“March 26, 2017
“Dear Comrades,
“Spring has sprung and thankfully we’ve had some rain. And
that’s the good bit. For the rest? Western societies are completely out of
whack and getting even wackier in a world of lies and shadows.
“Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times that ‘the mendacity
of politics in 2016 has indeed been astonishing both in its brazenness and its
effectiveness…lying floats freely, with no pretense to be anchored in
evidence’. O’Toole specifically named Facebook and Google, now directly
involved in publishing fake news stories and neo-Nazi propaganda. ‘Trump is not
Hitler’, he said, ‘although there’s a kind of theatrical fascism about his
performance. He’s more Duce than Fuehrer, moving swiftly from impulsiveness to
caution, generosity to cruelty, like other tinpot right-wing politicians’.
“Our young and not-so-young are drowning in the unfiltered
sewer of the internet and social media, the addiction of our age. To an extent
never witnessed before, large numbers of people believe things that are simply
not true.
“‘Terrorism’ is on everyone’s agenda. Dictators and far
right leaders are now fighting ‘the terrorist menace’ without looking at the
underlying causes of war and poverty, especially when it comes to the
Palestinians who’ve been living among other people’s lies for more than sixty
years. Tariq Ali speaks for most of us when he bemoans the state of the world
and the ‘apologetics of a servile media’.
“Not servile enough, apparently. Last December President
Obama created a new $160 million bureaucracy called ‘Countering Foreign
Propaganda and Disinformation Act’ to combat anything that challenges
Washington’s version of what passes for reality. The new law mandates a range
of agencies ‘to lead, synchronize, and co-ordinate efforts of the Federal
Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and
non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining US
national security interests.’ And aren’t we lucky! The law directs that its
‘expertise’ should be ‘co-ordinated’ with allied nations, and we’re about as
‘allied’ as you can get.
“The law was initiated as the demonization of Vladimir Putin
was gathering steam amid allegations of ‘Russian hacking’ around the US
election and mainstream’s media furor over ‘fake news’. A marriage between
McCarthyism and Orwellianism. Ironic, seeing that Washington and its agencies
are the world’s biggest pushers of propaganda and out-right lies.
“We’re also reading a lot of nonsense about bugging and
wiretapping as if presidents and prime ministers direct the work of secret
agencies, when they haven’t got a clue about who they are and even less about
what they do.
“But not content with creating the ‘counter foreign
propaganda’ outfit, in 2011 Obama set up a new spy agency, the National
Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), at a cost of $1.4 billion plus. Its
massive HQ sits on a heavily protected military base south of Washington DC
with the principle function of analyzing billions of images and miles of video
captured by drones in the Middle East and spy satellites circling the globe.
Inevitably, technology used to spy on ‘enemies’ abroad will be turned on its
own citizenry.
“The US has been growing increasingly bonkers for a very
long time. I first became aware of its lunacy in the 1960s when we were assailed
with the bull that if we allowed Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh to unify
Vietnam, `the dominoes would fall and world revolution would engulf us’. The
lunacy reached a high point when we were told that US troops had ‘destroyed a
village in order to save it’. But nothing was learned as we saw the same hubris
and arrogance repeated again and again unleashing violence and destruction on
an industrial scale.
“In 2015 the Russians came in to clear up the mess
Washington has made in the Middle East, for which they have never been
forgiven. And now left-leaning newspapers like The Guardian are
‘rehabilitating’ prime war criminals George W. Bush and Tony Blair. The 43rd
president ‘should be applauded’, it wrote, with not a word about the millions
of victims or the way ‘their war’ gave rise directly to the evolution of the
Islamic State (IS).
“After the Iraq disaster - too drenched in blood for even
the propagandists to deny - Obama’s job was to reassert the myth of US
benevolence, that with him at the helm the US was under new compassionate
management which we know as total bull.
“History has shown that any country not sufficiently
defended is liable to be destroyed by Washington. Wherever there is easy prey,
it will do so with the utmost barbarity, adding insult to injury by calling it
‘nation building’.
“Cuba resisted and inspired the world. Its brave Revolution
took place just a few miles from the shores of the United States. It sent
teachers and doctors all around the world, spreading optimism, solidarity and
kindness, while its revolutionaries fought against colonialism in Congo, Angola
and Namibia. Obama attempted to weaken the resolve of the Cuban people and
failed miserably.
“Lewis Lapham is well-known for his articles in Harpers
Magazine and has put some of them in a book, Age of Folly: America Abandons its
Democracy (2016), although it’s questionable that America ever had a democracy
in the first place.
“Lapham writes on 9/11 and never actually says it was an
inside job, but cleverly describes how the orchestra and chorus were
miraculously ready to play the required tune, just as somehow the US military
was ready and able to invade Afghanistan less than one month after 9/11. In
other words, the invasion force was assembled waiting for the pretext, and the
orchestra and chorus were ready and waiting for the 9/11 conductor’s baton…”
“Joan Coxsedge”
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