For Our Rulers, Smearing A Dissident Journalist Is As Good As Killing Him

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

As I write this, demonstrations around the world are taking place in protest of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange’s arbitrary detention and silencing by the US-centralized power establishment that has been actively pursuing his destruction for over a decade. The demonstrations will be well-attended, but not a fraction as well-attended as they should be. They will receive international attention, but not a fraction as much attention as they should.

This is because the manipulators and smear merchants who have made their careers paving the way for oligarchic agendas have been successful in killing off sympathy for the plight of Assange. As we discussed yesterday, sympathy is key for getting narratives to take hold in public consciousness. This is why western corporate media will circulate pictures of dead children all day long when it’s in the interests of advancing longstanding imperialist agendas, but never when those children were killed by western weapons. If you can tug at someone’s heart strings while telling them a story, the story you tell them will slide right in with minimal scrutiny. And it works the other way, too: if you can prevent someone’s heart strings from being plucked while hearing about a legitimately heartbreaking story, you can prevent that story from taking hold. Kill all sympathy for a dissident journalist and you kill all belief in his side of the story.

And Assange’s side of the story is indeed devastating to the preferred narrative of the US-centralized empire. A journalist (yes, journalist, per definition) who publishes 100 percent authentic documents exposing the inner mechanics of power structures all over the world, who was forced to seek political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to avoid extradition by the same government which brutalized Chelsea Manning, is on its face a highly sympathetic story. And it does tremendous damage to the narrative that America and its close network of allies are freedom-loving democracies whose systems of government are nothing like those naughty, oppressive regimes they seek to topple.

So they smear him. As often as possible, using whatever they can, they smear his reputation. Because if they can kill all sympathy for him and his outlet, it’s as good for their agendas as actually killing him.

The smears work because the social engineers know how to manipulate people. In America, for example, people are herded into two isolated ideological holding pens and encouraged to identify as much as possible with whichever pen they’re in so that narratives can be slipped into their consciousness in a smooth, streamlined way. Are you in the ‘R’ pen and upset about the hand you’ve been dealt? You should blame the ‘D’ pen, and those foreigners who are of no strategic consequence to your rulers. Are you in the ‘D’ pen and upset about the hand you’ve been dealt? You should blame the ‘R’ pen, and those Russians whose downfall would advance the longstanding geopolitical agendas of your rulers.

In the same way, those in the ‘R’ pen were fed narratives against Julian Assange in 2010 which they lapped up because believing them was easier than believing that the pen they’re so tightly identified with had enabled the evils revealed in WikiLeaks releases about US war crimes. And in exactly the same way, those in the ‘D’ pen were fed narratives against Julian Assange in 2016 which they lapped up because believing them was easier than believing that the pen they’re so tightly identified with is pervasively corrupt.

By enforcing a strong sense of identification with a particular ideological tribe, they ensure that the psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance will arise from any revelation which can be spun as detrimental to that tribe. They then create a narrative which alleviates that discomfort, and that narrative always damages the reputation of the enemies of the power establishment. It’s a snake oil cure for an ailment that they deliberately caused.

Nobody actually thinks that Julian Assange is a Russian agent, or a rapist, or a “hostile non-state intelligence service”, or any of the other absurd smears I’ve seen circulating about him throughout all political sectors of the US-centralized empire. Those are not ideas that anyone has taken on board because they sincerely believe there’s enough evidence for them to outweigh the undeniable fact that many extremely powerful and influential people stand to benefit from tarnishing his reputation on false pretenses. At best, they’re just fairy tales people tell themselves because they’re easier than believing that their favorite country/political party persecutes journalists for telling the truth and is as corrupt and evil as the various WikiLeaks publications of their communications would indicate. At worst, it’s a fairy tale they are deliberately seeding into public consciousness so that people will believe lies instead of truth.

People find all sorts of ways to wiggle their way around the cognitive dissonance that unedited, authentic documents can create in them when it challenges their deeply treasured identity structures. People who present themselves as anti-establishment progressives often say things like “Well, you can be critical of Assange and still support WikiLeaks for providing a valuable service.” And sure, that may be technically true, but it’s never actually true for the people who say it: look at their writings and social media posts and you won’t see them aggressively defending WikiLeaks, you’ll only see them smearing Assange as often as they can get away with. They’re just trying to retain their anti-establishment cred (another treasured identity structure) while promulgating smear campaigns which advance the agendas of the CIA and the State Department. They pay lip service to the image they’re trying to convey, but their actions tell you where they really stand.

People who disrupt dominant narratives will always be attacked and vilified, because those narratives often form the building blocks of people’s identity structures, their egos. An ego is just a collection of believed “I” stories; they typically include believed ideas about really basic things like “I am this body,” but they also include a bunch of other “I” stories like “I am a Democrat” or “I am a patriotic American” as well. Attacking dominant narratives on a large scale will cause intense cognitive dissonance in everyone who has a lot of identity wrapped up in the power structure which is weakened by that attack, to such an extent that it can feel as though you yourself are being personally attacked. The way Democrats have talked about Assange since 2016 you get the distinct impression they feel like he may as well have walked up and stabbed them.

