War and Propaganda
Faith and Lies, or Reason?
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Saturday, 07 January 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
Definition of “derangement”—Such a lack of intelligence as prevents anyone from understanding the nature and consequences of their acts.
Definition of “mania fanatica”—Insanity characterized by a morbid state of religious feeling.
US Lies
I have no doubt that John Kerry will win the election. Whether he will become president is another matter.Hunter S Thompson, Interview, October 2004
The year was 1898. Randolf Hearst, the US newspaper baron, had a cable from Frederick Remington the The New York Journal’s man in Havana. The situation in the country was normal and there would be no war, so he was anxious to come home. Hearst cabled back that he should stay where he was. His job was to supply photographs, and he, Hearst, would supply the war. The Spanish-American war soon broke out, and quickly Spanish colonial rule gave way to US colonial rule in Cuba. How do rich media tycoons supply wars? They do it by lying, and spreading their lies by their control of the media!
The US battleship, Maine, anchored in Havana blew up with many injuries, and the loss of the lives of 258 American able seamen. By good fortune, most of the officers were ashore! Both the Spanish and American governments investigated the explosion, and were unable to find any unequivocal evidence to explain the blast as the work of Spanish agents or Cuban terrorists, but, even so, the US blamed the Spaniards. The real suspects were the Americans themselves. Several Americans pressure groups had motives for a war with Spain. Right wing imperialist-minded Americans, the US press, some corporations and some of the military were anxious for war for their own selfish reasons. The US had 50 million dollars invested in Cuba’s sugar plantations.
Modern investigations concluded that a boiler exploded. The boiler that blew up was most likely “made in the USA”, but the truth leaked out much later. Unless the boiler explosion was set off deliberately by a small charge, the disaster was accidental. Even so, Hearst used his media power to blame the explosion on to the Spanish, and secured public support for a war, the immediate outcome.
Here was the US doing what it was to do over and over again in the next century, although too many US citizens remain insensitive to the abuse of their intelligence by their leaders. Falsification and war have been the instruments of US foreign policy. They certainly could not have been if more citizens of the USA had been worldly wise, and so more aware and critical of the lies they are fed by their ruling conservative caste, who use popular ignorance to paint everything as black and white, evil and good, heroes and villains, but with the untested assumption that US leaders must necessarily be heroes.
The enemy has always to be wicked. It is a standard principle of propaganda, but easily accepted by those who have been brought up to believe in manifest lies from childhood. European fascists brought the traditional methods of falsification to perfection. The flames of the Reichstag spread far beyond the German borders. Goering and Goebbels live on. US neo-con falsifiers multiply their activities. Lies, slander and falsifications have been used in the post-War years with unabating vigour. The aim was obvious to everyone except red neck Americans—to justify an aggressive foreign policy favourable to the US military-industrial complex—the arms race.
Mass Media
A century ago, the absence of radio and television did not prevent Hearst’s press from deceiving public opinion with regard to the Maine incident thus finding a cause of the war, and popular support for it. Radical changes have also taken place in methods of indoctrination. Radio and television with their round-the-clock broadcasts have turned the mass media into a singular power. In the UK, during the Iraq War the BBC did not lie enough, and Blair’s corrupt government disciplined its leaders by engineering their sacking. Now, it is much more compliant.
The mass media can have a good effect on society. By giving truthful accounts of social changes and world events, revealing their causes and connections, they can meet everyone’s interests and further world democracy and cooperation on the basis of mutual trust. But the media is used for psychological warfare, poisoning the atmosphere at home and abroad, spreading lies and slander and fabricating incidents to escalate tension between states, justifying arms sales and warfare.
What do most Americans know about the world outside the US? They are famously ignorant. Though a prosperous nation, less than 10 per cent ever travel abroad. Few are bothered about geography, world affairs and the alternative outlooks that other people have. Did readers and radio or television audiences in the west ever learn why the Soviet revolution happened? Are they capable of thinking that other people are human beings too? That, like the American revolutionaries victorious in 1776, they are willing to die for their independence? The US attitude, as fomented by the Christian Right and neo-cons, is “do not do as we have done, do as we tell you”.
