As the government and media pivot from pandemic hysteria to war hysteria, I thought I would take some time to put together a reminder/educational piece for readers about the veracity of what they hear in the media and coming out of their leaders’ mouths. Americans would be wise to pay very close attention to what they are being told, then think long and hard about who benefits from whatever that may be. Regardless of your politics, or where you fall on the approved left-right spectrum we are permitted to publicly debate, one thing is guaranteed; you are being lied to.
When modern Americans gave up participating in local and national civic life, and exchanged it for professional sports fanaticism, comic book cinema, celebrity worship, the X-Box, and social media drivel, they also opened the way to subjugation by a supremely powerful elite who now control every aspect of our lives, including what we are permitted to say and even think.
You may think you are free, but you may only choose a Republican or Democrat to wield this unchecked power. Americans would rather blindly accept propaganda as news than accept reality; it’s ugly and uncomfortable. President Kennedy alluded to this when he said, “Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Americans believe that the freedom of the press will protect them from dangerous and criminal behavior by our government and its corporate patrons, but MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News are not in the business of truth; they aren’t even in true competition with one another. These corporate news outlets are permitted to exist so as to give the populace the illusion of being informed, while engendering suspicion, fear, and hatred, so as to turn us against one another – and they are doing a fabulous job. The people you vote into office have virtually no say in how the government is run or what the laws they vote on will look like. If you actually believe that the Republican or Democrat political parties, Fox News, or CNN have any interest in ensuring your well-being or your access to truth, you may as well stop reading because there is no hope for you. Yes, there are individuals in these organizations with noble motives, but they are kept within strict parameters or they don’t last long.
The Republicrats and big media are interested in the same two things that have obsessed mankind since the dawn of civilization; power and money. America’s current congress is composed of a majority of millionaires; as of 2019, the richest 50 millionaires in congress were composed of 20 Democrats and 30 Republicans. One of the fastest ways to become wealthy in the United States is to get elected to congress. You’ll never see any of these fabulously wealthy elites on Capitol Hill send their sons to war or offer to pony up one penny of their own money to pay for their hairbrained, wasteful, and corrupt schemes – they want your money for that. Whether it’s a grant to pay for a bus station named after themselves in their district, or a $5 trillion war; we proletarians and our offspring can pay for it. But all this is dark story of corruption that could fill volumes; just remember the motivation.
Back to the information you and I are spoon-fed by our news provider of choice. Let’s start with recent history; first the September 11 attacks shook our nation to its foundations, followed immediately by the never-solved anthrax attacks. This provided the power elite with a free hand to eliminate most all of our privacy rights, conduct warrantless searches, illegal surveillance, kidnappings, torture, preemptive war and imbued the government with near limitless powers to detain, imprison, disappear, and even assassinate American citizens without trial. Meanwhile the populace cowered under the theater of fear put on for us by the media; dutifully parroting the government’s line; color-coded alerts, nebulous “credible threats” and “increased chatter,” TSA strip searches, arrests of deadly, hidden “sleeper cells” with no evidence ever made available to the public. So effective was the government/media propaganda that a majority of Americans rated terrorism as the number one issue facing the country, when the actual chance of being killed in a terror attack was far less than being killed by a piece of household furniture falling on them.
According to the government and the corporate media, there was one single reason for the attacks; the terrorists “hate us because of our freedom.” That’s it. We were told to believe that a bunch of Saudi Muslim religious fanatics on the other side of world got so angry about Americans running around having a great time doing what they pleased, that they came here to kill themselves while carrying out acts of mass murder. Never a word was uttered that Bin Laden’s group was founded in response to; 1- the massive American military presence in Saudi Arabia that never ended after the Desert Storm war in 1991 and, 2 – American government support of Middle Eastern dictators that routinely torture and otherwise tyrannize their citizens; most notably, the hopelessly corrupt, decadent, and murderous Saudi royal family. Neither were we told that Bin Laden and his compatriots were products of the United States’ government’s meddling in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, or that the entire modern Muslim extremist movement began with the overthrow of our government’s BFF in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, in 1979. The CIA engineered the 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically elected premier of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, and installed the Shah, who then spent decades as our staunch ally while simultaneously terrorizing and torturing his population.