You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you https://t.co/XwFjK9EOyl pic.twitter.com/QRSalVfuKK

— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) May 2, 2017

As this webcomic from The Oatmeal brilliantly explains, the brain is hardwired to protect strongly valued belief systems in the same way it’s hardwired to make sure the body protects itself from a physical attack. This serves a useful function in that it gives us a cognitive strategy for making sense of the world that isn’t blown to pieces every time you encounter a new idea, but it can also be malformed in a way which does not accurately represent reality. When that happens, it really is worthwhile to tough it out through the brain’s distress signals of cognitive dissonance and consciously restructure your sense-making apparatus in a way that accommodates a more accurate perspective.

This is the invitation whenever you’re looking at a WikiLeaks drop which challenges your existing worldview. It’s just raw information sitting there, and you can choose to believe a story which allows you to comfortably dismiss it, or you can stick it out through the psychological discomfort and allow it to restructure your worldview. You have defense mechanisms in place to prevent random bits of information from tearing apart your sense-making apparatus that haven’t been properly audited for reliability, but a publishing outlet with a 100 percent perfect record for releasing authentic documents is as reliable a source of information as you will ever find.

If your goal is psychological comfort, you have plenty of good reasons to loathe Julian Assange and spend all day helping plutocrats and secretive government agencies damage his reputation so that nobody will ever pay attention to him or his publications. If your goal is the truth, however, it is to your benefit to ignore the smears, to accept the reality of how and why Assange is being targeted, and to allow the truths that have been revealed by WikiLeaks publications to reshape your understanding of how the world works.

_________________________

Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Liked it? Take a second to support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon!

About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]

Internment Camps for Child Migrants

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By R S Ahthion

“I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. These images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.” -Laura Bush, Wife of George W Bush who pursued a campaign of extreme violence in Iraq which has led to the death of over a million Iraqis and the rise of ISIS, kidnapping and rendition to blacksite CIA prisons and rehabilitated torture as an international norm.

As the US descends further down the rabbit hole of nationalist politics the conservatives in the United States are showing their love for family values by ripping away children as young as 4 from their mothers and fathers.

“What the US is doing now, there is no equivalent,” said Michael Flynn, executive director of the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, a non-profit group focused on the rights of detained immigrants. “There’s nothing like this anywhere”. —https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44503514

The United States has long considered Latin America its “backyard”. It has run military coups, supported the most retrograde elements of society and assassinated leaders so the US could keep the world safe for its process of capital appropriation and capital accumulation.

In 2014 the Huffington Post ran an article detailing the history of Latin America and why 57,000 children had arrived at the borders of the United States that year.

The superbly done film El Norte (1983) by Mexican-American director Gregory Nava focuses on the journey of two siblings from Guatemala to Mexico and eventually the US escaping the civil wars and economic implosion of their native lands triggered by the US meddling in those regions.

“In 2009, the Honduran military, with the backing of the Supreme Court, illegally overthrew the elected government of President Manuel Zelaya, a populist reformer. In contrast to the governments of Latin America — many of whose histories are marred by U.S.-backed coups — the American government balked at using the term “coup” in this case, and made little effort to get Zelaya returned to power, instead pressuring Honduras’ neighbors to recognize the new government.

The de facto government in Honduras used the military to quell protests and re-establish order in the capital. Drug cartels stepped in along the Honduras-Guatemala border, exploiting the power vacuum, according to a report published in June by the International Crisis Group.

“Local law enforcement, always weak, fell into disarray,” the report says. “The U.S., concerned about providing assistance to an unaccountable and illegitimate regime, suspended non-humanitarian aid, including counter-narcotics assistance. The result was a ‘cocaine gold rush,’ as traffickers hurried to secure routes through the region.”

They succeeded. A 2012 State Department report estimated that as much as 90 percent of the 700 metric tons of cocaine shipped from Colombia to the U.S. every year passes through Central America.

A sharp escalation of violence accompanied the 2009 coup and the expansion of cartel operations. The Honduran homicide rate spiked from an already high 61 per 100,000 in 2008 to 90 per 100,000 in 2012 — the world’s highest murder rate, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.”

( https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/refugee-crisis-border_n_5596125 )

What they miss (but later released by Wikileaks) is the support by Hilary Clinton's State Department for this coup.

“Grandin, who wrote about Clinton’s response to the 2009 coup in The Nation last week, told HuffPost that her work on Honduras should be a campaign issue and that the assassination of Cáceres should force a “reckoning with history...They legitimated this coup regime,” Grandin said. “The U.S. could have adopted a real multilateral position and joined with Brazil, for instance, in demanding the restoration of Zelaya.”

Instead, the U.S. opted to sideline Zelaya and back elections that brought in a conservative government. “That’s fairly clear between her emails and her own concession in Hard Choices. She took credit for that. Before she was called on it, she was holding it up as a signature achievement,” he said.”

( https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/hillary-clinton-honduras-coup-memoirs_us_56e34161e4b0b25c91820a08 )

As the US ratchets up its economic war on Venezuela to “make the economy scream” it is important to remember just how many governments the US has overthrown, destabilised and thrown into turmoil to make Latin America safe for global capital. And these companies go in and force people off the land and take huge swaths of land which used to grow beans and rice to feed the people. But now grow Soy/palm oil, sugarcane and beef for export markets.

