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By Graeme MacQueen
(Special to Truth and Shadows)

ABOVE: Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.

March 13, 2017

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.

The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favoured it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.

In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission’s report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro’s imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: “I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination.”[2]

I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to “the booby hatch.”[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission’s emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission’s report.[4]

Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a “high-level conspiracy with policy significance” to be “implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.”[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime “close to inconceivable,”[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue.

Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today’s standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period.

Chomsky’s use of the terms “implausible” and “inconceivable” has stimulated me to write the present article. I have no new evidence to bring to the debate, which is decades old now, as to how his mind and the other great minds of the U.S. left leadership could have failed to see what was obvious to so many. My approach will assume the good faith of these left leaders and will take as its point of departure Chomsky’s own words. I will explore the suggestion that these intellectuals were not able to conceive, were not able to imagine, that these attacks were operations engineered by intelligence agencies and the political right in the U.S.

Why would Castro have had less difficulty than the U.S. left leadership imagining that the assassination of Kennedy had been carried out by and for the American ultra-right and the intelligence community?

What we imagine to be true in the present will surely be influenced by what we have intimately experienced in the past. Castro’s imagination of what U.S. imperial powers might do was shaped by what he had witnessed them actually do, or attempt to do, to him and his country.

Castro referred in his November 23 talk not only to the economic warfare against Cuba, but to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, of course, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose had been active in the interim between these two latter events, and he was familiar with its main lines. Perhaps he was not familiar with all its components. As far as I am aware, he did not know on November 23, 1963 of the 1962 Operation Northwoods plan, endorsed by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba through a multi-faceted false flag operation that included terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, to be falsely blamed on Cuba.[8] Had he been familiar with this scheme he might have cited it on November 23 to bolster his case.

Castro: questioned JFK and 9/11.

Castro was certainly familiar with many plans and attempts to assassinate him, which were eventually confirmed to the U.S. public by the Church Committee’s report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”[9]But, to the best of my knowledge, he was not aware when he gave his November 23 talk of an assassination-planning meeting that had taken place the previous day. On November 22, the day Kennedy was killed, while Castro was meeting with an intermediary who conveyed Kennedy’s hope that Cuba and the United States would soon be able to work out a mode of peaceful coexistence,[10] members of the CIA were meeting with a Cuban to plot Castro’s death. The would-be assassin was not only given poison to use in an assassination attempt; he was also promised support by the CIA for a shooting, such as was taking place at that very time in Dallas. He was assured that “CIA would give him everything he needed (telescopic sight, silencer, all the money he wanted).”[11]

The Church committee used the term “ironic” to refer to the fact that the shooting of John Kennedy took place on the very day a Kennedy-Castro peace initiative was being countered by a CIA plan to kill Castro.[12] Why was there no discussion of the significance of the fact that the same people who were working for the overthrow of the Cuban government considered Kennedy and his peace initiatives serious obstacles to their plans?

Castro noted in his November 23 talk that Latin American rightwing forces might have been involved in the Kennedy killing. These forces, he said, had not only openly denounced Kennedy for his accommodation with Cuba but were pushing for an invasion of Cuba while simultaneously threatening a military coup in Brazil to prevent another Cuba. Castro could not know at the time what we now know, namely that the threatened coup in Brazil would indeed take place soon—on April 1, 1964. It would lead to a wave of authoritarianism and torture that would spread throughout Latin America.

If, therefore, we try to make the case that Castro’s critique of the mainstream account of Kennedy’s assassination was the result of paranoia, denial, and a delusional tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, we will have a hard row to hoe. Almost all the operations he mentioned in his talk, and several operations he did not mention, did involve conspiracies. Cuba was at the center of a set of actual and interconnected conspiracies.

I am not suggesting that because Castro imagined a particular scenario—ultra-right forces killing John Kennedy—it must have been true. That is not the point. The point is that only when our imagination embraces a hypothesis as possible will we seriously study that hypothesis and put it to the test.

The evidence accumulated over many years has shown, in my view, that Castro’s view of who killed John Kennedy was correct. In fact, I think the evidence presented by the first wave of researchers fifty years ago settled the matter.[13] However, it is not my intention to try to prove this in the present article. My topic is the left imagination.

The silencing, by an elite American left, of both dissident researchers and those who have been targets of Western imperial power has reached an unprecedented level in the interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001. The inability of the Western left leadership to imagine that these events were fraudulent—that they involved, as Fidel Castro put it in 1963, people “playing a very strange role in a very strange play”—has blocked understanding not of only of 9/11 but of actual, existing imperialism and its formation and deformation of world politics.

9/11 and state officials facing imperial power

Talk about blaming the victim. Three days after 9/11 the eminent economist Celso Furtado suggested in one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers that there were two explanations for the attack. One possibility, Furtado implied, was that this savage assault on America was the work of foreign terrorists, as the Americans suspected. But a more plausible explanation, he asserted, was that this disaster was a provocation carried out by the American far right to justify a takeover. He compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.[14]

Celso Furtado compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag.

Kenneth Maxwell wrote this paragraph in 2002. At the time he was the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The paragraph is from an article written for the Council entitled, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil.” In writing his article Maxwell clearly felt no need to give evidence or argument as he dismissed Furtado. He must have felt his readers would agree that the absurdity of Furtado’s remarks was self-evident. Furtado’s claim would be off their radar, beyond their imagination.

Certainly, Furtado’s imagination had a wider scope than Maxwell’s. Could his personal experience have had something to do with this? Furtado was more than an “eminent economist;” he was an extremely distinguished intellectual who had held the position of Minister of Planning in the Goulart government when it was overthrown in the April 1, 1964 coup in Brazil. Furtado said in a 2003 interview:

[15]

Did Celso Furtado have a wild imagination when he implied there was U.S. support for the coup? Not at all. The coup was not only hoped for, but prepared for and offered support at the highest level in the U.S. [16]

Furtado has not been the only sceptical voice on the Latin American left. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, himself a major target of U.S. imperial force, entered the public debate. The Associated Press reported on September 12, 2006:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it’s plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination.

The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001.

“The hypothesis is not absurd … that those towers could have been dynamited,” Chavez said in a speech to supporters. “A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion.”

“The hypothesis that is gaining strength … is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world,” Chavez said. “Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”[17]

Actually, scepticism in Venezuela about the 9/11 attacks was not new. In March of 2006, for example, well known survivor and eyewitness of the September 11, 2001 attacks, William Rodriguez, had spent time with high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Chavez, and had given talks on television and in universities in that country.[18]

The culmination of this Venezuelan scepticism was a statement in a legislative resolution of the country’s National Assembly. The resolution, apparently passed unanimously in the fall of 2006, referred to the 9/11 attacks as “self-inflicted.”[19]

Chavez: “Those towers could have been dynamited.”

In a sneering attack on the Chavez government in the Miami Herald, journalist Phil Gunson felt no need to support, with evidence or reason, his claim that Chavez was merely engaging in “anti-imperialist rhetoric.”[20] Presumably he knew the imaginations of Floridians could be trusted to block out the possibility that the insane rhetoric about 9/11 might have some truth to it.

One year later, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Fidel Castro, at that point ill and retired from government but still keeping up with political events, made his own conclusions known. “That painful incident,” he said, “occurred six years ago today.” “Today,” he said, “we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.” Castro listed several anomalies and omissions in the official reports. For example, he said: “The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists…demolition experts and others.”

Referring to the attacks generally, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically, Castro said: “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”[21]

This was a poignant admission by the man who had grasped the falsity of the Lee Harvey Oswald story one day after Kennedy’s assassination.

Reporting on Castro’s remarks in the Guardian, journalist Mark Tran said: “Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.”[22]

Tran seems to have worried that the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” term might not put an end to the matter for readers of the Guardian, so he added two brief factual claims, one having to do with DNA evidence at the Pentagon and one having to do with a 2007 video allegedly showing Bin Laden giving an address.

The contempt for Castro’s intelligence, however, was breathtaking. Tran implied that his “facts,” which could have been found in about fifteen minutes on the Internet and which were subsequently questioned even by typically uncritical mainstream journalists, were beyond the research capabilities of the former President of Cuba.[23]

Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI[24]while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.

Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:

Monthly Review
Common Dreams
Huffington Post
Counterpunch
The Nation
The Real News
Democracy Now!
Z Magazine
The Progressive
Mother Jones
Alternet.org
MoveOn.org

In the end, the most dramatic public challenge to the official account of 9/11 by a state leader did not come from the left. It came from a conservative leader who was, however, a target of U.S. imperial power. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2010, President Ahmadinejad of Iran outlined three possible hypotheses for the 9/11 attacks.[25] The first was the U.S. government’s hypothesis—”a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.” The second was the hypothesis that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” The third was a somewhat weaker version of the second, namely that the assault “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”

Ahmadinejad implied, though he did not definitively claim, that he favoured the second hypothesis. He went on to suggest that even if waging war were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack—he did not think it was—a thorough and independent investigation should have preceded the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people died.

He ended his discussion of 9/11 with a proposal that the UN set up an independent fact-finding group to look into the 9/11 events.

In reporting on this event, The New York Times noted that Ahmadinejad’s comments “prompted at least 33 delegations to walk out, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, all 27 members of the European Union and the union’s representative.”[26]

Ahmadinejad proposed that the UN investigate 9/11.

The Times’ report was given to remarks that sidestepped the Iranian president’s assertions. Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made to endear himself to the world’s Muslim community, and especially to the Arab world. Ahmadinejad was playing the politician in Iran, where he had to contend with conservatives trying to “outflank him.” Ahmadinejad wanted to keep himself “at the center of global attention while deflecting attention away from his dismal domestic record.” Ahmadinejad “obviously delights in being provocative” and “seemed to go out of his way to sabotage any comments he made previously this week about Iran’s readiness for dialogue with the United States.”

The possibility that Ahmadinejad might have been sincere, or that there may have been an evidential basis for his views, was not mentioned.

Meanwhile, the reported response to Ahmadinejad’s talk by the United States Mission to the United Nations was harsh:

Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.

Where were these anti-Semitic slurs? In his talk the Iranian President condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians and included as one of the possible motives of a 9/11 inside job the saving of “the Zionist regime” by U.S. government insiders. But how is either of these an anti-Semitic slur? He said nothing in his speech, hateful or otherwise, about Jews. He did not identify Zionism, as an ideology or historical movement, with Jews as a collectivity. He did not identify the state of Israel with Jews as a collectivity. He did not say “the Jews” carried out the 9/11 attacks.

And what did the U.S. Mission mean when it said that Ahmadinejad did not represent the views of Iranians? His views on 9/11 were probably much closer to the views of Iranians than were the views of the U.S. Mission. As will be explained later, the great majority of the world’s Muslims reject the official account of 9/11.

In his address to the General Assembly the following year, Ahmadinejad briefly revisited this issue, saying that, after his 2010 proposal of an investigation into 9/11, Iran was put “under pressure and threat by the government of the United States.” Moreover, he said, instead of supporting a fact-finding team, the U.S. killed the alleged perpetrator of the attacks (Osama bin Laden) without bringing him to trial.[27]

In 2012 another leader in the Muslim world made his position on 9/11 known. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had been Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and was still in 2012 a significant power in his country and a major figure in the global south. By then he had spent considerable time discussing 9/11 with several well-known members of the U.S. movement of dissent (including William Rodriguez and David Ray Griffin)[28] and had indicated that he questioned the official account. But on November 19, 2012 he left no doubt about his position. In a 20-minute public address introducing a day-long international conference on 9/11 in Kuala Lumpur, he noted:

The official explanation for the destruction of the Twin Towers is still about an attack by suicidal Muslim extremists, but even among Americans this explanation is beginning to wear thin and to be questioned. In fact, certain American groups have thoroughly analyzed various aspects of the attack and destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon building, and the reported crash in Pennsylvania. And their investigations reveal many aspects of the attack which cannot be explained by attributing them to attacks by terrorists—Muslims or non-Muslims.

He went on to give details of the official narrative that he found especially unconvincing, and he concluded that the 9/11 attack:

…has divided the world into Muslim and non-Muslim and sowed the seeds of suspicion and hatred between them. It has undermined the security of nations everywhere, forcing them to spend trillions of dollars on security measures…Truly, 9/11 is the worst manmade disaster for the world since the end of the two world wars. For that reason alone it is important that we seek the truth because when truth is revealed then we can really prepare to protect and secure ourselves.[29]

There is no need to quote Western media coverage of Mahathir’s remarks because, as far as I can tell, there was none—an outcome Mahathir had predicted in his talk.

Now, of course, it is possible that these current and former state officials had not seriously studied 9/11 and were simply intoxicated by anti-imperial fervour. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Those who visited Venezuela well before the public pronouncements in that country in September of 2006 noted that officials had collected books and other materials on the subject of 9/11.[30] And Malaysia’s Mahathir had been meeting people to discuss the issue for years. There is no reason to doubt what he said in his 2012 talk: “I have thought a lot about 9/11.” The dismissal of these leaders by the Western left is puzzling, to say the least.

Educator Paulo Freire, himself a victim of the 1964 coup in Brazil, pointed out years ago that when members of an oppressor class join oppressed people in their struggle for justice they may, despite the best of intentions, bring prejudices with them, “which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think…and to know.”[31] Is it possible that the left leadership in the U.S. has fallen into this trap?

The dismissal of 9/11 sceptics has been carried out through a silence punctuated by occasional outbursts. The late Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch was given to outbursts. Not content to speak of the “fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists” and to tie them to the decline of the American left, Cockburn even took the opportunity to go beyond 9/11 and pledge allegiance once more, as he had in previous years, to the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald hypothesis[32]—a hypothesis that had, in my opinion, been shown to be absurd half a century ago.

In a January 2017 article entitled, “American Psychosis,” Chris Hedges continued the anti-dissent campaign. Crying out that, “We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors,” Hedges announced that:

The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history… We don’t know “who really knocked down” the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies.[33]

The hall of mirrors is real enough but Hedges’ rant offers no escape. As far as I can discover, Hedges has made no serious study of what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and has, therefore, no idea who knocked down the buildings.[34] Moreover, he appears never to have seriously thought about what a “conspiracy theory” is and what he is denouncing when he denounces such theories. Does he really mean to suggest that the American ruling class, in pursuing its interests, never conspires?

And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.

9/11 and public opinion

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f state leaders familiar with Western imperial power have questioned the official narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks, what about “the people” beloved of the left?

Actually, sorting out what portion of the world’s population qualifies, according to ideological criteria, as “the people” is a difficult task—an almost metaphysical exercise. So let us ask an easier question: what, according to surveys undertaken, appears to be the level of belief and unbelief in the world with respect to the 9/11 narrative?

There have been many polls. Comparing and compiling the results is very difficult since the same questions are seldom asked, in precisely the same words, in different polls. It is, however, possible to set forth grounded estimates.

In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org polled over 16,000 people in 17 countries. Of the total population of 2.5 billion people represented in the survey, only 39% said they thought that Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.[35]

The belief that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks is, I suggest, an essential component of belief in the official narrative of 9/11. If only 39% is willing to name Al-Qaeda as responsible, then a maximum of 39% can be counted as believers of the official narrative.

This WorldPublicOpinion.org poll is, for the most part, supported by other polls, suggesting that the U.S. official narrative is, globally, a minority view. If these figures are correct, of the current world population of 7.5 billion, roughly 2.9 billion people affirm the official view of 9/11 and 4.6 billion do not affirm it.

Now, of the 61% who do not affirm the official view of 9/11, a large percentage says it does not know who carried out the attacks (by implication, it does not know what the goals of the attackers were, and so on). But the number of those who think the U.S. government was behind the attacks is by no means trivial. The figure appears to be about 14% of the world’s population.[36] If this is correct, roughly 1 billion people think the U.S. government was behind the attacks. Of course, this figure includes children. But even when we exclude everyone under 18 years of age we have 700 million adults in the world who think the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.