After 9/11, the media and government went all-in on blind, rabid patriotism; “Support the Troops!” was the war cry as defense contractors, private mercenary companies, and scam artists made trillions from two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that accomplished exactly nothing of benefit to the American population, and shattered the lives of tens of thousands of well-intentioned and courageous military service members. To say nothing of the three quarters of a million civilians killed in the so-called war on terror. Meanwhile, Americans, the vast majority of whom do not even know someone in the military, cheered wildly and right on cue, to carefully choreographed surprise soldier homecomings on baseball fields and to marching soldiers with flags and rifles while warplanes screeched overhead at football stadiums.
None of these facts, of course, justify the murders carried out by Muslim terrorists over the past 50 years. They do demonstrate however, the ways in which the government, in concert with a complicit media, systematically hide the fact that its actions and relentless spread of its military empire, engender resentment and hatred around the globe; and not just in the Muslim world.
Next, enter Donald Trump. Whatever you think of him, this pugnacious, often petty, and egotistic outsider in the Republican Party was a grave danger to both Republicans and Democrats and their financiers. The invisible people who truly run the country viewed him as an existential threat to their continued positions of wealth and power. Among his worst sins, Trump made overtures to end the highly lucrative, 70-year-long (and counting) Korean War. Worse still for the military-industrial-congressional complex, he disrupted the NATO alliance by suggesting that the American taxpayers should not be paying to provide military defense for wealthy nations on the other side of the world. As such, monumental efforts were made to remove him from office, using, among other things, phony “dossiers” and false stories of Russian tampering with election results.
Next came Covid-19; the greatest gift the gods bestowed upon America’s authoritarians since 9/11. Our overlords learned that Americans were far more compliant and eager to display their obedience to any master than they could have hoped. Even after nearly two years of the obviously overblown and media-driven hysteria over a virus with a survival rate well over 99 percent (for anyone with a sense of curiosity and an internet connection), most Americans enthusiastically embraced virtual martial law and the destruction of their nation’s social fabric and economy - except large corporations, which continued business-as-usual - along with indefinite house arrest, compulsory facial concealment, forced vaccinations, and censorship of any dissenting medical opinion.
As the Covid-19 narrative began to unravel a few months ago and midterm elections loomed on the horizon, the media dutifully started phasing out pandemic stories and dropping the breadcrumbs that would lead Americas away from Covid, and prepare them for the next crisis du jour. With nearly perfect timing, Vladimir Putin, the former Soviet spy turned Russian dictator, launched an invasion of Ukraine. Despite the seriousness and historic implications of the issue, the corporate media entertainment shows – touted as “news” – have not uttered a single substantive word regarding precisely why Putin is invading or what his rationale may be.
Putin’s motivation may be linked to the aggressive expansion of the NATO alliance, which was created a lifetime ago to counter a threat from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; a country that ceased to exist thirty years ago. Rather than disband the alliance after the fall of the Soviet state and the reduction of Russia to a third-rate power – albeit one with nuclear weapons – the United States instead led its NATO allies to expand, by enlisting the eastern European nations formerly under the control of the Soviets; bringing American troops, tanks, bombers, and missiles right up to Russia’s doorstep. Before yet another seven countries opted into NATO in 2004, Putin had repeatedly expressed a desire for closer ties to the west and even to join NATO. Maybe the dictator is concerned about the plan to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance, ushering in more American military bases, troops, and weapons to the Russian frontier. As recently as last June, in a communiqué issued after a NATO summit meeting, the alliance stated unequivocally that Ukraine, “…will become a member of the alliance…” (Paragraph 69). Remember Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and his seizure of two breakaway provinces of that nation? That invasion came two months after another NATO summit where membership for Georgia – on Russia’s southern border - was discussed.
Perhaps Putin is thinking of the American and British invasion of Russia following the end of World War I. Possibly he, along with many of his countrymen, are uneasy about the American military empire pressing against their western borders after the loss of 30 million citizens at the hands of European invaders in the world wars of the twentieth century. This is to say nothing of the one million dead from the French invasion of 1812. The government-media cabal has decided that you don’t need to know any part of the backstory to any event, whether it’s terror attacks, flu viruses, or wars. Today, “Dictator Putin Bad” is all you need to know and all you will be permitted to hear – and of course, “Support the Troops!”