So what you see in these countries is the GDP grow but the people are starving.

“The hunger for minerals was also blamed for turning the Andean nations into a “war zone” with high-profile conflicts between indigenous groups and the owners of Las Bambas copper mine in Peru and El Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia [see footnote].

“Agribusiness was the biggest driver of violence as supermarket demand for soy, palm oil, sugarcane and beef provided a financial incentive for plantations and ranches to push deeper into indigenous territory and other communal land.”

( https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-four-environmental-defenders-a-week-killed-in-2017?CMP=share_btn_tw )

The United States has overseen an empire that extracts enormous riches from Latin America and whenever the Latin Americans have seen to redress this by democratically electing a leader that goes against United States wishes the US has overthrown that democracy.

From:

1. President Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) A CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz. The real reason for U.S. involvement came from pressure from the United Fruit Company, whose land was expropriated by Arbenz’s progressive land reforms.

2. To British Guiana (1953–1964) CIA and British Intelligence funded anti-communist unions in order to strengthen opposition to democratically elected Dr. Cheddi Jagan. When this failed, the Churchill government simply removed him from office due to his socialist leanings. In 1957, Jagan was re-elected, and in response the U.S. Information Service launched an anti-communist (anti-Jagan) media campaign. Despite this, Jagan was re-elected again in 1961, which moved the British government to organize strikes in the unions that they had previously funded. The British government used these strikes as a sign of incompetence on the part of Jagan and changed the constitution to remove him from power.

3. To Cuba (1959 — present) After the Cuban revolution in 1959, the U.S. did everything in its power to prevent its government from succeeding. The U.S. performed air raids and even mobilized Cuban exiles to attack Cuba in the infamous CIA-orchestrated Bay of Pigs. The U.S. also enacted trade and credit embargos, sabotaged goods destined for Cuba, made multiple assassination attempts on Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara.

4. To Ecuador(1960–63) The CIA infiltrated the Ecuadorian government, set up news agencies and radio stations, bombed right-wing agencies and churches and blamed the left, all to force democratically elected Velasco Ibarra from office. When his replacement, Carlos Arosemara, refused to break relations with Cuba, the CIA-funded military took over the country, outlawed communism, and cancelled the 1964 elections.

5. To (Brazil 1961–64): After democratically elected Janio da Silva Quadros of the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) resigned, citing military and U.S. pressure as the reasons, his successor, Joao Goulart, was overthrown by a U.S.-supported military coup in 1964. Critics argue that this is because Goulart promoted social and economic reforms, limited the profits of multinationals, nationalized a subsidiary of U.S.-owned International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), and refused to break relations with Cuba and other socialist countries. He was replaced by two decades of a brutal military regime. There would not be another Labor Party president until the election of Lula da Silva in 2002.

6. Peru mid-1960’s: The CIA set up military training camps and provided arms to the Peruvian government to combat guerilla forces.

7. Dominican Republic 1963–65: In 1963, Juan Bosch took office as the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic since 1924. He was a true liberal and called for land reform, low-rent housing, modest nationalization of business, and restrictions on foreign investment. Seven months after being elected, the U.S. allowed a right wing military coup to take over the government. Nineteen months later, a popular revolution broke out which attempted to reinstate Bosch. The U.S. reacted by sending in troops to stop the Bosch revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the CIA and U.S. Information Agency (USIA) conducted an intensive propaganda campaign against Bosch. U.S. troops stayed in the Dominican Republic until September 1966, when, thanks in part to the anti-Bosch media campaign, Juan Bosch lost the election to Joaquin Balaguer.

8. Uruguay 1964–1970: The CIA and the Agency for International Development (AID) set up the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo to train police in the art of torture in order to suppress rebel activity. The torture and killing was mainly directed at the Tupamaros, guerrillas who embarrassed public officials and exposed corporate corruption.

9. Chile 1964–1973: After the CIA unsucessfully prevented Salvador Allende from winning the Chilean presidency by spreading propaganda and funding the opposition, it concentrated its efforts on getting Allende overthrown. The campaign, which involved bribing officers and spreading misinformation, was eventually successful and brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende in 1973. Allende died during the overthrow and seventeen years of repressive military rule followed.

10. Bolivia 1964–75: In 1952, an armed popular revolt defeated the military, displaced the oligarchy, nationalized the mines, instituted land reform, set up a new government, and reduced the military to an impotent force. Yet under the training (School of Americas) and financial support of the CIA and Pentagon, the military was built up again and overthrew President Victor Paz in 1964 because of his refusal to support Washington’s Cuba policies. (Note: this was nothing new for Bolivia, which has experienced the passing of governments more frequently than the passing of years.)

In January 2006, as Evo Morales was sworn in as Bolivia’s first indigenous president, he predicted a future of indigenous rule, saying, “We are here to say enough of the 500 years of Indian resistance. From 500 years of resistance, we pass to another 500 years in power.” Later that year, Morales sent Bolivian troops to occupy 56 gas installations and demanded all foreign energy-firms sign new contracts giving Bolivia majority ownership and as much as 82% of revenues, which they did.