It is not clear if the Guardian’s “band of September 11 conspiracy theorists,” which Castro was said to have joined, consists of this 700 million people or if it consists of the entire group of 4.6 billion non-believers. Either way, we are talking about a pretty large “band.”

Do these poll results prove that the official narrative is false? No. Do they prove that blaming elements of the U.S. government is correct? No. But these figures suggest two things. First, the official story, despite its widespread dissemination, has failed to capture the imaginations of the majority of people on the planet. Second, the minds of 700 million adults have no trouble embracing the possibility that elements of the U.S. government were behind the attacks.

What can be said about the views of that segment of the world population that is most clearly targeted by Western imperialism today?

The so-called Global War on Terror, announced shortly after the 9/11 events, has mainly targeted countries with Muslim majorities.

The 2008 WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of people in 17 countries included five countries with majority Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented in the survey (399.6 million people in 2008), only 21.2% assigned guilt to Al-Qaeda.[37]

In 2011 the Pew Research Group surveyed eight Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented (588.2 million in 2011), only 17% assigned guilt to Arabs.[38]

The evidence suggests that scepticism toward the official account among Muslims has been growing. In December of 2016 a published poll of British Muslims indicated that only 4% of those polled believed that “Al-Qaeda/Muslim terrorists” were responsible for 9/11, whereas 31% held the American government responsible.[39] This is remarkable given the unvarying, repetitive telling of the official story by British mainstream media and political parties.

Are British Muslims wallowing in feelings of victimhood, which have made them prey to extremists peddling “conspiracy theories?” As a matter of fact, the British think tank that sponsored the 2016 poll has drawn this conclusion. But the think tank in question, Policy Exchange, has a special relationship to the UK’s Conservative Party and appears to have carried out the poll precisely in order to put British Muslims under increased scrutiny and suspicion.[40]

Cannot the left, in its interpretation of the views of this targeted population, do better?

Most peculiar and disturbing is the tendency of left activists and leaders to join with state intelligence agencies in using the term “conspiracy theory” to dismiss those who raise questions about official state narratives.

There seems to be little awareness among these left critics of the history of the term.[41] They seem not to realize that they are employing a propaganda expression, the function of which is to discourage people from looking beneath the surface of political events, especially political events in which elements of their own government might have played a hidden and unsavoury role.

In the case of the 9/11 attacks it is important to remember, when the “conspiracy theory” accusation is made, that the lone wolf alternative, which was available for the John Kennedy assassination, is not available here. Everyone agrees that the attack was the result of multiple persons planning in secret to commit a crime. That is, the attack was the result of a conspiracy. The question is not, Was there a conspiracy? The question is, Who were the conspirators? Defamation cannot answer this question.

Conclusion

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]uppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.[42] Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”

I am not concerned in this article to demonstrate the truth of the “inside job” hypothesis of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years of research have led me to conclude that it is correct, but in the present paper I am concerned only with the preliminary, but vital, issue of imagination. Those who cannot imagine this hypothesis to be true will leave it unexamined, and, in the worst of worlds, will contribute to the silencing of dissenters. The left, in this case, will betray the best of its tradition and abandon both the targets of imperial oppression and their spokespeople.

Fidel Castro sounded the warning in his November 23, 1963 speech:

Intellectuals and lovers of peace should understand the danger that maneuvers of this kind could mean to world peace, and what a conspiracy of this type, what a Machiavellian policy of this nature, could lead to.

***

(l would like to thank Ed Curtin for his inspiration and advice.)

NOTES

[2] Michael Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000 (Michael D. Morrissey, 2007), 436.

[3] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 241.

[4] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 14ff., Appendices VII and VIII.

[6] Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, 208 and throughout chapter 5.

[7] Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000, 421.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=1244&relPageId=137.

[9] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” Church Committee Reports (Assassination Archives and Research Center, 1975), http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm.

[10] Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 275.

[11] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”

[12] Ibid.

[14] Kenneth Maxwell, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2002.

[15] “Developing Brazil Today: An Interview with Celso Furtado–’Start with the Social, Not the Economic’,” NACLA Report on the Americas 36, no. 5 (2003).

[16] “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup: Declassified Documents Shed Light on U.S. Role” (The National Security Archives, The George Washington University, March 2004).

[17] “Chavez Says U.S. May Have Orchestrated 9/11: ‘Those Towers Could Have Been Dynamited,’ Says Venezuela’s President,” Associated Press, September 12, 2006.

[19] For this information I have depended on Phil Gunson, “Chávez Attacks Bush as `genocidal’ Leader,” Miami Herald, November 9, 2006.

[20] Ibid.

[21] “The Empire and Its Lies: Reflections by the Commander in Chief,” September 11, 2007, Discursos e intervenciones del Commandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Presidente del Consejo. de Estado de la Republica de Cuba.

[22] Mark Tran, “Castro Says US Lied about 9/11 Attacks,” Guardian, September 12, 2007.

[23] Sue Reid, “Has Osama Bin Laden Been Dead for Seven Years – and Are the U.S. and Britain Covering It up to Continue War on Terror?” The Mail, September 11, 2009.

[24] The FBI was officially in charge of the investigation of the crimes of 9/11, and the Bureau bears ultimate responsibility for the official narrative of 9/11, which was adopted uncritically by other state agencies and commissions.

[25] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “Address by H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Before the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (United Nations General Assembly, New York, N.Y., September 23, 2010).

[26] Neil Macfarquhar, “Iran Leader Says U.S. Planned 9/11 Attacks,” The New York Times, September 24, 2010.

[27] Daniel Tovrov, “Ahmadinejad United Nations Speech: Full Text Transcript,” International Business Times, September 22, 2011.**

[28] Richard Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures,” COTO Report, August 10, 2011, https://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/last-man-out-on-911-makes-shocking-disclosures/. The information about David Ray Griffin’s 30-60 minute discussion with Mahathir is from my personal correspondence with Dr. Griffin.

[29] Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, President of the Perdana Global Peace Foundation and Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Opens the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” Conference in Kuala Lumpur on November 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZdgaViIyI.

[30] Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures.”

**[31] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1970), 46.**

[32] Alexander Cockburn, “The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Anmerican Left,” Counterpunch, November 28, 2006. For a critique of Cockburn see Michael Keefer, “Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence,” 911Review.com, December 4, 2006.

**[33] Chris Hedges, “American Psychosis,” Truthdig, January 29, 2017.

[35] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11” (WorldPublicOpinion.org, September 10, 2008), https://majorityrights.com/uploads/who-did-911-poll.pdf.

[37] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11.” The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2008 from the Population Reference Bureau.

[38] “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist: Common Concerns About Islamic Extremism” (Pew Research Center, July 21, 2011), http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/4/. The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2011 from the Population Reference Bureau.

[40] Graeme MacQueen, “9/11 Truth: British Muslims Overwhelmingly Reject the Official 9/11 Story,” Global Research, December 29, 2016.

[41] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 2013).

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By Edward Curtin

Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende was toppled in a US-backed coup on 9/11/73—’the “forgotten 9/11”. Almost 20 years of fascistic rule followed.

It is well known that the United States is infamous for engineering coups against democratically elected governments worldwide. Voters’ preferences are considered beside the point. Iran and Mosaddegh in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia and Sukarno in 1965-7, Allende in Chile in 1973, to name a few from the relatively distant past. Recently the Obama administration worked their handiwork in Honduras and Ukraine. It would not be hyperbolic to say that overthrowing democratic governments is as American as apple pie. It’s our “democratic” tradition – like waging war.

JFK may have been a victim of the Deep State (aka The PUG =Permanent Unelected Government).

What is less well known is that elements within the U.S. ruling power elites have also overthrown democratically elected governments in the United States. One U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated because he had turned toward peace and opposed the forces of war within his own government. He is the lone example of a president who therefore was opposed by all the forces of imperial conquest within the ruling elites.