Fat cat media barons will not tell them that all peoples want social justice and to have confidence in the future, but they might not want it the American way! They especially do not want it the American way when it is advertised directly to them as death and destruction by high powered modern bombs and military hardware. Nor do they want it when even the ignorant people of the countries ignorant Americans despise know more about US machinations in upholding vile regimes that suit the US ruling caste than the supposedly well-educated and well-fed Americans do themseselves. If Americans actually do know about US foreign policy since WWII then, they must have condoned it, and therefore make themselves responsible.
Leo Strauss and the Neocons
Immediately post WWII, a sinister conservative professor called Leo Strauss effectively began the neo-conservatives in his own rejection of the liberal America of Harry S Truman. Strauss decided that liberalism had within it the seeds of its own destruction, so by creating the neo-cons as a tight knit right wing academic conspiracy, he set out to destroy it. In 1963, Strauss also declared his intense dislike of Kennedy, just two months before Kennedy’s death. Strauss considered the imminent ratification of the Test Ban Treaty an error—it helped to remove fear!
Many Straussians were wealthy snobs with mercenary interests obsessed with a missionary mania. As academics, they were second rate and their predilection for lying could not get them employed in an academia that then still valued honesty. They—Wolfovitz, Perle and Kristol among them—opted for Washington as a place where dishonesty was a virtue, where they could exert pressure directly, and get jobs and funding from corrupt millionaires and their party, the Republicans. They would have remained in the shade were they not supported and financed by wealthy Republicans, especially those in the mass media, and the party itself. Latterly, Tony Blair, the British, supposedly Labour, Prime Minister, has been a belated convert to Straussianism, even calling his unplanned youngest son, Leo, explained as a name commemorating a family patriarch, though not significant enough earlier for any Blair sons to have the honour first.
Flouting human rights, and the suppression of democracy and freedom is supposed to be the role of dictatorships and totalitarianism. Opponents of such regimes are “dissidents”. Strauss saw that he could turn the tables totally and that no one would notice. Neocons were “dissidents” against the post-War liberalism that was the natural reaction against the threat of fascism, but these dissidents were the heirs of fascism. They were working out the theoretical basis for a democratic fascism, electoral fascism—a fascism by consent, that people would not even know they were consenting to.
Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat. Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured.Shadia Drury, University of Calgary
A terrible and fearful common enemy was essential to this. Republicans are three times as likely as Democrats to have nightmares. An analysis of the dreams of 56 college students by a psychologist of Santa Clara University in California—after the first Bush election but before 9/11—showed that Republicans’ dreams were much more often nightmares compared with Democrats—one dream in two of Republican’s dreams compared with one in six of Democrats. Moreover, nightmares were bleaker and left more of a feeling of hopelessness among the “Fright on the Right” Republicans. The psychology of the right is fright—they are scared! It seems the neo-con theorists knew this reaction already, by whatever means and have built up the horrors of the frightened US right-wing voter.
The ready-made perfect enemy was communism. The first evil empire was the Soviet Union. Communism was Satanic, and every God-fearing American knows that nothing good can come out of Hell! So, no achievements could be granted to communism, and every difficulty it had was multiplied and emphasised. The defeat of the Soviets should, on the thesis of the neo-cons, have freed the world from fear. It has not. Straussian myths needed an evil empire. Drury says, “Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in”. The old communist enemy had to be replaced by a new one. The overwhelmingly Judaeo-Christian neo-cons had the obvious candidate—Islam!
Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld was in on the first stirrings of the neo-cons at national level when he was Defense Secretary in the 1970s. As a key official of the Ford administration, Rumsfeld banged on about the USSR being a dire threat to the world. In 1976, the USA announced that its experts “due to sheer misunderstanding” had for many years “underestimated” by nearly a half the level of military expenditure in the USSR. No proof or facts were given. Military experts accordingly doubled their estimates of Soviet military allocations. Even so, they had to admit that Soviet spending on armaments in 1975 was still only half the US military expenditure that year—the US always led the arms race. Then an unknown Belgian general bemoaned the horrors of a “Soviet blitzkrieg”—Soviet tanks occupying western Europe in 48 hours. These fancies were quickly endorsed by General Haig, Supreme Allied Commander of the NATO forces in Europe, and Donald Rumsfeld, no less. That Soviet divisions could be on the Rhine in 48 hours was an earlier version of the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, who could apparently destroy the world within 45 minutes! A Big Lie, and a Bigger One!