Make no mistake, any unprovoked military attack against a sovereign country is, of course, a violation of international law and morally wrong (DISCLAIMER: Unless such action is undertaken by the United States against countries including but not limited to; Mexico, Nicaragua, Columbia, Venezuela, Haiti, Panama, Dominican Republic,Philippines, Kingdom of Hawaii, China, Serbia, Russia, Libya, Syria, Iraq). Vladimir Putin is indeed, to paraphrase former President Trump, a “Bad hombre,” but there is far more to the story.
As we move into this next, never ending, cycle of crisis, remember that you are going to be lied to. Britain’s MI-6 intelligence agency ran a massive fake news and propaganda operation in the United States to get America to fight its second world war for them. President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, worked tirelessly to provoke the Japanese into attacking our naval forces in Hawaii[1], so that they could enter World War II and take over the British Empire. No one in the media then or since has ever questioned why our military was occupying Hawaii and the Philippine Islands on the other side of the world in the first place.
During the first world war – it was called the Great War before we realized we’d have to start numbering them – the British also ran a sophisticated propaganda operation in the United States, eventually pulling our country into the greatest bloodbath in human history up to that time. They were aided by President Woodrow Wilson - who saw the war as an opportunity to fulfill his destiny as savior of mankind, by congress - which worked on behalf of American bankers to ensure that they were repaid the billions loaned to the allied powers, the munitions makers - who were reaping towering profits from selling weapons, and a press that fed Americans a steady diet of lies[2]. The public was told the Lusitania sinking was a heinous crime (Which did not, by the way, trigger our entry into the war – that came two years later). Americans were also never informed that the Lusitania was illegally transporting a massive cargo of war material and was armed with artillery. Americans were not told that British ships were illegally flying flags of neutral nations – including the US – thereby making a mockery and an impossibility for German U-boats to obey rules on the seas pertaining to non-belligerent nations. Neither were Americans informed that the British had cut the transatlantic cable between the US and Germany, so that their government could not effectively communicate with the outside world. Most shamefully, Americans were not informed of Britain’s illegal starvation blockade against Germany, which was killing tens of thousands of German women and children. The blockade, which continued for eight months after the armistice ended hostilities, starved to death more than 800,000 civilian non-combatants[3]. Winston Churchill – then First Lord of the Admiralty – stated it plainly, “The British blockade…avowedly sought to starve the whole population - men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound - into submission.” It was this blockade, and the resulting domestic political pressure placed on the German leaders that forced them to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 after they had previously acceded to American demands for an end to the practice. None of this information was provided to Americans by their free press.
In 1898, America launched a war to seize the waning Spanish Empire’s territories of Puerto Rico, Cuba, The Philippines, and Guam after a US warship, the USS Maine, exploded in Havana harbor and the government falsely blamed it on the Spanish. “Remember the Maine!” was the war cry then. The press faithfully ginned up public support for colonial conquest by writing false stories of Spanish aggression and atrocities against civilians. As newspaper mogul William Randolph Hurst told his photographer in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” If you think anything has changed in the last 124 years, you are deluding yourself.
When our government wanted to begin the process of expanding its military empire into the Middle East, former CIA asset Saddam Hussein of Iraq, provided a pretext by invading the tiny emirate of Kuwait. In order to get Americans, who were largely indifferent to the event, behind launching a war to eject the Iraqi military, the Kuwaiti government financed a massive, multi-million dollar, carefully orchestrated public relations campaign directed at the American Public by the New York marketing firm, Hill & Knowlton. Public hearings were arranged with the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, whose Democrat and Republican co-chairs were close associates of Hill & Knowlton. The two politicians were recipients of campaign contributions from the firm and their caucus’ offices were housed in the Hill & Knowlton headquarters building in Washington, DC at a discounted rent.
Some of you may remember the tearful testimony of a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as “Nayirah,” about brutish Iraqi soldiers stealing incubators from a Kuwait hospital and tossing dozens of infants on the floor to die a slow death. This horrific tale was used dozens of times in speeches in congress and by President Bush the First to justify American military intervention. Turns out that Miss Nayriah was reading a Hill & Knowlton-prepared script and that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States. Her testimony was a complete fabrication– what we used to call a “lie.”