Others, despite their backing for the elite deep state’s imperial wars, were taken out for various reasons by competing factions within the shadow government. Nixon waged the war against Vietnam for so long on behalf of the military-industrial complex, but he was still taken down by the CIA, contrary to popular mythology about Watergate. Jimmy Carter was front man for the Tri-Lateral Commission’s deep-state faction, but was removed by the group represented by George H. Bush, William Casey, and Reagan through their traitorous actions involving the Iran hostages. The emcee for the neo-liberal agenda, Bill Clinton, was rendered politically impotent via the Lewinsky affair, a matter never fully investigated by any media.

Obama, CIA groomed, was smoothly moved into power by the faction that felt Bush needed to be succeeded by a slick smiling assassin who symbolized “diversity,” could speak well, and played hoops.

But surprises happen, and now we have Trump, who is suffering the same fate – albeit at an exponentially faster rate – as his predecessors that failed to follow the complete script. The day after his surprise election, the interlocking circles of power that run the show in sun and shadows – what C. Wright Mills long ago termed the Power Elite – met to overthrow him, or at least to render him more controllable. These efforts, run out of interconnected power centers, including the liberal corporate legal boardrooms that were the backers of Obama and Hillary Clinton, had no compunction in planning the overthrow of a legally elected president. Soon they were joined by their conservative conspirators in doing the necessary work of “democracy” – making certain that only one of their hand-picked and anointed henchmen was at the helm of state. Of course, the intelligence agencies coordinated their efforts and their media scribes wrote the cover stories. The pink Pussyhats took to the streets. The deep state was working overtime.

Trump’s fatal mistake was saying that he wanted to get along with Russia, that Putin was a good leader, and that he wanted to end the war against Syria and pull the U.S. back from foreign wars. This was verboten. And when he said nuclear war was absurd and would only result in nuclear conflagration, he had crossed the Rubicon.

Trump, probably never having expected to win and as shocked as most people when he did, made some crucial mistakes before the election and before taking office. Some of those mistakes have continued since his inauguration. Not his derogatory remarks about minorities, immigrants, or women. Not his promise to cut corporate taxes, support energy companies, oppose strict environmental standards. Not his slogan to “make America great again.” Not his promise to build a “wall” along the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it. Not his vow to deport immigrants. Not his anti-Muslim pledges. Not his insistence that NATO countries contribute more to NATO’s “defense” of their own countries. Not even his crude rantings and Tweets and his hypersensitive defensiveness. Not his reality-TV celebrity status, his eponymous golden tower and palatial hotels and sundry real estate holdings. Not his orange hair and often comical and disturbing demeanor, accentuated by his off the cuff speaking style. Surely not his massive wealth.

While much of this was viewed with dismay, it was generally acceptable to the power elites who transcend party lines and run the country. Offensive to hysterical liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans, all this about Trump could be tolerated, if only he would cooperate on the key issue.

Trump’s fatal mistake was saying that he wanted to get along with Russia, that Putin was a good leader, and that he wanted to end the war against Syria and pull the U.S. back from foreign wars. This was verboten. And when he said nuclear war was absurd and would only result in nuclear conflagration, he had crossed the Rubicon. That sealed his fate. Misogyny, racism, support for Republican conservative positions on a host of issues – all fine. Opposing foreign wars, especially with Russia – not fine.

Now we have a reality-TV president and a reality-TV coup d’etat in prime time. Hidden in plain sight, the deep-state has gone shallow. What was once covert is now overt. Once it was necessary to blame a coup on a secretive “crazy lone assassin,” Lee Harvey Oswald. But in this “post-modern” society of the spectacle, the manifest is latent; the obvious, non-obvious; what you see you don’t see. Everyone knows those reality-TV shows aren’t real, right? It may seem like it is a coup against Trump in plain sight, but these shows are tricky, aren’t they? He’s the TV guy. He runs the show. He’s the sorcerer’s apprentice. He wants you to believe in the illusion of the obvious. He’s the master media manipulator. You see it but don’t believe it because you are so astute, while he is so blatant. He’s brought it upon himself. He’s bringing himself down. Everyone who knows, knows that.

I am reminded of being in a movie theatre in 1998, watching The Truman Show, about a guy who slowly “discovers” that he has been living in the bubble of a television show his whole life. At the end of the film he makes his “escape” through a door in the constructed dome that is the studio set. The liberal audience in a very liberal town stood up and applauded Truman’s dash to freedom. I was startled since I had never before heard an audience applaud in a movie theatre – and a standing ovation at that. I wondered what they were applauding. I quickly realized they were applauding themselves, their knowingness, their insider astuteness that Truman had finally caught on to what they already thought they knew. Now he would be free like they were. They couldn’t be taken in; now he couldn’t. Except, of course, they were applauding an illusion, a film about being trapped in a reality-TV world, a world in which they stood in that theatre – their world, their frame. Frames within frames. Truman escapes from one fake frame into another – the movie. The joke was on them. The film had done its magic as its obvious content concealed its deeper truth: the spectator and the spectacle were wed. McLuhan was here right: the medium was the message.

This is what George Trow in 1980 called “the context of no context.” Candor as concealment, truth as lies, knowingness as stupidity. Making reality unreal in the service of an agenda that is so obvious it isn’t, even as the cognoscenti applaud themselves for being so smart and in the know.

The more we hear about “the deep state” and begin to grasp its definition, the more we will have descended down the rabbit hole. Soon this “deep state” will be offering courses on what it is, how it operates, and why it must stay hidden while it “exposes” itself.

Right-wing pundit Bill Krystal tweets: “Obviously [I] prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, [I] prefer the deep state to Trump state.”

Liberal CIA critic and JFK assassination researcher, Jefferson Morley, after defining the deep state, writes, “With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most – perhaps the only – credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump’s “wrecking ball presidency.”

These are men who ostensibly share different ideologies, yet agree, and state it publically, that the “deep state” should take out Trump. Both believe, without evidence [or pretend to believe], that the Russians intervened to try to get Trump elected. Therefore, both no doubt feel justified in openly espousing a coup d’etat. They match Trump’s blatancy with their own. Nothing deep about this.

Liberals and conservatives are now publically allied in demonizing Putin and Russia, and supporting a very dangerous military confrontation initiated by Obama and championed by the defeated Hillary Clinton. In the past these opposed political factions accepted that they would rotate their titular leaders into and out of the White House, and whenever the need arose to depose one or the other, that business would be left to deep state forces to effect in secret and everyone would play dumb.

Now the game has changed. It’s all “obvious.” The deep state has seemingly gone shallow. Its supporters say so. All the smart people can see what’s happening. Even when what’s happening isn’t really happening.

“Only the shallow know themselves,” said Oscar Wilde.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

MAIN IMAGE: The clueless Trump and his team of amateurs is no match for the Deep State networks, proficient in bending state machinery to their will. Plus he keeps making moves that sink his popularity ever deeper into the swamp of self-elimination.

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By Edward Curtin

—Karl Kraus

Most Americans dislike poetry, or at least are indifferent to it. That is probably an understatement. We live in an age of prose, of journalese, and advertising jingles. Poetry, the most directly indirect, mysterious, condensed, and passionate form of communication, is about American as socialism or not shopping. Unlike television, texting, or scrolling the internet, it demands concentration; that alone makes it suspect. Add silent, calm surroundings and a contemplative mind, and you can forget it, which is what most people do. Silence, like so much else in the present world, including human beings, is on the endangered species list. Another rare bird—let’s call it the holy spirit of true thought—is slowly disappearing from our midst.

How, for example, could a noisy mind hovering in a technological jangling begin to grasp these lines from Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem New York?

The mountains exist. I know that
And the lenses ground for wisdom.
I know that. But I have not come to see the sky.
I have come to see the stormy blood,
the blood that sweeps the machines on to the waterfalls,
and the spirit on to the cobra’s tongue.

Can you imagine telling someone in the U.S. what you did for a living was write poems? They’d look at you as if you were from outer space, some weirdo, probably a secret Russian agent, out to corrupt the youth of the land.

Long dead poets are okay in school, of course. They’re safe, since what they have to say is assumed to have no direct bearing on the present. They call them classics, and force you to read and dissect a few before you can pass an English course. They sterilize them, and create immunity to their power in students. As one of our great poets and man of letters, Kenneth Rexroth, has written, “The entire educational system is in a conspiracy to make poetry as unpalatable as possible ….everybody is out to depoetize the youth of the land.” In this regard, the schools do a terrific job. Most students graduate with the firm intent never to open another book of poems, and they don’t.