In January 1977, US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld repeated the story of a “possible” lightning strike from East Germany (DPA Washington, 19 January, 1977). Soon TV stations in the United States and Western Germany were transmitting a series of “war games”, which concluded war was imminent. The Soviet Union was so little of a threat that only a few years later, it collapsed, but Rumsfeld had his neo-con lies to tell. Rumsfeld later admitted with cynical frankness US aims in propagating the lies about the Soviet threat. The purpose of it was not that the Pentagon had suddenly had an awakening about the level of Soviet arms, but that the notion of a threat should be repeated long enough for it to register in the minds of Joe Public. In Straussian terms, he was creating the myth of the Soviet threat for right wing political reasons.
Rumsfeld supplied the media with the supposed super power of the communist armies in Russia, and the media barons deluged the American public and the rest of the world with these impossible threats. People were drowned in a torrent of lies charging the socialist countries with “aggressive ambitions”, “plans of intervention” and “blitzkrieg”. The US quickly subdued Afghanistan, but the Soviet union had failed to do it over many years, yet Soviet tanks could be in Paris in two days.
Perhaps communism is wicked, but then the good Christians of the USA have the problem of explaining why then Jesus and his followers in the New Testament were themselves communists. It is far too hard a question for the average American Christian.
The Penkovsky Papers
The characteristic feature of this myth of the hated ungodly enemy is that the media, instigated by the Straussians, always emphasise the “imbalance in armament levels” and the “overwhelming superiority” of socialist forces whenever western parliaments discuss and vote on military budgets. When the USSR suggested a ban on neutron bombs, the neo-con myth machine launched a campaign of slander, accusing the Soviets of “continuing to arm itself” and having at its disposal a “wonder-weapon”. The CIA itself refuted the neo-cons. There was no wonder weapon. The Straussians got a man to their taste made head of the CIA, and he demanded a report about the hidden Soviet weapons. “There were none!” The whole story had been planted by the CIA in the phase of myth making that had gone before the neo-cons were to re-invent it as the Really Big Lie (RBL).
In 1965, a man called Penkovsky, a former official at the USSR State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, offered his services to British intelligence, and worked for it and later for the CIA too. Then the spy’s “diary”, The Penkovsky Papers was published by Doubleday and Company for the CIA and in accordance with a decision taken “for operational reasons” (The New York Times, 25/26 December 1977) by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Penkovsky Papers were fabrications about the Soviet Union’s secret plans for attacking the West and new types of secret weapons, intended to justify the continued arms race and the equipment of Nato armed forces in Western Europe with nuclear weapons. The New York Times wrote that The Penkovsky Papers became a cold war bestseller in the US, one of more than 250 “masterpieces” prepared and financed by the CIA since the early 1950s (The New York Times, 25/26 December 1977).
For a while, Western newspapers and magazines, keen on scare stories and sensations, profited from the publication of these papers which poisoned the international atmosphere. The Washington Post and The Observer (UK) published extracts from them. Then doubt began to arise. The campaign was questioned as a deliberate act of black propaganda, a patent CIA forgery in the spirit of the cold war. The West German weekly Die Zeit published an article entitled Genuine Hatred or a Good Fake? (3 December 1965) It proved it was not even a good fake:
To prove the authenticity of The Papers the publishers refer to bad style and frequent repetitions. But they cannot explain, why a man living in constant danger should take a further risk by writing a diary, and in his own home too.Die Zeit, 3 December, 1965
Victor Zorza, a specialist on Russia, working mainly for The Guardian (UK), wrote on 16 November, 1965:
So far as can be established, the Russian manuscript of Penkovsky’s memoirs just does not exist… The English text is peppered with words and phrases that no man with Penkovsky’s Soviet background would use… These are not mistakes in translation, but they arise from ignorance of Soviet terminology… virtually, the whole section on the Soviet military doctrine appears to have been written by a Western pen… The book can have been compiled only by the Central Intelligence Agency.The Guardian, 16 November 1965
So it was that the CIA planted misinformation that the neo-cons took to be sufficiently true for their myth machine.
