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Blood Diamonds:
the Inside Story
An amazing
expose by T.R. Naylor: How the "Blood" or "Conflict
Diamonds" Myth peddled by NGOs Helped a Vicious Mining Company
Shore Up Its Monopoly, Made a Pile of Money for A Washington
Post Reporter and Leonardo di Caprio, Served As A Propaganda
Myth in the "War on Terror" and had Nothing to Do With
Osama Bin Laden. Pinochet
is gone, and the world is a cleaner place. JoAnn Wypijewski recalls
1988 in Santiago, when Chile lost its fear. And yes, here they
are in charge of Congress again, ready to facilitate a troop
hike in Iraq. Alexander
Cockburn re-introduces an old acquaintance: the Democrats--Party
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Now
In her historical mystery, "The
Daughter of Time," Josephine Tey (a pen name of Elizabeth
MacKintosh), has Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, while confined
to his hospital bed, solve the 15th century murder of the two
York princes in the Tower of London. The princes were murdered
by Henry VII, and the crime was blamed on Richard III in order
to justify the upstart Tudor's violent seizure of the English
throne.
Tey makes the point that if
a 20th century mystery writer can detect the truth about a 15th
century murder, historians have no excuse to persist in writing
in school textbooks that Richard murdered his nephews. British
historians remained loyal to the Tudor propaganda long after
the Tudors were no longer around to be feared or served.
At the beginning of the scientific
era, men had the hope that the ability to discover truth would
free mankind from superstition, dogma, and the service of power.
The belief in truth was powerful. Truth would deliver justice
and bring an end to status-based privileges and the falsehoods
propagated by privilege. The faith in truth was short-lived.
Today propaganda is everywhere in the ascendency.
Every week another apologist
for President Bush compares "Bush's fight for Iraqi freedom"
to Abraham Lincoln's "fight to free the slaves." The
American civil war was not fought to "free the slaves,"
as Thomas DiLorenzo and other scholars have thoroughly documented,
any more than the purpose of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq
was to "bring freedom to Iraqis." The freedom excuse
was invented after it became impossible to maintain the fictions
about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's
connections to Osama bin Laden. Bush has yet to tell the real
reason he invaded Iraq.
In the US today, demonization
and propaganda substitute for facts and analysis. Professors
and journalists are quick to lend their names and voices to the
untruths that rule our lives. Just as Hitler's foreign policy
was based in propaganda, so is Bush's and Blair's.
The success of propaganda enhances
government's illusion that it has a monopoly on truth. It is
the monopoly on truth that gives the Bush regime the right to
define the "Iran problem," the "Syria problem,"
the "Lebanon problem," and the "Korea problem"
and to apply coercion in place of understanding and negotiation.
Secure in its possession of
truth, the Bush administration refuses to talk to the enemies
it has manufactured. It will only fight them.
When scholars, such as John
Walt and Stephen Mearsheimer, or President Jimmy Carter who
has tried harder than anyone else to achieve Arab-Israeli peace,
point out that Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians is a cause
of Middle East turmoil, they are immediately denounced as anti-semites.
Columnists and academics who know nothing about the Middle East
or its troubles nevertheless know what they are supposed to say
whenever anyone mentions Israel in any critical context. And
they have no compunction about saying it, the truth be damned.
Without commitment to truth,
science, justice, and debate falter and disappear.
The belief in truth is fading
from our society. It is unclear that scientists themselves any
longer believe in truth or the ability to discover it.
The discovery of truth is no
longer the purpose of our criminal justice system. Once prosecutors
believed that it was better for ten guilty men to go free than
for one innocent person to be wrongfully convicted. Today prosecutors
believe in high conviction rates to justify their budgets and
re-election.
In the past police solved crimes.
Today they round up suspects and pressure them.
There was no debate in Nazi
Germany and Stalinist Russia, and none today in the US. Many
Americans, who imagine themselves to be conservatives even though
they have never read, nor could they identify, a conservative
writer, equate truth-telling with hatred of America. They are
of Bush's mindset: "you are with us or against us."
Bush supporters respond to factual articles about Iraq and the
rending of the US Constitution by suggesting that as the writer
hates America so much, he should move to Cuba or China.
In America today each faction's
"truths" are defined by the faction's dogma or ideology.
Each faction bans factual analysis that it doesn't want to hear.
This is as true within the universities as it is at political
rallies. The old liberal notion that "we shall follow the
truth wherever it may lead" has long departed from America.
Think tanks reflect the views of the donors. Studies are no longer
independent of their financing. In America, truth has become
partisan.
All societies have elements
of myth, untruths that nevertheless serve to unite a people.
But many myths serve as camouflage for evil. One of the greatest
myths is that "GIs have died for our freedom." GIs
have died for American empire, for the American elite's commitment
to England, and for the military-industrial complex's profits.
Some may have died in Korea for the freedom of South Koreans,
and some may have died trying to save South Vietnamese from the
North Vietnamese communists. But it is hogwash that GIs died
for our freedom.
There was no prospect of North
Korea attacking America in the 1950s or Vietnam attacking America
in the 1960s and none today. The Nazis were defeated by Russia
before US troops landed in Europe. The US never faced any threat
of invasion from Germany, Italy, or Japan.
America's wars have created
hysteria that endanger our freedom. Abraham Lincoln shut down
the freedom of the press and arrested editors and state legislators.
Woodrow Wilson arrested war critics. Franklin Roosevelt interred
American citizens of Japanese descent. George W. Bush has destroyed
most of the Bill of Rights. In 2006 Congress appropriated funds
for building concentration camps in the US.
Recently, Newt Gingrich, the
former Speaker of the House, said that freedom of speech is inconsistent
with "the war on terror" If it takes a police state
to fight terror, the country is lost even if Muslim terrorists
are defeated. Americans have far more to fear from a homeland
police state than from terrorists.
The vast majority of the world's
terrorists are the recent creations of Bush's invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq and of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and brutality toward
the Palestinians. Bush is simultaneously creating terrorists
and a police state. It serves no one but the police to make their
power unaccountable.
On December 26 Jeff Cohen explained
on Truthout how war propaganda took over TV news and demonized
everyone who spoke the truth about Iraq, while pushing war fever
to a frenzy. Fox "News" was the worst with its ranks
of generals and colonels who sold their integrity for dollars
and TV exposure. One of Fox's loudest voices for war was a retired
general who sat on the board of a military contractor.
When the Clinton administration
allowed the media concentration in the 1990s, the independence
of the American media was destroyed. Today there are a few large
conglomerates whose values depend on broadcast licenses from
the government. The conglomerates are run by corporate executives
who are not journalists and whose eyes are on advertising revenues.
They publish and broadcast what is safe. These conglomerates
will take no risks in behalf of free speech or truth.
The challenges that America
faces are not terrorism and oil supply. The challenges that we
face are the police state that Bush has created and the disrespect
for truth that is endemic in government, the universities, and
the media. The US has entered a dark age of dogmas and unaccountable
power.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the
Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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