There are minor exceptions to this dismal picture of schools and poetry. There is a national program in the U.S. called Poetry Out Loud that introduces a small percentage of high school students to poetry. It is a program that individual schools can adopt and takes place a few weeks every fall. Being voluntary, it depends on the motivation of the country’s best English teachers (my wife being one) and enlightened administrators to support. Highly motivated students choose from an extensive list of poems. They must memorize their selections, and then recite them before their respective schools. Their recitations must convey the inner meaning of the poem, and their performances are judged on that and stage presence. The winners advance from schools to counties to states to national winners. One hopes that many of these students carry a love of poetry into adult life, although I would add a few caveats: competition and performance. Great poets, while not immune to those twin vices, are primarily devoted to art as a vocation. They compose in the spirit of inspiration. Nevertheless, Poetry Out Loud is a positive development.

But the vast majority of students are not part of this program, which is a shame. From their meagre educations about poetry’s importance to their lives, perhaps this would be the only echo they would remember: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one to the mall.”

Poetry, they’ve learned, has no bearing on life; it’s impractical, too meditative, nor will it get you a job. These words follow them to college, and their parents usually reinforce them. Poetry is not one of the highly funded and promoted STEM (Science, Technology, Education [a misnomer for schooling], and Mathematics) disciplines that will supposedly lead to the gravy train. Students’ minds and emotions, following the corporatization of schooling, have been digitized. Their faces often reflect the affectless nature of the little machines they are constantly fingering and assiduously searching, as if for secret messages. They meditate on Facebook as nuns do on their rosary beads and a few poetry lovers still do on lines from Rilke:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

In this the young are like their poetry-avoiding parents and teachers who have not walked out but have walked into a technological labyrinth that devours their spirits – consumes them as they consume. It is no wonder that a company has been formed to study and report to the corporations on their emotions. Affectiva (no, not a yogurt) describes its mission as follows: “Our mission is to bring emotional intelligence to the digital world. When we digitize emotion it can enrich our technology, for work, play and life…. Spun out of MIT Media Lab, our company is leading the effort to emotion-enable technology. From understanding how consumers engage with digital content, to enabling developers to add emotion sensing and analytics technology to their own apps and digital experiences.”

Chile’s unique poetic voice, Neruda, during one of his walks.

Reading faces, not poetry, is their business. They measure and analyze facial expressions of emotion with the assistance of The National Science Foundation. So they say. They have no clue that the living poems that are persons need to be pondered intimately to be known; that behind every expression is a meaning. Their manipulative stupidity is so great, and their clients’ faith in technology so touching, that they both assume the outer is the inner, that faces tell the story of the spirit’s truth, the living meaning of a person’s heart. They read the face on the book’s cover – as with Facebook – for its contents. They seem ignorant of Shakespeare or the actor’s art. They are killers of the spirit and typify the anti-poetic ethos that reigns in the U.S.

Compare the technological face-readers’ manipulations with the truth of these lines from Galway Kinnell’s poem, “The Fundamental Project of Technology.”

To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete,
evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,
which foreknowledge terrorizes the content of skulls with,
is the fundamental project of technology; however,
pseudologica fantastica’s mechanism’s require:
to establish deathlessness it is necessary to eliminate those who die;
a task attempted when a white light flashed.

Here in seven lines a poet tells us why Americans are addicted to technology and where this is leading – nuclear annihilation. He reveals the death fear at the heart of the technological obsession and its self-defeating consequences. He tells a truth few want to hear, and in doing so fulfills the age-old prophetic function of art – poetry, drama, painting, etc. Acting as “antennae of the race,” in Ezra Pounds words, genuine artists grasp by their art the unconscious conflicts most prefer to avoid at their peril. In a country addicted to ingesting technologically produced mind altering drugs and to being consumed by machines, it is no wonder that poetry is considered irrelevant.

Harold Pinter succinctly said the following about all the countless war crimes committed by the United States while the American people were deluded into thinking otherwise: “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

In many other countries, poets are held in high esteem and their poems affect people’s lives; people know their national poets’ work by heart. The Russians know Pushkin; the Irish can recite Yeats; the Chileans revere Neruda. They find hope and joy and the passion to resist oppression in their verses. Their poets take them to places where passionate love of the world can be awakened in their hearts and minds. In the U. S. they are ignored, at best. Why bother with them is the unspoken assumption. What good is poetry? We have our machines.

And if by some small chance Americans do bother, they find that a great deal of what passes for poetry is worthless drivel churned out according to formula by “creative writing” students and their mentors who have carved out a safe place for themselves in American colleges. Behind a façade of seeming profundity and studied ambiguity hides a nihilism that can best be described as a bad joke. Much of this academic poetry is just plain trivial, devoid of ideas and any lived encounter with world events that so deeply influence our lives. So much of it is solipsistic in the extreme – “selfies” in verse written from within a bubble.

I will elide Hallmark poetry at the risk of ridicule.

There are, however, many profound and wonderful contemporary poets, and it is a shame they are not read. They work in the shadows. They are not household names as in the past when literature meant something to Americans and they weren’t despondently depressed and drugged into a zombie-like passivity. Perhaps this is because, as the philosopher/psychologist Rollo May puts it, “The poet’s way is the opposite to the opaque, placid life. In authentic poetry we find a confrontation which does not involve repression nor covering up nor sacrifice of passion in order to avoid despair, nor any of the other ways most of us use to avoid direct acknowledgment of our destiny.”

In an age of constant death and war and smiling killers sitting in the White House, who seeks out today’s Kenneth Rexroth? “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was written in the “placid” 1950s. One verse follows.

You,

The hyena with the polished face and bow tie,

In the office of a billion dollar

Corporation devoted to service;

The vulture dripping with carrion,

Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,

Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;

The jackal in double-breasted gabardine,

Barking by remote control,

In the United Nations;

The vampire bat seated at the couch head,

Notebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;

The autonomous, ambulatory cancer,

The Superego in a thousand uniforms;

You, the finger man of behemoth,

The murderer of the young men.

The work of our best poets confronts us with our deepest anxieties and the questions that hover over our lives like a held breath. Since the late 19^th century, our finest poets and thinkers have devoted themselves to the Herculean task of undercutting the false distinction between thought and emotion (passions being a more inclusive word) that has been a mainstay, not only of rationalism and romanticism, but of the way we live. This invalid distinction goes back to Plato, who wanted poetry banned because he said it was imitative and did not possess ideas, as philosophy did. He said poetry was irrationally emotional and dealt in illusions.

This critique of poetry is paralleled at the individual level by the saying, “I know that intellectually, but emotionally…” – as if emotions were irrational and seize one like a worry dog seizes a duck shot by a hunter. This belief results in people becoming victims of their emotions, and victims of poetry and the arts that are assumed to be devoid of ideas. This schizoid attitude lies at the heart of issues of faith and responsibility that plague our times, and it is against this ongoing myth that the most astute poets aim their art.

This effort is linked to the increasingly widespread disbelief in the reality of the objective world and the growing acceptance of the idea of the “social construction of reality” (even if one never heard of the term), an idea co-terminus with the movement from modern to “postmodern society” and the development of sophisticated technologies of mind control. It has led to the devaluation of our senses, our divorce from the reality of the natural world, and the diminution of direct personal experience. While understanding how powerful elites manipulate “reality” perception can lead to liberating truth, it has primarily led to widespread skepticism and confusion as technology has grown exponentially more sophisticated and the modern corporate state’s propaganda machines have utilized it with lies and deceptions in the service of empire. When people believe that “everything is relative” and socially constructed, the assumption that there are no facts or truths seeps into public consciousness and corrupts people’s sense of reality at the deepest level. It is soul murder. Of course, that “everything is relative” is an absolute statement that contradicts itself is usually lost on true believers. Or is it true doubters?