Neocon Proof!
In the face of the non-cooperation from the CIA, the Straussian choice of CIA chief commissioned a report from a conservative academic of a neo-con bent. He found a novel but certain proof that the secret weapons existed. It was that there was no evidence for them! They were so secret! This is the RBL! Here we are back to the Inquisition, when any denial was proof to the inquisitors of heresy or witchcraft, so no defence was possible. Who can refute such concoctions when refutation is to admit them?
Typical of the mass media is a contradiction that is rooted in private ownership of communications. Man’s ingenuity with the latest technology makes it possible to transmit information with incredible speed, but privately owned information is often dishonest since it has to serve the interests of the owner. In its content, tendencies and aims, it is often misinformation which hinders social progress and is counter to the interests of humanity as a whole. The Congressional Record, published by the US Congress, admits that ideas that penetrate the human mind can be like bullets, inflicting mortal wounds. Distortion and deception can achieve much more than violence. So, a barrage of lies and slander is kept up in the media against human reason. Year after year, from morning till night, the press, radio and television indoctrinate minds in the hope that something at least will sink in. Lies and slanders called by the neo-cons “myths” so they don’t sound so bad, have become the chief weapon of the right wing in its struggle for survival.
The result has been America’s political centre of gravity has moved rightward, creating a set of shibboleths that cannot be challenged. If liberals established a certain political correctness in the last 20 years—making it off-limits to demean women, gays and ethnic minorities—then the right, as Jonathan Freedland has shown in The Guardian (20 October 2004), has now erected more significant barriers.
- First among these taboos is the military. No-one can say a word that implies a criticism of the US armed services. Kerry cannot mention the Abu Ghraib scandal. Yet, the US has consistently condoned and used torture directly, and it is a well known fact, at least outside the USA. Myriads were tortured in Vietnam. Sayyid Qtub and his disciple Ayman Zawahiri were both tortured by Americans and by their Egyption allies, Qtub, like the prisoners of Abu Graib, being set upon by dogs trained to attack the vital parts of human beings. These were the people whose scars were so deep they started the Islamic Jihad movement, the cause of modern Islamic intransigence. US inhumanity created the terrorists whom US citizens now fear. Yet they are determined to vote for more of the same military madness and torture.
- Next is 9/11, which has been hallowed by Americans, who now see themselves as victims, but remain utterly indifferrent to the victims of US military interventions worldwide, Vietnam being the biggest, where US soldiers murdered an estimated million “Gooks”, Vietnamese people to less Christian human beings than Americans. Now Americans mawkishly wear yellow ribbons bearing a slogan like “Support America”, where little ribbons were previously used to express sympathy for sufferers such as those with aids. A similar blue ribbon was used for those defending free speech, but that seems to have disappeared all together with the introduction of the Patriot Act. Any action, however preposterous, taken in the name of 9/11 cannot be questioned.
- If anyone should oppose the Patriot Act, and its restrictions on civil liberties, they are branded as assisting terrorists. The Straussian Republicans buy TV adverts showing a montage of Democratic congressional candidates—as opposed to attacks on civil liberties as they are against terrorism—with Osama bin Laden as if they were chums. It is a visual lie, but Republican supporters think it is hunky-dory.
- Anyone who considers international opinion is branded a traitor. “America first” is a slogan that appeals to right wing Americans, but isolates the US even more from a world looking on in disbelief. The neo-conservative strategy, if lies can bear such an exalted name, is succeeding in uniting the world against unreason.
Faith or Reason?
The present Bush administration is Strauss’s achievement. Its main weapon was to create myths. It means to tell lies and persuade the great US public that they are true. Needless to say, the utterly uncritical and uninterested average American has fallen for it all hook line and sinker. The Republicans, impelled by the sheer dishonesty of the neo-confidence tricksters, are ruthless, and that gives them the edge as we saw in the jerrypokery of the Florida elections that won G W Bush his original presidency. Would honest people vote for a candidate who only got past the post by cheating? They would not, but half of American voters do—and with an insanely fervant passion!