11. Nicaragua 1978–1990: When the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, the U.S. was frightened by what they thought could be another Cuba. President Jimmy Carter tried to sabotage the revolution through economic and diplomatic forms, and later Reagan used violence. For eight years, Nicaragua faced military attacks by the U.S. funded Contras (Reagan’s “freedom fighters). In 1990, the U.S. interfered in national elections, and the Sandinistas were defeated. According to Oxfam, the international development organization, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas was “exceptional in the strength of that government’s commitment…to improving the condition of the people and encouraging [an] active development process.” Now, Nicaragua is one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere, with widespread illiteracy and malnutrition.

12. Honduras 1980’s: Honduras was basically a colony of the U.S. during the Contra war in Nicaragua. Thousands of U.S. troops were housed there and it was used as a supply center and refuge for the Contras. The U.S. funded the Contras by covertly and illegally selling arms to Iran (known as the Iran-Contra Affair).

13. Grenada 1979–1983: A 1979 coup took control of this small island country and attempted to install socialist reforms. The Reagan administration used destabilization tactics and eventually invaded in 1983, resulting in U.S. as well as Grenadian and Cuban casualties.

14. El Salvador 1980–92: After the U.S. helped fix an election to repress dissidents in El Salvador, the rebels turned to violence and a civil war ensued. Although the U.S. claimed to be only involved on an advisory basis 20 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat missions. The U.S. spent six billion dollars repressing this popular revolution.

15. Haiti 1987–94: After supporting the Duvalier family dictatorship for 30 years and opposing Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the U.S. claimed to support the elections that returned Aristide to power after he was ousted by a 1991 military coup. Meanwhile, they warned Aristide that they would only allow him to rule if he implemented free market policies. Aristide did not remain in power for long, however, and in a subsequent interview he attributed his removal from power to his refusal to privatize Haiti’s state-owned enterprises.

The 2004 coup was orchestrated by the leaders of the FRAPH, or Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress, a CIA-backed organization that carried out state terror against opponents of the military regime that ruled the country from 1991 to 1994. Another leader in the armed coup against Aristide was Guy Philippe, a former member of the Haitian military who received training from US Special Forces in Ecuador in the 1990s. After these forces pushed Aristide into exile, the U.S. stepped in to restore stability in Haiti, now under new rule. Since Aristide’s removal from power, his supporters have been targeted by the UN forces now tasked with “peace keeping,” killing many innocents from Haiti’s poorest neighborhoods in the process.

16. Panama 1989: Just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. invaded Panama, killing thousands and leaving many more wounded and homeless in order to capture Manuel Noriega, a previous ally of the U.S.

17. Mexico, Peru, and Colombia 1990’s to present: Under the guise of the drug war, the U.S. has given military aid to these countries despite their poor human rights records. This aid is used to fight rebel forces.

18. Venezuela (Present): Recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela manifests itself as millions of dollars in contributions to political opponents of leftist President Hugo Chavez. The short-lived 2002 coup d’etat that kidnapped the democratically elected president was orchestrated by groups who had received funding from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED). When the opposition took power, they dissolved all of Venezuela’s democratic institutions, including the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, the Constitution, the General Attorney, and the Public Defender’s office. Meanwhile, their plan promised a return to free market economic policies. The coup only lasted two days before a popular resistance reinstated Chavez.

-William Blum, Killing Hope. (ISBN-13: 978–1783601776)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he world is smaller in these times and no more can the US leave a continent of broken little nations oppressed by US arms and money so the fortune 500 can grow ever richer.

Those in Latin America are not going to stay put under threats of extreme violence perpetuated by the super power to the north that has gone to these lengths of violence in the name of profit and capital accumulation. They will instead go to the areas of the world which are safe from imperialism. To add another level or sordidness to American society is a border agent mocking the children.

“Mami!” one child can be heard crying in the seven-minute audio.

“Papá!” another screams.

“Well, we have an orchestra here,” says a man identified as a Border Patrol agent. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-immigration-children-audio-trump-border-patrol-separate-families-parents-detention-center-a8405501.html

It is of course no surprise that the Americans' response to a humanitarian crisis they created be the disgusting internment camps reminiscent of World war 2.

The thousands of people turning up at the borders of the United States are the refugees from capitalism and a violent foreign policy led by the leaders of the United States (Democrats or Republicans).

Therefore that border is not worthy of respect.

[premium_newsticker id="211406"]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R S Ahthion is a geopolitical analyst living in the UK. The author’s work focuses on questions of social and international justice whose work has appeared in The Greanville Post and Counterpunch. Never fails to be disgusted by capitalism. Spends his free time writing fiction, studying history, politics, ideology and philosophy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

PLEASE COMMENT ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP OR IN THE OPINION WINDOW BELOW.
All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

Does the Burns/Novick Vietnam Documentary Deserve an Emmy?

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

by DOUG RAWLINGS

Doug Rawlings (left) and fellow veteran Don Evon visiting memorials in Washington, DC

By the time I reached Episode Four in this ten-episode film, I concluded it should not be touted as an Emmy Award winning documentary.