Modern propaganda is reality construction. People like Dick Cheney and his innumerable ilk throughout the U.S. government bluntly crow that while others may report the facts, they create them – they create reality and what people think is reality. Then their stenographers in the mainstream corporate media report this created reality that most distracted, hypnotized, and ignorant Americans take for reality.

Harold Pinter succinctly said the following about all the countless war crimes committed by the United States while the American people were deluded into thinking otherwise: “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

So what at first glance may seem a small issue of concern only to poets and assorted eggheads, should be of momentous importance to everyone. The poet’s dilemma is actually everyone’s. Against a steady devaluation of the created world – the real content of poetry – the poet’s fight is against the heightened emphasis on pure form over content, as if the world existed as a palette for one’s inward paintings, a recording of precious images, stylistic performances, or fake news.

I am not arguing that poetry and all the arts should be didactic or political tracts. Far from it.

No Theory

No theory will stand up to a chicken’s guts
being cleaned out, a hand rammed up
to pull out the wriggling entrails,
the green bile and the bloody liver;
no theory that does not grow sick
at the odor escaping.

—David Ignatow

Poetry is the search for truth. It marries outer to inner. It probes reality with words. It suggests, states, intimates, all the while inviting the reader to enter into a raid on what was previously unspeakable. This exploration is composed of ideas, images, and words arranged in ways that engender powerful emotions and thoughts. Like life, a poem swims in mystery. Sometimes it carries a tune that moves the words, and the reader is moved in return. Sometimes it is out of tune to jar the reader out of a life of complacency with no questions asked, no disruptions. True poetry startles. It inspires. It enlivens.

It is a distillation of the human spirit, as essential as bread. It is composed of a few simple ingredients, as is bread. They are: the real, actually existing, outside world, and us; the outside world that we are in and that is in us, and our emotional thoughts about our condition. Flour, water, and yeast. The bread rises, the poem forms. They are good or bad, depending on taste. They nourish or don’t. But we cannot live without them. Thomas McGrath writes:

On the Christmaswhite plains of the floured and flowering

kitchen table

The holy loaves of bread are slowly being born:

Rising like low hills in the steepled pastures of light-

Lifting the prairie farmhouse afternoon on their arching

backs.

While academic hucksters churn out reams of solipsistic verse of hallucination and artifice, our true poets passionately address issues that count and should be of concern to the average person: questions of value and ultimate concern, of life and death, of meaning or meaninglessness, of truth and lies.

In a screen and selfie culture, these matters are irrelevant.
In a robotized world, technology is king.
Great poets say otherwise.

If such poetry needs a defense, let me leave the final words to Caroline Forche, an authentic poet if there ever were one. The following is from her poem “Ourselves or Nothing” and cuts to the heart of the matter.

There is a cyclone fence between
Ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
We hover in a calm protected world like
Netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
Of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing.

This article first appeared at Intrepid Report

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

MAIN IMAGE: Pablo Neruda, Chile’s bard. Born to humble origins (Neftali Reyes), he went on to prove that poetic genius is not the preserve of the rich or refined, but the blessing of destiny.

by JOHN STEPPLING

“Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that.” Dylan

The age of cognitive dissonance. Sunday, the American public (millions of them) watched the NFL Super Bowl. This spectacle is, of course, rife with all manner of jingoism and military symbolism (as is the game itself). But this is also a game, American football, that has proved to destroy the human brain of those who play it. In fact there was even a Hollywood movie, a popular one, about the doctor who led the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); the brain trauma caused by the collision of man and helmet. Great players such as Mike Webster and Junior Seau died by their own hand; Terry Long drank anti freeze as his brain went into full melt down. Here is a list of NFL players with CTE.

Tom Brady: The man who, by US standards, has it all: White, male, 6’4″ of toned muscle, model good looks, and wedded to a supermodel wife. Currently worth $200MM, and chances are he will easily top $1 billion before he turns 45. Could a guy like this find anything wrong with the imperial status quo?

None of these facts have put much of a dent into the NFL profit sheet. Or the popularity of the pro game. In fact, the dark shadow hanging over this spectacle is that its popularity may well have been enhanced by the facts surrounding the cost of playing. A league that is over 60% black starts to serve as something of a gladiator sacrifice ritual. One with links to the American slave owning past. Never underestimate the deep lacerating and ugly racism of the U.S. public.

This was the same week that Donald Trump notched his first war crime, though I suspect he was only dimly aware of it (a common attribute, it is becoming clear, for The Donald). An 8 year old girl, the baby sister of a teenage American citizen also killed, a couple years back, by drone. This took place in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Why, you might ask, is the U.S. killing people (including children) in Yemen? Well, the U.S. is helping the murderous monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Why, you ask again….and the answer is because, well, that’s how foreign policy operates. Why are there 900 U.S. military bases around the globe? I will return to that a bit later.

This also marked the week where the anti Trump forces (well, the ones funded by various front groups, a good many of them the product of George Soros’ long tentacles) went into hyper drive. One meme I saw was mocking how Trump can’t read. And look, I don’t think he can, either. I think he is borderline functionally illiterate. But so was Ronald Reagan. So was Dan Quayle. Republicans must long for the age of literacy under Bush Jr. What is becoming clear, however, is that Trump has no idea what he is doing. I mean he thinks Frederic Douglas is still out there doing a ‘helluva job’. Trey Parker of South Park confessed he cant find a way to satirize Donald Trump. So he’s giving up for the time being.

“Former cast members from SNL take time to make fun of him, now. And look, on one level I get it. But these same people continue to fawn over Obama. They voted Hillary. They have only barely little more grasp of Yemeni politics than Trump. They just cover it up more successfully. They know the right desert fork. They went to good schools. And what was once called middle America, or ‘the heartland’ are now the flyover states, and this populace today (what are really just white petty bourgeoisie and not swastika tattooed Klansmen) hates the entitled liberals who make fun of Trump. They are, for the moment, ready to forgive Trump. They don’t like him either, but they hate those making fun of him…”

I feel ya. But Trump is now surrounded by nearly equally sub literate advisors. Jerry Fallwell’s kid is now going to helm a task force on education. What this portends is anyone’s guess. But before getting too disturbed, one should remember the actual state of public education in the U.S. under Obama or Bush or Clinton. It was Reagan, again, who pretty much had already destroyed any semblance of a real education for america’s children. Trump cut arts spending, too. Gosh, no NPR? Am I supposed to care? I have to tell you I don’t. I mean the National Endowment for the Arts already had a budget less than the US Marine Corps band. And basically the entire arts infrastructure was monopolized by the white bourgeoisie and had excluded, for a long while, all voices of any radical nature. So I don’t care, really.

The problem is that with Trump, the message — the optics — the symbolism if you want, is what is so pernicious. The elevation of this rapey buffoon to the Presidency is a culture shock (Trump as a younger man actually liked Roy Cohn!). So I get that shock part. I’m shocked in a sense, too. But the reality is that Trump has no idea what is going on. So who is calling the shots then? Who wanted to bomb a group of people in Yemen and snuff out the life of a beautiful eight year old child? What sort of sociopathic personality does that? The answer is that the corridors of power in the U.S. — the deep state — never really changes its actors. And those actors are sociopaths, in fact. I think that is not hyperbole. Maddie Albright and the famous ‘it was worth it’ reply to the death of millions of Iraqi children suggests I am right.

The *War on Terror* has not abated since its inception, and really it was only an intensification of already existing U.S. foreign policy. The majority protestors against Trump almost never mention U.S. imperialist wars of aggression. They DO care about further shredding an already pathetic health care system and what will now be an even more egregious assault on women’s reproductive rights. And that is certainly legitimate. But stepping back just a little would reveal that the war on the poor, on black neighborhoods, and the installing of draconian surveillance systems and a constant ever receding list of civil liberties is a part of this. You cannot separate the attack on women’s rights from the death of that 8 year old girl. Or the vicious coup in Honduras courtesy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Or the proxy war in Syria. The neocons in positions of influence have never gone away. They were there before 9/11 and they are there now. Few in those protests have any grasp of the destruction of Yugoslavia. Most still think Milosevic was a war criminal. How many bother to mention U.S. black sites and those military bases around the globe? Do they wonder what goes on in those places? I think such facts only appear in their consciousness when watching a TV show or Hollywood film. And mostly they are perfectly fine with killing Arabs just as they are perfectly fine with mass incarceration and with eroding civil liberties. Do any of them protest the U.S. and especially the Clinton’s, grotesque plunder of Haiti?

