Author
|
Topic: A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth? (Read 508 times) |
|
Blunderov
Archon
Gender: 
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.90
Rate Blunderov
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
|
 |
A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth?
« on: 2007-07-17 02:05:25 » |
 |
"Nolan pointed wildly: "There, my Lord, are your guns,… there is your enemy."
learnenglish.org.uk
Military Blunders - Balaclava 1854
[Blunderov] Remember how almost all the terror flyers of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia?
fark.com
[Obvious] 45% of insurgents in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia - which is troubling to the Bush Administration, according to the Duh News Service
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=11300
A Free Press or a
Ministry of Truth?
by Paul Craig Roberts
In his novel 1984, George Orwell portrayed a future time in which the explanations of recent events and earlier history are continually changed to meet Big Brother's latest purpose. Previous explanations disappear down "the memory hole."
Sound familiar? Any American who pays attention can observe the identical phenomenon occurring in the U.S. today.
Think about the Bush regime's changing explanations for the failed U.S. occupation of Iraq. Shortly after Bush's May 2003 announcement of "mission accomplished," the mission revealed itself to be very much unaccomplished. Americans were told that the cause of the snafu was a small Sunni insurgency of two or three thousand at the most inspired by "die-hard Ba'ath Party remnants." Remember the propagandistic deck of cards identifying the most wanted down to the less wanted? Americans were assured that once Saddam Hussein and his relatives and henchmen were rounded up, our troops would be pelted with the promised flowers instead of roadside bombs.
When the roundups, trials, and executions failed to fix the problem, the "die-hard" explanation disappeared. A new explanation, with no continuity to the old, took its place.
The new explanation was that Syria was allowing foreigners to cross its border into Iraq to commit jihad against the American troops. This explanation lasted until it became all too clear, despite the propaganda, that the "foreign fighters" were remarkably well accepted by, and concealed within, the Iraqi communities that were suffering all the collateral damage of the conflict.
When it came time for the U.S. to create an Iraqi government, it was evident that it would be one dominated by Shi'ites. Then, for a limited time, it was permissible to recognize that the insurgency was popularly based in the Sunnis.
As the insurgency evolved into what the Iraq Study Group [.pdf] described as a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war with U.S. troops unclear on which side they stood, the Bush Regime and the captive media began blaming al-Qaeda for the escalating violence. Americans were assured by the Ministry of Truth that there wasn't a civil war, just outsiders stirring up conflict. This enabled Big Brother to deny that there was a civil war and to revive fear of terrorist attacks in the U.S. and UK, the new Oceania.
The al-Qaeda explanation was soon discarded into the memory hole. The explanation implied that Oceania's invasion of Iraq had greatly expanded the ranks and strength of al-Qaeda, thus contradicting big Brother's claim that his war in Iraq was making Oceanians safe by stamping out terrorism. The al-Qaeda explanation had to depart for another reason as well. Cheney, Israel, and the neocons, the rulers of the new Oceania, plan to attack Iran, and so the insurgency in Iraq is now being blamed on Iran.
The Ministry of Truth has accommodated the latest explanation, just as it did all others before, without remarking on the funeral of the previous explanation. All of a sudden, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, goes down the memory hole.
The American and British media work the same way as the Ministry of Truth in Oceania. A day arrives when the "truth" no longer serves the empire or hegemonic power or center of moral purpose in the world, or for short, the regime. When that day arrives, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, is discarded down the memory hole.
In recent weeks Americans have been fed a series of reports from official sources that Iran is arming both Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Experts, both within the government and without, who have been made more attentive by the Bush Regime's false charges of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, have disputed the news reports.
But the reports keep on coming. As I write, the latest story is that the U.S. military "discovered a field of rocket launchers near a U.S. Army base south of Baghdad armed with 34 Iranian-made missiles." Can you imagine? The insurgents went to the trouble of lugging powerful missiles within striking distance of a U.S. base and just left them there unfired to be discovered by the Americans. To further serve Cheney's plan to attack Iran, the media report states: "Earlier this month, U.S. commanders stepped up the charges [against Iran], claiming that senior leaders of Iran's special forces and of the Lebanese Shi'ite Hezbollah militia have trained Iraqi fighters and provided other support."
Notice that none of the explanations fed to Americans over the years have ever mentioned, even as a faint possibility, that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq might be the cause of the violence in Iraq.
Allegedly, the U.S. is a free and open country with a free press and a government accountable to the people. Yet the information fed to the American people is as thoroughly false as that fed to the citizens of Oceania by Big Brother through the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's famous novel.
In Orwell's novel, despite the totalitarian power of the government, nothing happens to people as long as they accept the government's intrusive monitoring of their lives and do not become interested in truth or facts. In such a world, truth and individuality pass out of human consciousness and become unimportant. Citizens survive by accepting Big Brother's ever changing reality.