Episode Four “Resolve,” is the story of 1966, a year that the producers of this film have designated as the time when doubt began to worm its way into American troops. This doubt sows the breeding ground for what we now call “moral injury.”

The American soldier in Viet Nam begins to realize that his job of killing others, or supporting those who are carrying out the killing, is not divinely ordained. He is not in a just war. In fact, he is being used by others who have much more pedestrian motives — rank, saving face, gaining political favor, selling weapons.

This is three years before I even set foot in country, into a war much different than early 1966. In 1969, we trudged into that muck and mire as reluctant cynics. We were intent on surviving, not attaining some fanciful glorious victory over the demonic communists – but not so for the 173rd Airborne in the Central Highlands in mid-1966.

So, let’s assume that Burns and Novick et al are somewhat accurate in setting off 1966 as the “turning point” in our slow awakening to the truth. So what?

Three million soldiers from this country sent to Viet Nam did not “serve”—we were used. We were blood-sacrificed on the altar of greed and power along with millions of Vietnamese dead. And for what?

First off, this would have been a good point for the auteurs to work in the aforementioned concept of moral injury.

As that term begins to be thrown around in popular culture, losing any real meaning, it is important to note that it was intended to mean a slow, remorseful process of recognizing one’s complicity in what most religions call “evil,” combined with a soul-shaking sense of betrayal.

You realize that there is no excuse for your unwillingness or inability to stop human degradation as it unfolds before you as your deeply held moral codes wither away. And now you must accept the consequences of that debilitating malaise that worked its way into your head.

Some of us have deflected that responsibility by attacking the commanders and officers and politicians who told us to follow their orders. But that excuse wears thin over time. Even as the filmmakers worked for a decade on their enterprise, the proverbial chickens have come home to roost. The filmmakers do not overtly acknowledge this concept, but its presence begins to cast shadows on their narrative.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s I watched the faces of the soldiers caught up in the moment or moments that will change their lives forever, those acts of quick reflex to survive or to avenge the deaths of buddies, I cringed. Doug Peacock, a medic with the Green Berets for two tours, captures “the horror, the horror” of it all in his memoir WALKING IT OFF when he writes about the staggering realization that “everything is permitted.” You are nineteen, and you can end life, make life for another unbearable, and you can do it with virtual impunity. A person does not come back from that world unscathed.

At this juncture of the film, four episodes into a ten-episode saga, it is evident to me that we are not watching a true documentary film. In my eyes, documentation is rooted in facts and, if at all possible, immutable truths. The documentarian’s function is to get down to historical truths, to discover cause and effect, and to provide us with a trustworthy scaffolding on which to rebuild our memories as soundly as possible. No, we are watching instead a series of anecdotes, each one imbued with the earnestness of the teller. Who dares to question the grieving mother or disillusioned sister or duty-bound soldier? We are not being invited into a logical discussion of facts here — we are being asked to bear witness.

As a veteran of that war who has tried to bring to light its utter depravity and as a teacher, I oppose letting this visual extravaganza stand as a definitive historical record that students will turn to in their studies.

It is a cornucopia of anecdotes that gives us a glimpse of that war that I’m sure the Pentagon and the Koch brothers, who funded it, would approve of, but its priorities are misguided. The war was never “begun in good faith,” it was never just a “mistake,” it was, from the beginning and throughout, a morally depraved undertaking.

John Pilger, the Australian journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker wrote, “The invasion of Vietnam was deliberate and calculated—as were policies and strategies that bordered on genocide and were designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes. Experimental weapons were used against civilians.”

Burns and Novick avoid those conclusions although thousands of Viet Nam veterans came to realize the soul-devastating truth during the war or soon after. A film that brings their words into the narrative would be a major step forward. This one is far from that.

This is not history we are watching. We are watching theater. And we who lived through that war, whether “in country” or not, must see ourselves as players on a stage. That exercise is not without merit, but let’s not confuse it with a “healing” historical account or an Emmy award-worthy documentary.

[premium_newsticker id="211406"]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Doug Rawlings retired six years ago after teaching writing composition for 33 years at high school and college levels. He was drafted in 1968 and was with the 7/15th artillery in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam from July 1969 to August 1970.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

PLEASE COMMENT ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP OR IN THE OPINION WINDOW BELOW.
All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

Syria – Ready To Start The Daraa Campaign

DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY “B”

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

There are signs that the long expected liberation of the Daraa region in southwest Syria is about to begin. After a month of negotiations between Russia, Israel, Jordan and the U.S. no peaceful solution has been found. The various terrorist forces in the (green) area, including al-Qaeda aligned HTS and groups loyal to the Islamic State, have rejected all negotiations. For over a month Russian negotiators tried to convince locals to give up and to reconcile with the government. But the hardliners under the rebels have killed anyone who talked with the Russians. The U.S. government has warned against a Daraa operation and threatened to intervene.

First airstrikes were launched by the Syrian government today against villages in the eastern part of the Deraa area. Some local fighting is ongoing. This is not yet the expected all out attack on the 'rebel' held areas but the testing of enemy forces. The Syrian army has assembled a large force to liberate the southwest. It includes ten thousands of soldiers, more than 100 tanks and lots of artillery. Short range air defenses have been moved into the area to protect the Syrian troops. A well coordinated attack on several front and multiple axes should allow for a quick victory.