Evangelical Christians attribute the Bush success to God, unconscious of the plain fact that they are declaring God a cheat! They cannot see that a cheating God must be Satan, not the good God, and those who worship the cheating God must be themselves Satanists. They are the evil ones, not everyone else in the world, as they think in their simplistic black and white terms. The Straussians knew what they had to work with, all right! The neo-con political sense of entitlement to power is about Christian faith. In the US, it is remarkable that freedom is suppressed in schools and universities where doctrinaire and anti-scientific attitudes prevail, as a consequence of extremist Christian views, the same views that have been discovered as a great political lever by the neo-cons.
42 per cent of Americans describe themselves as a born-again Christians, George Bush among them. His is a “faith-based presidency”. A clutch of Republican neo-con insiders have discovered that God is a neo-con. Belief is the organising principle of the Bush White House, and this according to The New York Times Magazine. The new Straussian myth is that George W Bush is God—or as good as God, so far as Republicans are concerned. One voter even told Bush he believed God was now in the White House. The president did not dissent. Bush-Cheney billboards display the single slogan, “One Nation Under God”. Which God does it mean? Jarvay or Bush? Bush will not admit any mistake in his presidency. There can be no doubt. He is the Lord, or at least is doing His work guided by the Holy Ghost. Advisers, even cabinet members, are meant to believe in the wisdom of the president, whatever contrary evidence there may be to whatever he pronounces as infallible truth. Bush’s former environment secretary, Christine Todd Whitman, says:
In meetings, I’d ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!
Senators are told not to worry about the complexities of Iraq. Abu Graib is taboo. One obviously guilty staff sergeant has been given eight years but not one of his senior officers have been court marshalled, or even challenged, and some have been promoted! How can any Christian approve torture, or think it right that one guilty man should carry the whole can for his seniors right up to the White House? Do they think their own God was tortured to show them how to do it? Well, Bush knows better than God! The president’s “instincts”—his “gut” tells him he’s doing the right thing.
This instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.Bruce Bartlett, a Republican official in Bush senior’s administration, NYTM
Straussian myth-making is illustrated by a Bush aide who tried to demean the inquiries of The New York Times Magazine writer. His trouble, said the aide, was that the journalist lived in “the reality-based community”. Practical people worry about observable facts, but the Bush neo-con lives in a different universe, a realm where belief shapes reality, where people are guilty of future crimes, where justice is tortured and chained out of fear, and where a new inquisition is the truly horrific threat! This is a revolutionary shift for a country that was founded on the separation of church and state. It is a clash of tradition against modernity, lies against truth, faith against reason.
Justice and Hypocrisy
The evidence against those accused of terrorism and incarcerated without trial is apparently not suitable for public scrutiny, and so will never appear before a court, according to the US and UK governments. It is also commonplace for politicians and journalists to make assertions without any evidence at all. We are heading towards the “justice” of the inquisition when any accusation was assumed to be sufficient evidence of guilt, and those so accused had to prove they were innocent. Needless to say, the public are now ready to accept that unfounded statements are true based on prejudice, and the first sign of this is an inclination towards a simpering piety.
The principle that was incorporated into the laws of all civilised countries to prevent such injustice was that all accusations had to be proven beyond reasonable doubt before a judge and jury in an open, that is public, court room. Until that had happened everyone was presumed to be innocent. It was a principle valued by both rich and poor. The poor knew only too well that the rich could use their wealth and its concomitant power to pin crimes on to them to distract attention for the ones who had really perpetrated them. But the rich who had read their history knew that when law and order broke down, they too could suffer from false accusations, whether from powerful and profligate princes like Justinian the Great Christian emperor or the greedy, rancid Christian bishops of the middle ages. It was far more profitable for those seeking money to accuse the wealthy than to accuse the defenceless poor.
No one sensible has doubted, therefore, for hundreds of years that justice must be based on the sound principles of innocence, openness, evidence and judgement by peers, to avoid arbitrary or political victimization. Now, it is all being abandoned, in the US by Straussists and Republican neocons, and in the UK, astonishingly, by a so-called socialist government, albeit one led by a Christian Tory and a hand-picked bevvy of no-brain no-marks called Tony’s harem, whose only interest in parliament, politics and democracy is what they can make out of it.