ISIS beheading a Syrian Christian. This is what our “moderate rebels” do—routinely. Thank Obama and the Clinton mafia for such gruesome deaths. Naturally, showing such images, let alone showing the hidden connections, is considered too “shocking” for the American public sensitivity, as per the mainstream media gatekeepers.

If you love the Super Bowl, then you probably don’t dwell in any depth on the depravity of the U.S. government and its crimes around the world. And I say this because to enjoy the sight of young men turning their brains to mush should not be enjoyable. I say this knowing my own contradictions. I was close to the boxing world for much of my life. I admired the beauty and sacrifice and courage of great fighters. I still do. But I am aware of the problem with this. And if you asked me today I’d say ban all boxing. But I will watch fights again. (there is a side bar discussion to be had about why boxing feels tragic and heroic and MMA feels simply violent). But one needs to examine why young men are still willing to participate in these sports. The obvious answer is that for many of the poorer families in the U.S., the possibility of comparative wealth can come no other way. (And boxing at least rarely displays any jingoism. It is, as someone said, the red light district of sports).

But Trump is doing and saying pretty much what all presidents before him have done and said in foreign policy terms. Oh, he switched from Russia to China, but eventually he will get to both. So there is a cognitive dissonance to attack Trump but not have attacked Obama. And this is the core problem. The protests are about Trump the man, not his policies. Or rather, not his foreign policy. And really, even his domestic policy really doesn’t stand very far outside what is already mostly in place courtesy of the last six or seven U.S. presidents. They are not anti war protests, not even anti torture. Not anti Imperialism, except in a minority of cases and not anti Capitalist.

Edward Curtin wrote of the recent protests….

“At the call of organizers, they were roused from their long liberal naps. Reacting to Trump’s gross comments about “grabbing pussy” – sick words, macho aggressive in their meaning – they donned their pink hats, made signs, and took their newly awakened outrage to the streets. Rightly disgusted by being verbally assaulted and afraid that their reproductive rights and services were threatened, they pounced like tigers on their verbal attacker. Massive, very well organized, media friendly marches and demonstrations followed. It was a hit parade. Yet as others have forcefully written, something is amiss here. During the Obama years of endless wars, drone killings, the jailing of whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, etc., these demonstrators were silent and off the streets. A large number of the women (if not the vast majority) who marched against Donald Trump – and the recent women’s marches can only be described as anti-Trump marches – were Hilary Clinton supporters, whether they would describe their votes as “the lesser of two evils” or not. Thus, opposition to Trump’s aggressive statements toward “pussy” was implicit support for Clinton’s and Obama’s “feminism.” In other words, it was support for a man and a woman who didn’t publicly talk aggressively about women’s genitals, but committed misogynist and misandrist actions by killing thousands of women (and men and children) all over the world, and doing it with phallic shaped weapons. Trump will probably follow suit, but that possibility was not the impetus for the marches. The marches centered on Trump’s misogynist, macho language, and his threats to limit women’s access to health services – i.e. family planning and abortion.”

Trump is the logical culmination of the rightward drift of U.S. liberalism over the last fifty years. He is the sunlamped face of Capital.

The Democratic Party systematically purged left voices and anything that lent support to communist goals and organizations, worldwide and at home. The fall of the Soviet Union signaled the onslaught of neo-liberalism in hyper drive. Enzo Traverso, the Italian historian, noted the failures of liberalism in assisting the rise of Hitler and National Socialism. And the deeply engrained tendency of the liberal to gravitate toward the fascist right. The liberal bourgeoisie had a dog in the fight for the status quo. Michael Parenti’s cogent article on left anticommunism (from 2014) noted

“In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. “Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.” As Richard Levins put it, “So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay” (Monthly Review, 9/96).”

From Nicaragua to Yugoslavia, the anti communist hysteria was given credence and legitimacy by the right AND by much of the left. Or, rather, the non communist left. Watching Trump carry on the same policies as Obama, which in turn were carrying out the same policies as Bush Jr and Clinton and Bush Sr, it is remarkable the outrage coming from the liberal classes today. The privatizing of education and the further disempowerment of labor, along with a continuation of mass incarceration are all things that began back in 1989. And the endless search for new markets for Western capital has not halted since Reagan.

Norman Pollock wrote, here at CP just last week….

“This raises the question, applicable to Trump and his predecessors (for he cannot be examined in a vacuum), of the connectivity in America of power, wealth, and fascism, possibly from the time of Truman onward, and certainly, from Reagan onward.{ } America is fast crumbling into a boiling cauldron of hate, selfishness, and combativeness, Trump the perfect articulator, implementer, further executioner of capitalism…”

That Trump is so obviously incurious and ignorant suggests he will turn to others for advice, and likely some not officially within his administration. Ron and Nancy looked to the stars. One obvious voice for the Donald will be Benjamin Netanyahu. The other obvious candidate will be Eric Prince, late of Blackwater and insider pal to Trump and Pence both. And I suspect Pence almost serves as a life insurance policy for Trump. If anyone can be found to be more unstable and deranged than Trump, on a personal level, then it’s Pence. The logic of U.S. thinking on global hegemony, from those myriad think tanks that dot Washington, is one that will dovetail nicely with the fanaticism of a Netanyahu. The Israeli leadership has never had a problem working with anti semite fascists. And Trump is not an anti semite (that would be Steve Bannon, who’s influence may already be waning). In any case the targeting of Iran is directly linked to Israeli interests and the choice of General Mattis was quite possibly already a whispered suggestion.

It is fitting that the New England Patriots (sic) won the Super Bowl. Tom Brady and Coach Belichick both are Trump supporters. It’s the whitest team in the NFL, for what that’s worth (3 white wide receivers! Come on.), and somehow the entire spectacle of Super Sunday was one that suggested U.S. grandiosity and white supremacism.

I was thinking of Ryszard Kapuściński’s short book on The Shah of Iran (Shah of Shahs)…Reza Pahlavi was a U.S. client and his, Pahlavi’s, secret police, SAVAK, trained by the CIA and lend-out interrogation experts from Fort Benning and The School of The Americas.

“They would kidnap a man as he walked along the street, blindfold him, and lead him straight into the torture chamber without asking a single question. There they would start in with the whole macabre routine–breaking bones, pulling out fingernails, forcing hands into hot ovens, drilling into the living skull, and scores of other brutalities–in the end, when the victim had gone mad with pain and become a smashed, bloody mass, they would proceed to establish his identity. Name? Address?”

The American shah of Atlantic City will never be cool. Just super gaudy. And supremely ignorant—forever.

The CIA invented Pahlavi (Āryāmehr, The Light of the Aryans, the King of Kings) because Mossedegh had the temerity to nationalize the oil industry, and it feels oddly like a future foretold. Trump brings the nouveau riche desire to be a sort of American Shah. The same gold and cherebum, the same kitsch aristocratic trappings — though in Trump’s case these things mask the deep insecurities of the son of a brothel owner and slum lord. Trump is the counterfeit Shah. He embodies something of the crappy taste of all banana republic dictators. It is sort ‘despot cool’ ala Mobutu Sese Seko. Except one thing Trump will never be cool. Never.