This is what the mainstream media in the U.S. and UK are enabling the new Oceania to accomplish. It is pointless to complain about a few Judith Millers here and there at the New York Times, or the obvious warmongers at the Weekly Standard, Fox "News," and Wall Street Journal editorial page. The entire corporate media is behaving as a Ministry of Truth.
|
|
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth?
« Reply #1 on: 2007-07-17 11:41:41 » |
|
Quote:| This is what the mainstream media in the U.S. and UK are enabling the new Oceania to accomplish. It is pointless to complain about a few Judith Millers here and there at the New York Times, or the obvious warmongers at the Weekly Standard, Fox "News," and Wall Street Journal editorial page. The entire corporate media is behaving as a Ministry of Truth. |
Having the same interests and serving the same masters this is completely not news to me, even if the article was fun to read.
On that note, does anyone remember the comparisons of Bush and Kerry in 2006, their parallel lives and particularly their membership of the Skull and Bones Society?
Mz Hillary Clinton's Republican roots make an even more compelling case that there is no longer a bipartisan government in the USA, but only a single oligarchy with different aspeects.
From growing up with her father, a Goldwater Republican in middle class Chicago, to president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans in 1965, to an internship with Rep. Gerald R. Ford and the House Republican Caucus until anti-war sentiments she no longer seems guided by led to her campaigning for the anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy.
"I sometimes think that I didn't leave the Republican Party," she has written, "as much as it left me." Her nomination and possible election as President of the United States with effectively unlimited presidential powers, coutesy of Presidential Orders and the Patriot Act, might well be regarded as a coming home party.
Courtesy of http://www.infowars.net/articles/may2006/100506clinton.htm a few zingers.
Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul whose New York Post tabloid savaged Hillary Clinton’s initial aspirations to become a US senator for New York, has agreed to host a political fundraiser for her re-election campaign, reports the Financial Times.
Such elite back slapping and shoulder rubbing again highlights that when it comes to getting ahead it pays to be on the same page.
The notion that leading Democrats and Republicans are in opposition is ludicrous. The belief that a true left / right paradigm still exists in global politics is as antiquated as a grandfather clock in a coffin.
The Anglo-American aristocracy, big businesses and banks have long been pulling the strings behind the curtain in the theatre of politics and underlings such as the Clintons and the Bushes know what they have to do to satisfy their desire for political control.
Recently Hillary has also been spotted partying at Fox News, with Murdoch and his cronies, and buddying up with the very same Republicans who vociferously tried to get her husband impeached for having sex with another woman.
Whilst her husband has been hanging around with the Bushes, Hillary has also been living it up with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, John McCain and Rick Santorum. There is clearly a bipartisan move underway to shift public perception.
Hillary Clinton supports every Bush policy with as much if not more zeal.
She supported the war and recently again stated that American troops should be kept in Iraq as more sons, daughters, mothers and fathers return in body bags hidden from the media.
"Hillary Clinton today holds the new North American record for fakery," wrote Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin. "She copies. She sneaks and slithers past you with her opinion on a war that kills every day."
We can make a strong case that Bush and his cadre have set some precedents, but the Democratic opposition offers little hope. Bush spies on Americans with no regard for the Bill of Rights or even the meager statutory restraints imposed on him, and all the Democrats do is whine that they weren’t in on the snooping, and that next time they want to be informed. Of course, they have an interest in keeping the police state healthy and strong. The idea that Hillary Clinton would be more sensitive to civil liberties if she were at the empire’s helm is too absurd for words.
(...)
The Clintons and the Bushes have been known to vacation together in more recent times. Earlier this year on CBS, Clinton revealed that he looks upon the Bushes as a surrogate family, and how Barbara Bush refers to him as "her son". Is this really a picture of two distinct and opposed political ideologies pitted against one another?
Last year George W invited both Clintons as guests of honor and praised them to the hilt as he unveiled portraits of the two to be hung in the White House. Bush described him as having "...a great compassion for people in need... a man of enthusiasm and warmth". This after Bush's 2000 campaign was built around Clinton having no honor or dignity whilst in the White House.
Festivities continued in November 2004 when the entire Bush family journeyed to Little Rock for the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library. The praise from both President Bushes for Bill Clinton was sick bag overwhelming. "The William J. Clinton Presidential Library is a gift to the future by a man who always believed in the future and today we thank him for loving and serving America." Bush 43 was quoted.
After this Bush Snr and former President Bill Clinton joined forces for Tsunami Relief. They appeared at last year's Super Bowl and seemed to be having a blast together. They declared their friendship; we learn they talk on the phone often, play golf together and are just plain ‘pals.'
(...)
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
|
Logged
