge?
....................The United States is undergoing a coup against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil
....................liberties, and democracy itself. The "liberal press" has been co-opted. As everyone must
....................know by now, the New York Times has totally failed its First Amendment obligations,
....................allowing Judith Miller to make war propaganda for the Bush administration, suppressing
....................for an entire year the news that the Bush administration was illegally spying on American
....................citizens, and denying coverage to Al Gore's speech that challenged the criminal deeds
....................of the Bush administration.
....................The TV networks mimic Fox News' faux patriotism. Anyone who depends on print, TV,
....................or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved
....................a de facto Ministry of Propaganda.
....................The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and
....................the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous
....................affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in head-
....................lines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such dis-
....................closures can stand up for the country.
..........Remember Amy Goodman? Remember Frank Rich? Remember Matthew Rothschild? I've got two questions about them, and about all the other "left" or "progressive" gatekeepers: 1) Are they willing to stand up for their country, our country? 2) And, are they institutions, or are they people?
..........I would like now to make a comment about an essential difference between institutions and people. And I'd like to do it, first, by turning back again to Donna J. Thorne, who, like Paul Craig Roberts, points out that "the war-mongering, power-hungry elite" that now holds power in and over the U.S., that this elite knows full well that "only the bravest of the brave will dare risk ostracism for a noble cause."
..........And what does that mean? It means, very simply, that all people—all people—can be divided into one of two categories—those on the one side who are cowards, and those on the one side who are courageous.
..........And what does this have to do with the difference between institutions and people?
..........Let me make a small but important adjustment in that question. Let me ask: And what does this have to do with the difference between institutions and honorable people?
..........And now we're ready, at last, to return to our riddle from some ways back: Are People Made Up Of Institutions? Or Are Institutions Made Up Of People?
..........The riddle, of course, is on the surface of it unanswerable, and that's why I posed it. Still, though unanswerable unless first quite highly qualified, the "riddle" as is nevertheless allows us to make a small handful of extremely useful and empirically-based observations that are of enormous—that are of vital—relevance to this discussion.
..........1)
..........Institutions, in an imaginary pendulum-swing between cowardice and courage, tend usually—perhaps even always and perhaps inevitably-toward cowardice rather than toward courage.
..........2)
..........Now, a corollary. Institutions, by their very nature, are incapable of courage. This is because institutions are things, and things are not capable of courage. Only people are capable of courage.
..........3)
..........Therefore, the only force that could ever or can ever lead an institution to behave with courage rather than with cowardice is or must be the force of those people who work and dwell inside the institution.
..........Manuel Valenzuela, a patriotic and dedicated truth-teller with great courage, makes it clear in "A Nation in Silent Anger" that any person who "hides" inside an institution and thereby chooses cowardice over courage is nevertheless just as guilty of cowardice as he or she would be outside of the institution, since no one, if of sound body and mind, is or can be anything other—inside or outside an instution—than a free agent, responsible for each and every of his or her own choices or actions.
..........Valenzuela is also a compassionate and understanding writer—though he nevertheless casts his lot with truth and courage, not with cowardice and lying. As you read this paragraph, remember who Valenzuela is writing about. He's writing about you and me, yes, the "little people." But he's also writing about the big people, the influential people, the people to whom others look for guidance and right-thinking. He's writing about Frank Rich, about Matthew Rothschild, about Ariana Huffington, about Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia Journalism School, about Christopher Hayes in The Nation, about Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch, about Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, and, of course, about many, many others.
..........Read the Valenzuela passages below. Then answer this quiz question: Consider the people cited in the paragraph above this one and then determine whether each of them is or is not a coward.
..........Valenzuela begins by asking "why [it is] the corporatist media fails time and again to expose truth." From there, he goes on as follows:
....................The answer is not farfetched, nor is it hard to contemplate. The corporatist media
....................are not a bunch of idiots, or buffoons, though they are a bunch of opportunists ad-
....................dicted to power and greed. Most know exactly what the bloggers and the Internet
....................investigators have found [but] they simply ignore it, for this truth will get you burned.