The real puzzle is why people will vote for such manifest hypocrites, set on destroying the justice and democracy built up over centuries on the excuse of defending it from terrorists. Why do voters trust their most important freedoms to those who have been shown to be liars over issues that have meant the deaths of tens of thousands of Arabs, most of whom could have been nothing other than innocent victims of tyrants, whether Arab ones or US ones. Having lied about WMD and a non-existent threat from a US puppet dictator, these fascistic Christians have been emboldened to try for more—to turn back the clock 700 years to when Christianity ruled a world called Christendom where people were tortured and broken to save their souls and robbed of their material possessions in a system of state terror called the Inquisition. The Inquisitors were only too happy to hear of accusations of heresy against wealthy families by those with an envy or a grudge against them. The death or life imprisonment of such people meant a cut for the church, and the only alternative was for the rich man to offer up substantial bribes to escape with his life. The rich ought to be leading the fight to defend democracy. They have most to lose when it goes.
Liberals and socialists everywhere should also realise that UK Labour voters are supporting a right wing leader of a craven, corrupt but hand-picked parliamentary party. Since 1997, it has repeatedly undermined the social institutions of the welfare state introduced by its genuinely socialist predecessors. It joined the USA in bombing Iraq from 1998, eventually invading bloodily in 2003, while blatantly lying over the issue to the electorate, intimidating media critics and corrupting the judicial system to hide their crimes. To give an illusion of prosperity, it has reigned over a horrific and unsustainable expansion of credit, a hidden printing of money that will make the British Chancellor of the Exchequer’s famed prudence seem as as Micawberesque as the Weimar Republic. The solid socialist base of the Labour Party is a tiny fraction of what it was in 1997, so what remains is more national socialist than socialist. Even Roy Hattersley, hardly a loony leftie, has abandoned New Labour on the grounds it is no longer concerned with the essential equalities necessary to any center-left party in a democracy. Labour activists do not know where to turn, but there is a great chance for determined and principled people to form a genuinely new Labour party based on socialist ideals. Tony Blair has not made Labour the natural party of government, but has probably finished it for good.
Some Violations of Justice, and the Republican Response
Sara Paretsky, author of the novel, Blacklist, about the McCarthy priod in the USA, and whose mother came to America alone in 1911, sent by her mother to escape the pogroms in eastern Euriope, has listed a few of the violations of truth and justice in the US under the Bush Administration:
- Around 100 wounded soldiers from Iraq are flown into the miluitary hospital in Frankfurt every day, but there is a complete news blackout in the US about these war casualties, as there is about the body bags returned to the USA.
- An 81 years old Haitian Christian minister was detained at Miami airport, infirm with severe medical problems, but he was deprived of his medicine and mocked over a throat problem he had. After five days, he died in custody.
- University students protesting against Bush have been threatened with expulsion. One was arrested for criticizing Bush on the internet (S Johns, Santa Fe). Staff and students were gagged over the arrest.
- Many libraries have been obliged to surrender book and internet usage records without any legal cause.
- Journalists covering a Presidential vendetta have been imprisoned, and sacked for criticizing Bush over 9/11.
- People, whether citizens or residential aliens, have been held for over three years without trial and without even being told why! Some have been sent for renditioning to Pakistan and Egypt.
- People have been arrested and detained for innocuous acts called suspicious by the authorities, and not even their own families have been told.
The US right has bombarded Ms Paretsky with hate mail accusing this Jewish woman of favouring terrorists. Just how does all this differ from the way the Nazis started picking on minorities in the 1930s, leading to the concentration camps and the holocaust when millions of Jews, communists, trades unionists, homosexuals, Gypsies and the mentally ill were killed off and turned into bars of soap and fertilizer? It is the thin end of a wedge that is already frighteningly thick.
Rendition and True Christianity
The US always made a lot of the injustice of Soviet concentration camps called gulags where prisoners were kept indefinitely without trial or after only rigged show trials. Nothing could justify such violations of anyone’s freedom, the White House bellowed. The Great Society was far too God-guided to do such wicked things. Why then, now that God is in the White House, is the US opening gulags all over the world? Besides Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib and other unsung gulags in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is “renditioning” captives to various puppet countries mainly with shocking human rights records themselves to be held without trial for life.