Remember Saddam Hussein’s attempts to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapon and his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? Remember that was the reason we needed to launch a preemptive war and invade and occupy Iraq with absolutely no plan about what to do afterwards, or even so much as a Google search about the ethnic and religious divisions in the country? Remember how the entire pretext for that war turned out to be a lie?
Remember when President Lyndon Johnson told the American people we needed to send hundreds of thousands of American teenagers to be maimed and killed in the Vietnamese civil war because our navy ships were “attacked” on August 4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember how it turns out no such attack ever happened? Remember how the Pentagon Papers were later leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post and they proved that Johnson knew the war was unwinnable and he and his minions systematically lied to both the American public and congress for years, and then the government tried to send the leaker to prison for revealing the truth?
Remember when the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chomping at the bit to invade and occupy Castro’s Cuba (after a dry spell of nearly ten years without a war), submitted a proposal to President Kennedy to create a false pretext for an invasion? Titled “Operation Northwoods,” the heads of America’s military proposed to carry out terrorist attacks against American citizens in the United States and blame it on Cuba’s government to get the American people to support a war. They proposed blowing up an American navy ship to recreate the Battleship Maine pretext of 66 years earlier, hijacking and crashing American airliners, assassinating Cuban immigrants, faking attacks on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and more. You most likely don’t remember because it’s never been talked about in the media or taught in schools. You can read the actual memorandum with attached proposals here.
Your government – composed of the politicians you elect to make you feel as though you have a say in things, along with the unseen operatives whom you did not elect, lies to you in the interest of obtaining power and money for themselves and their patrons. These lies, distortions, and half-truths are gleefully fed to you by their media courtiers - this is an unfortunate fact of life. So, as you watch the empty 3-minute snippets of entertainment news, or the heart-rending personal stories about the hardships of a Yuri or a Katerina, just think carefully about what the government, media, and the people who control them want you to think – especially if an American ship explodes somewhere or you hear about Russian soldiers throwing babies on the floor…
[1]In just one example,Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his personal diary that FDR "brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday [December 1], for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. (See Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries, Nov. 25, 1941, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives)
[2]Meyer, G. J. The World Remade: America in World War I. Bantam, an Imprint of Random House, a Division of Penguin Random House, 2017.
[3]The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice, 1918–1919 Bane, S.L., 1942, Stanford University Press
When modern Americans gave up participating in local and national civic life, and exchanged it for professional sports fanaticism, comic book cinema, celebrity worship, the X-Box, and social media drivel, they also opened the way to subjugation by a supremely powerful elite who now control every aspect of our lives, including what we are permitted to say and even think.
You may think you are free, but you may only choose a Republican or Democrat to wield this unchecked power. Americans would rather blindly accept propaganda as news than accept reality; it’s ugly and uncomfortable. President Kennedy alluded to this when he said, “Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Americans believe that the freedom of the press will protect them from dangerous and criminal behavior by our government and its corporate patrons, but MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News are not in the business of truth; they aren’t even in true competition with one another. These corporate news outlets are permitted to exist so as to give the populace the illusion of being informed, while engendering suspicion, fear, and hatred, so as to turn us against one another – and they are doing a fabulous job. The people you vote into office have virtually no say in how the government is run or what the laws they vote on will look like. If you actually believe that the Republican or Democrat political parties, Fox News, or CNN have any interest in ensuring your well-being or your access to truth, you may as well stop reading because there is no hope for you. Yes, there are individuals in these organizations with noble motives, but they are kept within strict parameters or they don’t last long.
The Republicrats and big media are interested in the same two things that have obsessed mankind since the dawn of civilization; power and money. America’s current congress is composed of a majority of millionaires; as of 2019, the richest 50 millionaires in congress were composed of 20 Democrats and 30 Republicans. One of the fastest ways to become wealthy in the United States is to get elected to congress. You’ll never see any of these fabulously wealthy elites on Capitol Hill send their sons to war or offer to pony up one penny of their own money to pay for their hairbrained, wasteful, and corrupt schemes – they want your money for that. Whether it’s a grant to pay for a bus station named after themselves in their district, or a $5 trillion war; we proletarians and our offspring can pay for it. But all this is dark story of corruption that could fill volumes; just remember the motivation.