....................Most know 9/11 was an inside job designed to become the New Pearl Harbor,
....................opening up the globe to American hegemony, perpetually enriching the military-indust-
....................rial-energy complex. They understand geostrategic decision-making and the hunger
....................for profiteering through endless war. They understand the system is hungry, its ap-
....................petite needing to be satisfied through the blood of Arabs and the flow of oil. To these
....................individuals in the corporatist media, it is better to make a deal with the devil than to
....................starve at the hand of truth. They understand that during war the state and those in
....................power offer the corporatist media either the chance to be with those in power or
....................against the state. Most chose to be on the side of the state, knowing that censor-
....................ship must increase, dissent must disappear, debate must cease to exist and the
....................views and policies of those holding the reins of power must be given credence
....................above all. You are either with the state or against it, becoming a stenographer, a
....................propagandist and an abettor of lies and deceptions or an enemy of those in power,
....................your life ruined, your career in shambles, your reputation destroyed.
..........Those are words written by an understanding and perceptive human being. And they are strong words, citing, for example, what may be a terrible double bind: as the cost of being courageous and speaking truth, one may well become "an enemy of those in power, your life ruined, your career in shambles, your reputation destroyed." Yet, on the other hand, if one remains inside the lying institution, and lies for the institution, the result is or may—or even should—be the same: you will become an enemy of those out of power, those hoping to save the republic, save freedom, save dignity—with the result that, in the eyes of those holding truth as their greatest value, "your life [will be] ruined, your career in shambles, your reputation destroyed."
..........Frightening, yes, even terrifying. So what choice is to be made? Valenzuela is unbudging in his insistence that every person's choice must be on the side of the human, not on the side of the institutional—that it must be on the side of courage and truth, not of cowardice and lies. If it isn't, a person dies a moral death, and the nation dies alongside.
..........Valenzuela:
.................... In times of war, the corporatist media is the Ministry of Truth and the Department
....................of Propaganda fused together, lest the people be made aware what is done in
....................their name, lest we see the horrors and destruction our leaders unleash upon
....................humankind. Mobilized and conscripted to unleash psychological warfare against
....................the people of America, the corporatist media thus becomes a most important
....................weapon the state possesses, a way to hide the criminality and mass murder of
....................the state, and our leaders.
..........That is, the journalist who fails to speak the truth not only dies a moral death but becomes immediately and inevitably nothing less than a tool of the surrounding "institution." And still, in Valenzuela's judgment—and mine—the morally failed "journalist" remains a free agent, and, as such, remains responsible for what he or she has done:
....................For the many pseudo-journalists not banished or fired or censored for standing up to
....................principle, those that remain and sell their souls to war and death and destruction, be-
....................coming manipulators, liars and propagandists, the silence and deceptions and lies they
....................promulgate make them complicit in the worst crimes being committed by the state and
....................its leaders. Betraying the foundations and principles of their profession, these little
....................Goering's become complicit in the same crimes they help cover up as well as those
....................they help create.
....................In hiding truth and altering reality, in remaining silent and indifferent to the decimation
....................of America's rights and freedoms and liberties, to the death of 3,000 of her sons and
....................daughters, to the creation of an illegal and immoral war based on lies and deceptions,
....................the destruction of the foundations of America itself, they have become treasonous
....................criminals to the principles and virtues of America, betraying 300 million Americans in
....................the process. In a more perfect world, they would be held accountable for their crimes.
..........We close. "In a more perfect world," says Valenzuela, "they would be held accountable for their crimes."
..........Indeed. I remember Webster Tarpley speaking about Rudolph Giuliani, the traitor and criminal who betrayed the police, betrayed the firemen, betrayed the workers and employees in WTC 1 and WTC 2, betrayed the families of them all, and then hastened in a way shameful beyond any measure of shame to destroy the evidence of what he had done.
..........Coward or courageous? Person or institution?
..........Tarpley asks:
.................... "Why did you destroy the crime scene? Why aren't you in JAIL, Mr. Mayor?"
..........Giuliani. Just now the leading contender, it is said, among the gray flock of Republican candidates for president. Coward, criminal, traitor. Kept out of prison, kept safe and free by the cowards and quislings who sneak and rustle and hide—openly—everywhere among us, the blind.
..................................................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..................................................................................................................................—May 18, 2007
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