Israel, with U.S. backing, might intervene in such an operation even if it makes little sense to do so. The current state can not continue indefinitely. Any intervention might well lead to a war for which Israel is unprepared. The Syrian army is willing and able to hit back into Israel. After seven years of war it is not afraid of a fight.

The Russian military is warning of a false-flag "chemical incident" in Deir Ezzor governorate. The Syrian Observatory reports that Islamic State remnants in the southeastern desert and in the Rukban camp, both under cover of the U.S. occupied zone around al-Tanf, prepare for a large attack on Syrian government forces. It claims that such an attack is an attempt to occupy the zone between al-Tanf and Albu Kamal at the Euphrates. Both operation would be planned diversions intended to draw Syrian forces away from Deraa and could provide excuses for U.S. intervention on the opposition side.

Late Sunday an airstrike destroyed a building in the Harri area near Albu Kamal directly on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The building was used as a headquarter for the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMU) who are securing the border in coordination with the Syrian army in the fight against the Islamic State. More than 20 fighters were killed and more than 10 were wounded. This may have been in preparation for the reportedly planned large ISIS attack.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he strike makes otherwise little military sense. The PMU are nominally under command of the Iraqi government. They used a house on the Syrian side, some 200 meters from the border, as there was no adequate space on the Iraqi side. While they may have Iranian support and may help the Syrian army in some of its operations they are neither Iranian troops nor do they belong to the Lebanese Hezbullah.

The Syrian government accused the U.S. of having attacked the building. One U.S. source claims to CNN that the Israeli air-force attacked the site. I doubt that this is true. The U.S. has previously attacked Syrian government aligned forces in the area. It obviously continues to use ISIS to disrupt Syrian army operations. But as the U.S. needs Iraq it can not admit that it hit Iraqi forces. That would practically guarantee that the incoming Iraqi government would tell it to leave. It might have asked Israel to provide a cover for the strike.

Technically Israel could have done the attack. It would have needed tanker support and Jordanian compliance for overflight. Over the weekend Netanyahoo announced that Israel would hit Iranian forces all over Syria. But even CNN notes that the strike is untypical for Israel and does not make any sense.

Whoever committed the strike did so in an airspace that is controlled by the U.S. military. The leaders of the PMU in Iraq will use it to rally their forces against any U.S. bases in the country.

In north Syria Turkey is continuing its colonization of Syrian towns and regions. Turkish post offices, Turkish teachers, policemen and imans are pushing the population to adopt Turkish culture. It will more difficult to dislodge than the few thousand 'rebels' in the Deraa region.

Posted by b on June 19, 2018 at 02:00 PM | Permalink

Comments

The US needs to be challenged to get out of Syria. There can never be peace there until this happens. The US is the #1 terrorist force in the world by far. These demonic hordes must be eliminated if there is t be any peace on Earth.

Posted by: mike k | Jun 19, 2018 2:17:42 PM | 1

The US and Israel would wipe out the Syrian forces in no time, I think, if they wanted to do it. Syrian and Iranian forces have no air cover. Russia has made it clear that it will never defend either Syrian or Iranian forces. Attacking Syrian and Iranian forces would be shooting fish in a barrel for the Hegemon.

As has been clear for a long time, Russia's strategy all along has been to preside over a carveup of Syria.

Posted by: paul | Jun 19, 2018 2:50:00 PM | 2

thanks b... the usa - typical bullshit country with a 100% bullshit agenda, whether it is to support israel 24/7, or do whatever shit they are regularly doing in syria... at some point it has to end.. as for turkey - that is equally depressing, but to be expected from the fanatic erdogan...

"Israel, with U.S. backing, might intervene in such an operation even if it makes little sense to do so." as pepe escobar mentioned in the 57 minute video that karlof1 posted the other day - all usa is good for at this point is destroying or messing up countries.. they did it in ukraine and they continue to work at it in the middle east... as a consequence russia and china are working around that as best as possible... it is like having some 2 year old throwing tantrums regularly... as an adult - one works around it.. it = usa/uk/israel at this point..

Posted by: james | Jun 19, 2018 3:30:14 PM | 3

The troll is full of itself again as usual. Syrian forces number @80K, including its elite Tiger Force. The operation's name is Basalt, which I thought entirely apt given the nature of how that igneous rock flows atop the landscape covering everything in its path. Also in the cards to be Basalted is al-Tanf. And if the Zionists try anything from the Golan, they'd better be ready to run.

The strike against the PMU is now being blamed on a Zionist drone--the Outlaw US Empire's spokespeople in Iraq are furiously trying to deflect the blame from themselves to no avail. Iraq's future political alignment will again force the Empire to withdraw its forces. And now that it's 100% renounced International Law by declaring it will never leave Syria, the specter of confrontation between SAA and Outlaw forces becomes a very likely reality with a repetition of the Saigon airlift out of country. SAA and Iraqi forces are clearing the remaining pockets of Daesh along border zone and within Homs desert with much renewed vigor since the Zionist attack.