Back to the information you and I are spoon-fed by our news provider of choice. Let’s start with recent history; first the September 11 attacks shook our nation to its foundations, followed immediately by the never-solved anthrax attacks. This provided the power elite with a free hand to eliminate most all of our privacy rights, conduct warrantless searches, illegal surveillance, kidnappings, torture, preemptive war and imbued the government with near limitless powers to detain, imprison, disappear, and even assassinate American citizens without trial. Meanwhile the populace cowered under the theater of fear put on for us by the media; dutifully parroting the government’s line; color-coded alerts, nebulous “credible threats” and “increased chatter,” TSA strip searches, arrests of deadly, hidden “sleeper cells” with no evidence ever made available to the public. So effective was the government/media propaganda that a majority of Americans rated terrorism as the number one issue facing the country, when the actual chance of being killed in a terror attack was far less than being killed by a piece of household furniture falling on them.
According to the government and the corporate media, there was one single reason for the attacks; the terrorists “hate us because of our freedom.” That’s it. We were told to believe that a bunch of Saudi Muslim religious fanatics on the other side of world got so angry about Americans running around having a great time doing what they pleased, that they came here to kill themselves while carrying out acts of mass murder. Never a word was uttered that Bin Laden’s group was founded in response to; 1- the massive American military presence in Saudi Arabia that never ended after the Desert Storm war in 1991 and, 2 – American government support of Middle Eastern dictators that routinely torture and otherwise tyrannize their citizens; most notably, the hopelessly corrupt, decadent, and murderous Saudi royal family. Neither were we told that Bin Laden and his compatriots were products of the United States’ government’s meddling in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, or that the entire modern Muslim extremist movement began with the overthrow of our government’s BFF in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, in 1979. The CIA engineered the 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically elected premier of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, and installed the Shah, who then spent decades as our staunch ally while simultaneously terrorizing and torturing his population.
After 9/11, the media and government went all-in on blind, rabid patriotism; “Support the Troops!” was the war cry as defense contractors, private mercenary companies, and scam artists made trillions from two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that accomplished exactly nothing of benefit to the American population, and shattered the lives of tens of thousands of well-intentioned and courageous military service members. To say nothing of the three quarters of a million civilians killed in the so-called war on terror. Meanwhile, Americans, the vast majority of whom do not even know someone in the military, cheered wildly and right on cue, to carefully choreographed surprise soldier homecomings on baseball fields and to marching soldiers with flags and rifles while warplanes screeched overhead at football stadiums.
None of these facts, of course, justify the murders carried out by Muslim terrorists over the past 50 years. They do demonstrate however, the ways in which the government, in concert with a complicit media, systematically hide the fact that its actions and relentless spread of its military empire, engender resentment and hatred around the globe; and not just in the Muslim world.
Next, enter Donald Trump. Whatever you think of him, this pugnacious, often petty, and egotistic outsider in the Republican Party was a grave danger to both Republicans and Democrats and their financiers. The invisible people who truly run the country viewed him as an existential threat to their continued positions of wealth and power. Among his worst sins, Trump made overtures to end the highly lucrative, 70-year-long (and counting) Korean War. Worse still for the military-industrial-congressional complex, he disrupted the NATO alliance by suggesting that the American taxpayers should not be paying to provide military defense for wealthy nations on the other side of the world. As such, monumental efforts were made to remove him from office, using, among other things, phony “dossiers” and false stories of Russian tampering with election results.
Next came Covid-19; the greatest gift the gods bestowed upon America’s authoritarians since 9/11. Our overlords learned that Americans were far more compliant and eager to display their obedience to any master than they could have hoped. Even after nearly two years of the obviously overblown and media-driven hysteria over a virus with a survival rate well over 99 percent (for anyone with a sense of curiosity and an internet connection), most Americans enthusiastically embraced virtual martial law and the destruction of their nation’s social fabric and economy - except large corporations, which continued business-as-usual - along with indefinite house arrest, compulsory facial concealment, forced vaccinations, and censorship of any dissenting medical opinion.