The Christian President of the US, with the connivance of the Christian Prime Minister of the UK, wants political opponents to be incarcerated in utterly hidden concentration camps, out of sight of anybody, so that they can be tortured indiscriminately. Why else would they want to carry out such absurd and expensive manœuvres? After all, the US has not been shy about torturing people in the past, Great God-given Society or not—in the Vietnam war, for example. Nor was Alberto Gonzales, when advisor to God incarnate, Bush, averse to advising burying people alive and deliberately drowning them when they would not talk. In Gonzales’s perverted mind, it was not torture as long as the victims were retrieved short of actual death. For him torture is simply murder by another name. As long as the victim stays alive, in the Gonzales definition, any amount of ill-treatment is not torture. In fact, the torturer wants to avoid the victim dying, just like Gonzales, because then the suffering goes on, and on, and on, as long as the victim lives. That is the point of torture. Victims are caused extreme suffering until they will confess to any crime to escape the pain.
Moreover, torture is not torture, in the new US manual of torture, when it has some purpose besides causing suffering. Proper torture is gratuitous maltreatment. If there is a reason for deliberately causing pain, then it is not torture. Simple! So, when the US torturer says he is seeking information, he is entitled to stub cigarettes on a victim, electrocute them, beat them, deprive them of air or food, deprive them of sleep, brainwash them, break their fingers, leave them in rat infested holes, and so on, and it is all quite all right because the purpose is not really to harm them but just to obtain information. The military and political administrators of the US can publicly deny using torture because torture is no longer torture to them! They have redefined the word to suit themselves. Will no “true” Christian warn these people that their God must know? Apparently not!
Rendition in the sense the US use it is a surrendering, an act of giving in or yielding. Victims are made to yield by torture! Rendition, since it is done with no recourse to law, is actually kidnapping, then illegal torture and locking victims away from public view, conceivably for life. It is the same as throwing a man in the dungeon of a medieval castle or prison, just as Christians used to do at the peak of Christendom uncer the excuse of the Inquision. There is absolutely no justice in it, and to think it is Godly simply shows what perverts these supposed Christians really are. And again, where are the “true” Christians we always hear about? Silent, as ever! The Christians in the Pentagon and the White House plainly do not fear hell, where the torture is said to go on eternally, because torturers and those who order it must be the ones God personally “renditions” directly there. They have the temerity to judge others contrary to God’s express wish, and to take on to themselves the punishment God reserves for Himself!
The excuse for such medieval behaviour is to keep the victims from opposing US policies, to “keep them off the battlefield”, as the Godfearers in the administration put it. They cannot be kept “off the battlefield” in US jails because there still is a justice system in the US, even though this administration is intent on destroying it. Unless liberals fight back, it will not be long before anyone suspected of harbouring a distaste for the ruling elite in the US will be kidnapped and tortured, murdered or imprisoned for life. Rumsfeld has approved “ghost detainees”, captives who are not even admitted as existing. They will disappear just as people disappeared in Chile, Argentina, Greece and almost any other military junta you care to mention. What more proof is needed that the US is on the verge of fascism?
The Sociopathology of our Leaders
Bush and Blair have publicly said many things that anyone of average awareness and intelligence knows are untrue, yet they seem to believe they are honest. They must therefore be sociopaths, those who believe that the act of saying something makes it true. It is a common delusion among Christians. Sociopaths have no doubts, persuaded as they are that their beliefs must be correct. Sociopaths, curiously, can be highly successful people, driven by their unselfcritical confidence, aided by the charisma and persuasiveness this can give them. They take their success to be proof of the truth of their convictions and the normality of their behaviour. Their words are a substitute reality for them, and their dizzy roller-coaster existence, constantly fine-tuning their reality, seems to give them an apparent dynamism and boldness that substitutes for drive and ambition. It requires that they be willing to use any means to achieve their ends. The ends justify them, and warnings or conflicting evidence is dismissed as coming from enemies, or dismissed as unsound and untrue. They face down their critics with bland innocence, appeals to their integrity, and moral outrage. They use a natural talent for lying to beguile those around them they need to manipulate—and do it mainly unconsciously. So questions now about the President’s and the Prime Minister’s honesty are matter for the psychiatrists sofa.