Given the forces arrayed against it, the Outlaw US Empire's coalition of terrorists and Zionists will be defeated in detail--unless--they mount a counterattack using their own nationals as cannon fodder: The US from Jordan, Zionists from Golan. Such a move would of course invite a Syrian counter attack to regain Golan and drive the Outlaws from Jordan, perhaps even sending King PlayStation into his well deserved exile and thus overturning the current regional dynamic. IMO, given Neocon and Zionist hubris, this sort of scenario has a very good chance of occurring.

Preliminary probes and suppression fire against any terrorists firing on SAA and some preliminary airstrikes with lots of leaflet dropping comprise reported events so far. Several sources say the main thrust isn't to occur for 36-54 hours. We shall see.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 19, 2018 3:32:54 PM | 4

Godspeed SAA!
Thank you, B!

Posted by: roza shanina | Jun 19, 2018 3:39:01 PM | 5

Here's an image of Basalt's first objective.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 19, 2018 3:50:16 PM | 6

This may be a definitive moment in the battle for Syrian sovereignty. I wish the Syrian forces, and their allies all the best.

Posted by: ben | Jun 19, 2018 3:57:45 PM | 7

About the Author

"b" is the nom de guerre of Moon of Alabama's founding editor.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Comment here or on our Facebook Group page.

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]

It’s Time To Start Getting Enraged At What Western Imperialists Have Done To Syria

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

PROFILES IN HYPOCRISY: Because of his egregious betrayals of the public trust, and his coups, assassinations, and wars behind people's backs, Obama remains the worst president on record, worse even than Bush2 and Trump (as yet). The latter may match him in perfidy and damage, eventually. It's what US presidents usually do.

If this image bothers you, strikes you as extreme, it is a symptom of how far the establishment narrative has advanced inside you. Their propaganda—and lies—have constructed a glowing portrait of this man which is almost entirely untrue. The true Obama, the politician, is a repulsive bastard. Among other things, Obama left us with two ugly eggs: Syria and Ukraine, both flashpoints for WW3, and the theaters of terrible ongoing crimes. Thank you, Barack. Enjoy your ill-acquired millions.

are again swirling of an impending false flag chemical weapons attack in Syria, just as they did shortly before the highly suspicious Douma case in April. Warnings from Syrian and Russian intelligence, as well as US war ship movements and an uptick in US funding for the Al Qaeda propaganda firm known as the White Helmets, give these warnings a fair bit of weight. Since the US war machine has both a known regime change agenda in Syria and an extensive history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to justify military interventionism, there’s no legitimate reason to give it the benefit of the doubt on this one. These warnings are worth taking seriously.

So some people are understandably nervous. The way things are set up now, it is technically possible for the jihadist factions inside Syria and their allied imperialist intelligence and defense agencies to keep targeting civilians with chemical weapons and blaming the Assad government for them until they pull one off that is so outrageous that it enables the mass media to manufacture public support for a full-scale assault on Damascus. This would benefit both the US-centralized empire which has been plotting regime change in Syria for decades and the violent Islamist extremists who seek control of the region. It also creates the very real probability of a direct military confrontation with Syria’s allies, including Russia.

But the appropriate response to the threat of a world war erupting in Syria is not really fear, if you think about it. The most appropriate response to this would be unmitigated, howling rage at the western sociopaths who created this situation in the first place.

The lunatics who brought us to the brink of nuclear war with #Russia back in April may be rallying for another go at Armageddon in #Syria https://t.co/dqhFn7L0rd

— OffGuardian (@OffGuardian0) June 17, 2018

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he United States and its allies started the war in Syria. The narrative that it was an organic uprising brutally attacked by the Assad government is a lie. There is no reasonable doubt about this. The former Prime Minister of Qatar said on television that the US and its allies were involved in the Syrian conflict from the very beginning. A WikiLeaks cable and a declassified CIA memo both show the US government plotting to provoke an uprising in Syria exactly as it occurred, years before it happened. Former Foreign Minister of France Roland Dumas stated that he was informed that the UK was engineering an uprising in Syria two years before the violence erupted in 2011, and General Wesley Clark stated that there were Pentagon plans to take out the Syrian government in 2001. Shortly after the violence started President Obama secretly authorized the arming and training of violent extremist factions for the overthrow of Assad in a CIA program code named Timber Sycamore, which along with Saudi finances has wound up aiding some of the most evil terror groups ever to exist.

Six hundred thousand Syrians have lost their lives as a result of this regime change intervention, many of those lives ending in the most horrific ways imaginable at the hands of depraved jihadists. It was planned, and the people who planned it have names and addresses. They deserve to be punished to the fullest extent of the law for what they did. We should all be loudly demanding war crimes tribunals and life imprisonment for these vicious criminals.
Shortly after the violence started Obama secretly authorized the arming and training of violent extremist factions for the overthrow of Assad in a CIA program code named Timber Sycamore, which along with Saudi finances has wound up aiding some of the most evil terror groups ever to exist.

We need a major adjustment of our emotional posture on this issue. We shouldn’t be sitting around nervously hoping Trump pulls US troops out and western-backed terror groups don’t stage another chemical attack, we should be screaming at these bastards to get their murderous tentacles out of that poor war-torn country immediately. We shouldn’t be meekly trying to justify our skepticism of the establishment Syria narrative while snide Guardian op-eds inform us that we are not permitted to think such things. We know that we are right. We know what these evil monsters did. We should be shouting the imperialists down, not the other way around.