As the Covid-19 narrative began to unravel a few months ago and midterm elections loomed on the horizon, the media dutifully started phasing out pandemic stories and dropping the breadcrumbs that would lead Americas away from Covid, and prepare them for the next crisis du jour. With nearly perfect timing, Vladimir Putin, the former Soviet spy turned Russian dictator, launched an invasion of Ukraine. Despite the seriousness and historic implications of the issue, the corporate media entertainment shows – touted as “news” – have not uttered a single substantive word regarding precisely why Putin is invading or what his rationale may be.
Putin’s motivation may be linked to the aggressive expansion of the NATO alliance, which was created a lifetime ago to counter a threat from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; a country that ceased to exist thirty years ago. Rather than disband the alliance after the fall of the Soviet state and the reduction of Russia to a third-rate power – albeit one with nuclear weapons – the United States instead led its NATO allies to expand, by enlisting the eastern European nations formerly under the control of the Soviets; bringing American troops, tanks, bombers, and missiles right up to Russia’s doorstep. Before yet another seven countries opted into NATO in 2004, Putin had repeatedly expressed a desire for closer ties to the west and even to join NATO. Maybe the dictator is concerned about the plan to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance, ushering in more American military bases, troops, and weapons to the Russian frontier. As recently as last June, in a communiqué issued after a NATO summit meeting, the alliance stated unequivocally that Ukraine, “…will become a member of the alliance…” (Paragraph 69). Remember Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and his seizure of two breakaway provinces of that nation? That invasion came two months after another NATO summit where membership for Georgia – on Russia’s southern border - was discussed.
Perhaps Putin is thinking of the American and British invasion of Russia following the end of World War I. Possibly he, along with many of his countrymen, are uneasy about the American military empire pressing against their western borders after the loss of 30 million citizens at the hands of European invaders in the world wars of the twentieth century. This is to say nothing of the one million dead from the French invasion of 1812. The government-media cabal has decided that you don’t need to know any part of the backstory to any event, whether it’s terror attacks, flu viruses, or wars. Today, “Dictator Putin Bad” is all you need to know and all you will be permitted to hear – and of course, “Support the Troops!”
Make no mistake, any unprovoked military attack against a sovereign country is, of course, a violation of international law and morally wrong (DISCLAIMER: Unless such action is undertaken by the United States against countries including but not limited to; Mexico, Nicaragua, Columbia, Venezuela, Haiti, Panama, Dominican Republic,Philippines, Kingdom of Hawaii, China, Serbia, Russia, Libya, Syria, Iraq). Vladimir Putin is indeed, to paraphrase former President Trump, a “Bad hombre,” but there is far more to the story.
As we move into this next, never ending, cycle of crisis, remember that you are going to be lied to. Britain’s MI-6 intelligence agency ran a massive fake news and propaganda operation in the United States to get America to fight its second world war for them. President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, worked tirelessly to provoke the Japanese into attacking our naval forces in Hawaii[1], so that they could enter World War II and take over the British Empire. No one in the media then or since has ever questioned why our military was occupying Hawaii and the Philippine Islands on the other side of the world in the first place.
During the first world war – it was called the Great War before we realized we’d have to start numbering them – the British also ran a sophisticated propaganda operation in the United States, eventually pulling our country into the greatest bloodbath in human history up to that time. They were aided by President Woodrow Wilson - who saw the war as an opportunity to fulfill his destiny as savior of mankind, by congress - which worked on behalf of American bankers to ensure that they were repaid the billions loaned to the allied powers, the munitions makers - who were reaping towering profits from selling weapons, and a press that fed Americans a steady diet of lies[2]. The public was told the Lusitania sinking was a heinous crime (Which did not, by the way, trigger our entry into the war – that came two years later). Americans were also never informed that the Lusitania was illegally transporting a massive cargo of war material and was armed with artillery. Americans were not told that British ships were illegally flying flags of neutral nations – including the US – thereby making a mockery and an impossibility for German U-boats to obey rules on the seas pertaining to non-belligerent nations. Neither were Americans informed that the British had cut the transatlantic cable between the US and Germany, so that their government could not effectively communicate with the outside world. Most shamefully, Americans were not informed of Britain’s illegal starvation blockade against Germany, which was killing tens of thousands of German women and children. The blockade, which continued for eight months after the armistice ended hostilities, starved to death more than 800,000 civilian non-combatants[3]. Winston Churchill – then First Lord of the Admiralty – stated it plainly, “The British blockade…avowedly sought to starve the whole population - men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound - into submission.” It was this blockade, and the resulting domestic political pressure placed on the German leaders that forced them to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 after they had previously acceded to American demands for an end to the practice. None of this information was provided to Americans by their free press.
In 1898, America launched a war to seize the waning Spanish Empire’s territories of Puerto Rico, Cuba, The Philippines, and Guam after a US warship, the USS Maine, exploded in Havana harbor and the government falsely blamed it on the Spanish. “Remember the Maine!” was the war cry then. The press faithfully ginned up public support for colonial conquest by writing false stories of Spanish aggression and atrocities against civilians. As newspaper mogul William Randolph Hurst told his photographer in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” If you think anything has changed in the last 124 years, you are deluding yourself.
When our government wanted to begin the process of expanding its military empire into the Middle East, former CIA asset Saddam Hussein of Iraq, provided a pretext by invading the tiny emirate of Kuwait. In order to get Americans, who were largely indifferent to the event, behind launching a war to eject the Iraqi military, the Kuwaiti government financed a massive, multi-million dollar, carefully orchestrated public relations campaign directed at the American Public by the New York marketing firm, Hill & Knowlton. Public hearings were arranged with the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, whose Democrat and Republican co-chairs were close associates of Hill & Knowlton. The two politicians were recipients of campaign contributions from the firm and their caucus’ offices were housed in the Hill & Knowlton headquarters building in Washington, DC at a discounted rent.
Some of you may remember the tearful testimony of a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as “Nayirah,” about brutish Iraqi soldiers stealing incubators from a Kuwait hospital and tossing dozens of infants on the floor to die a slow death. This horrific tale was used dozens of times in speeches in congress and by President Bush the First to justify American military intervention. Turns out that Miss Nayriah was reading a Hill & Knowlton-prepared script and that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States. Her testimony was a complete fabrication– what we used to call a “lie.”
Remember Saddam Hussein’s attempts to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapon and his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? Remember that was the reason we needed to launch a preemptive war and invade and occupy Iraq with absolutely no plan about what to do afterwards, or even so much as a Google search about the ethnic and religious divisions in the country? Remember how the entire pretext for that war turned out to be a lie?
Remember when President Lyndon Johnson told the American people we needed to send hundreds of thousands of American teenagers to be maimed and killed in the Vietnamese civil war because our navy ships were “attacked” on August 4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember how it turns out no such attack ever happened? Remember how the Pentagon Papers were later leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post and they proved that Johnson knew the war was unwinnable and he and his minions systematically lied to both the American public and congress for years, and then the government tried to send the leaker to prison for revealing the truth?
Remember when the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chomping at the bit to invade and occupy Castro’s Cuba (after a dry spell of nearly ten years without a war), submitted a proposal to President Kennedy to create a false pretext for an invasion? Titled “Operation Northwoods,” the heads of America’s military proposed to carry out terrorist attacks against American citizens in the United States and blame it on Cuba’s government to get the American people to support a war. They proposed blowing up an American navy ship to recreate the Battleship Maine pretext of 66 years earlier, hijacking and crashing American airliners, assassinating Cuban immigrants, faking attacks on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and more. You most likely don’t remember because it’s never been talked about in the media or taught in schools. You can read the actual memorandum with attached proposals here.
Your government – composed of the politicians you elect to make you feel as though you have a say in things, along with the unseen operatives whom you did not elect, lies to you in the interest of obtaining power and money for themselves and their patrons. These lies, distortions, and half-truths are gleefully fed to you by their media courtiers - this is an unfortunate fact of life. So, as you watch the empty 3-minute snippets of entertainment news, or the heart-rending personal stories about the hardships of a Yuri or a Katerina, just think carefully about what the government, media, and the people who control them want you to think – especially if an American ship explodes somewhere or you hear about Russian soldiers throwing babies on the floor…
[1]In just one example,Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his personal diary that FDR "brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday [December 1], for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. (See Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries, Nov. 25, 1941, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives)
[2]Meyer, G. J. The World Remade: America in World War I. Bantam, an Imprint of Random House, a Division of Penguin Random House, 2017.
[3]The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice, 1918–1919 Bane, S.L., 1942, Stanford University Press
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