NOTICE THAT IN THE VIDEO BELOW, JEFFREY SACHS MINCES HIS WORDS IN ORDER TO REMAIN "ACCEPTABLE" TO US TELEVISION AND NOT BE BANNED ENTIRELY. THUS HE CALLS US WAR CRIMES IN SYRIA MERELY "MISTAKES", THEREBY PRESERVING THE ASSUMPTION OF MORAL INNOCENCE BY WASHINGTON. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM LIVES ON TO KILL ANOTHER DAY.

The same depraved sociopaths who raped Iraq are presently raping Iraq’s next-door neighbor Syria for the exact same reasons. They were wrong then. They are wrong now. We should be much more angry and aggressive in pushing back on their pernicious pro-interventionism narratives. There is no excuse for any faction of the western empire to be anywhere inside of that nation’s borders. Out. Now.

Much like medicine, anger can do more harm than good when used improperly. Channeled in a wholesome, conscious direction, however, it can be an indispensable tool for driving out the toxic influence of manipulators and exploiters.

The social engineers who manufacture the narratives which are dispensed to the mass media and repeated as fact to unsuspecting audiences rely heavily on the tactic of generating sympathy. Sympathy opens people up and allows narratives to be imbued with the power of belief in a way that bypasses skepticism and critical thinking. This is why the users and abusers you have known in your personal life are always telling stories about how much wrong has been done to them, or even going out of their way to make themselves look helpless and pathetic; if they can suck you in with sympathy, they can get you to buy into the other stories they need you to believe about who they are, who you are, what your relationship to them is, and how much money/resources/affection/sex/forgiveness you should give them.

This, right here, is the real reason anyone hates @georgegalloway. Not because he has been wrong, but because he has been completely, loudly, unapologetically right. Be George Galloway. https://t.co/tbH5FA1bcX

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 1, 2018

The propagandists understand this dynamic all too well. They used people’s emotional reaction to 9/11 to manufacture support for not one but two full-scale ground invasions. They circulate pictures of dead children whenever their deaths can be blamed on a longtime target of western imperialism, but never when their deaths are caused by western imperialism. Today the narratives most prolifically circulated by proponents of regime change interventionism in Syria are almost entirely emotional in nature, consisting of nothing more than constant repetition of nonsensical talking points about civilians being brutalized by a sadistic dictator in various ways for no apparent reason. This is all to generate sympathy in order to bypass people’s skepticism of pro-interventionist narratives.

Anger is sympathy poison. It kills the sympathy you are feeling toward the narratives being promoted by those you are angry with, thus allowing you to see things clearly and eject them like the parasites they are. This is a very useful tool for dealing with the manipulators and exploiters in your personal life, and it is equally useful for the manipulators and exploiters who control western society with money, media manipulation, intelligence agency operations and brute military force. Creating momentum for widespread rage at those who unleashed the horrors inflicted upon the Syrian people immunizes the public from toxic war propaganda narratives by that much.

Six hundred thousand human lives. The chaotic violence which ended them was planned, orchestrated and overseen by the same multinational power establishment whose media propaganda machine has been singing us a seven-year lullaby keeping us from questioning the ongoing military presence and interventionism in that nation and steering us away from seeking justice for those responsible for all that death. If anyone is deserving of our loud, lullaby-shattering howling rage, it is these people.

And of course we will be fought tooth and claw on this by the US-centralized power establishment; no one is going to give us permission to do this. They will do everything they can to maintain control of the narrative and the veil of government opacity which shrouds those responsible for their Syria atrocities. But we will be attacking, which means that they will be forced to defend against those attacks. Rather than playing defensive and trying to justify our right to be skeptical while praying that there isn’t a devastating false flag attack in the illegally-occupied nation of Syria, we should be putting them on the back foot with rage and loud demands for justice. Righteous anger can severely hobble the propaganda machine they intend to use for further interventionism in that nation.

You cannot argue with the rage of someone who is certain that an unforgivable evil has been perpetrated. You simply cannot manipulate and narrative-spin your way around that; it plants an unbreakable, immovable object in the gears of the propaganda machine. By getting unapologetically furious, loud and aggressive and letting the wisdom of our anger guide our response to the situation in Syria, we can shift the zeitgeist of anti-imperialist sentiment from a meek “Oh gosh darn I sure hope the people who decimated Iraq do the right thing in Syria” to a thunderous “FUCK YOU. OUT. NOW.”

Which is where it should be.

A world in which war crimes tribunals are actually carried out for the imperialists responsible for the evils inflicted upon the Syrian people will look very different from the world that we are in now. But shoving angrily and aggressively against the establishment structures which made it possible and screaming for justice and vengeance is the first step toward creating that world.

Let’s not play defense and reaction anymore. Let’s stop waiting for something to go wrong and start forcing things to be right. It’s time to go on the offensive with this thing. Get angry and let it roar through you.

__________________________

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Liked it? Take a second to support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon!

About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]