The entire shift in the ruling financial sector before the election; the shot callers in Wall Street boardrooms and the Pentagon, seemed to have thrown their weight behind Trump. The reasons remain obscure. But I can’t shake the feeling Trump never intended to win. In any event, he can’t be enjoying this. He is a daily endless 24/7 object of derision and ridicule. His consigliere, Bannon, appears himself a bit shaken. They woke up and suddenly a world beyond their preparation lay before them. Donald doesn’t know there is a country called Yemen. But he signed off bombing them. Didn’t he? Presumably. Trump is the 21st century version of a Shah — the shah of Atlantic City and reality TV, a bone ignorant crude and louche operator who did fourteen seasons of The Apprentice as preparation for this new role. But I suspect Trump sees himself as The Donald of Donalds: and the Art of the Deal as this era’s Profiles in Courage — though perhaps not. Former cast members from SNL take time to make fun of him, now. And look, on one level I get it. But these same people continue to fawn over Obama. They voted Hillary. They have only barely little more grasp of Yemeni politics than Trump. They just cover it up more successfully. They know the right desert fork. They went to good schools. And what was once called middle America, or ‘the heartland’ are now the flyover states, and this populace today (what are really just white petty bourgeoisie and not swastika tattooed Klansmen) hates the entitled liberals who make fun of Trump. They are, for the moment, ready to forgive Trump. They don’t like him either, but they hate those making fun of him. For how long they will forgive him is unclear. But for now their hatred of the white liberals who manufactured the master narrative for America and made fun of NASCAR and duck hunting and college football tailgate parties trumps (sic) all else. There is enormous and complex cultural overlap, of course. But the reality is, some people somewhere backed Trump. The Clintons were thrilled he was running. Hell, I suspect the Clintons might have encouraged him to run. For the DNC, the leaked Podesta emails verifies they wanted him or Ted Cruz. Even they couldn’t lose to a Don Trump, so the reasoning had it.

But they did lose.

Bannon, remember, once produced a documentary on Reagan (In the Face of Evil) and honed his carny pitchman skills at both Goldman Sachs and Breitbart media. Bannon is the voice of, or at least serves as stand-in, for a shrinking class of American worker who vaguely still dream the American dream. Trump is the latter day Reagan in that sense. The Trump base are really, in their own way, social climbers. And the great miscalculation of the DNC in this election was to wildly underestimate the anger of middle America. The petty bourgeoisie who watched in rapture as Tom Brady orchestrated a historic comeback. A comeback to beat the team of the blackest city in the U.S. (well, the one with a football team anyway); these were people who instinctively rejected all that the Clinton’s stood for. Remember, too, that half the electorate didn’t vote. That is the other lesson in all this.

John Pilger wrote of the recent protests by quoting firstly journalist Martha Gelhorn (circa 1930s)…

“A writer,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, “must be a man of action now… A man who has given a year of his life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where he belonged. If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will last.” Her words echo across the unction and violence of the Obama era and the silence of those who colluded with his deceptions.”

Pilger added..

“According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.”

This is what the Democratic Party, all of it, was silent about. Decades of removing communist and socialist and really, even just working class voices from what was supposed to be the party of ‘labor’ has resulted in the silence of bourgeois culture in the face countless global crimes and military aggressions. The age of humanitarian intervention stripped the patina from the deaths head of liberal apologetics. Cognitive dissonance. The complicity in war crimes in Yemen, with and in support of the most odious regime in the world, Saudi Arabia, passes in silence. Total media silence. Total. Hillary Clinton’s comment about deplorables reveals a mind set that sees poverty as something to ignore. One is led to expect such contempt from a Barbara Bush, but Democrats were supposed to be different. The imprisonment and murder of radicals, from Fred Hampton to Leonard Peltier is simply not a topic at the Democratic convention. The cynical tolerance of a brutal never ending assault on the global south is not protested.

So, until protestors begin to find solidarity with those hundreds of thousands of malnourished children in Yemen, or the displaced and suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, or Honduras or Haiti or Gaza, or who pledge solidarity with the two million jailed in the U.S. prison system…then these protests are just as morally bankrupt as the Wall Street ghouls and Christian zealots who are salivating at the opportunity to punish women, the poor, and all people of colour domestically. These things cannot be separated. Ferguson is Port au Prince and is Fallujah and is Tripoli. The violence of such silence really cannot be tolerated anymore. The rights of women matter in central America and the Middle East, too. Trump, the cartoon Shah of TV reality entertainment is just a symptom. Covering up the symptom does not cure the disease. And the disease is Capitalism.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. Plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. A collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other Plays was published in 1999, and his book on aesthetics, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest was published this year by Mimesis International.

MAIN IMAGE: Image by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
This article is a crosspost with Counterpunch, where it originally appeared.

By Edward Curtin
THIS IS A CROSSPOST WITH FRATERNAL SITE GLOBAL RESEARCH

Bernays—the malignant genie of Western “civilization”. His seed fructified in the neoliberal soil.

In 1929, Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, U.S./CIA war and coup propagandist, and the founder of public relations, conducted a successful mind-manipulation experiment for the tobacco industry. In those days there was a taboo against women smoking in public, and Bernays was hired to change that. He consulted a psychiatrist, A. A. Brill, who told him that cigarettes represented the penis and were a symbol of male power. If women could be tricked into smoking, then they would unconsciously think they “had” their own penises and feel more powerful. It was irrational, of course, but it worked. Bernays had, in his words, “engineered the consent” of women through symbolic prestidigitation. The age of the image was launched.

He did this by having a group of women hide cigarettes under their clothes at a Big Easter parade in New York. At a signal from Bernays, they took out and lit up what he called “torches of freedom” (based on the Statue of Liberty).

The press had been notified in advance and dutifully photographed and reported the story. The New York Times headline for April Fool’s Day 1929 was entitled “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom.”

This fake news story made cigarettes socially acceptable for women, and sales and advertising to them increased dramatically.

The institutional power structures smiled and continued on their merry way. Women were no freer or more powerful, but they felt they were.

A symbolic taboo was breached as women were bamboozled. Image triumphed over reality.

We have moved on from the symbol of the penis to that of the “pussy,” and now the symbol is displayed openly as an ironic postmodern spectacle in the form of a sea of pussyhats.

And the fake news stories continue apace; the mind manipulators labor on and are still successful.

Genitalia remain the rage. In the 1920s there was no overt talk of the penis; the idea then was that there was an unconscious association that could sway women to smoke. Today subtlety is gone. “Pussy” power is out there, cutely symbolized by pink pussyhats (see image below), promoted by a group called the Pussyhat Project that on its website praises the Washington Post and the New York Times for their “high quality journalism” and “integrity.” “In the midst of fake news sites,” the Pussyhat Project claims, “we need high quality journalism more than ever….newspapers that have integrity….[that] can continue reporting the truth” – i.e. the Times and the Post.

By “truth” and “integrity” do the women running the site mean that the Russians are behind Trump’s election, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and there are 200 or so alternative websites that repeat Russian propaganda, a few of the lies reported by these papers of “integrity”? Or do the Pussyhat women have something else in mind?

Most women demonstrators who marched against Trump were no doubt well intentioned within their limited perspective. At the call of organizers, they were roused from their long liberal naps. Reacting to Trump’s gross comments about “grabbing pussy” – sick words, macho aggressive in their meaning – they donned their pink hats, made signs, and took their newly awakened outrage to the streets. Rightly disgusted by being verbally assaulted and afraid that their reproductive rights and services were threatened, they pounced like tigers on their verbal attacker. Massive, very well organized, media friendly marches and demonstrations followed. It was a hit parade.

Yet as others have forcefully written, something is amiss here. During the Obama years of endless wars, drone killings, the jailing of whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, etc., these demonstrators were silent and off the streets.

A large number of the women (if not the vast majority) who marched against Donald Trump – and the recent women’s marches can only be described as anti-Trump marches – were Hilary Clinton supporters, whether they would describe their votes as “the lesser of two evils” or not. Thus, opposition to Trump’s aggressive statements toward “pussy” was implicit support for Clinton’s and Obama’s “feminism.” In other words, it was support for a man and a woman who didn’t publicly talk aggressively about women’s genitals, but committed misogynist and misandrist actions by killing thousands of women (and men and children) all over the world, and doing it with phallic shaped weapons. Trump will probably follow suit, but that possibility was not the impetus for the marches. The marches centered on Trump’s misogynist, macho language, and his threats to limit women’s access to health services – i.e. family planning and abortion.

Since the women who recently marched didn’t march against Obama and his Secretary of State Clinton while they slaughtered foreigners (others) and Clinton exulted at the sodomized killing of Muammar Gaddafi, it is quite clear the focus of their anger was a sense of personal outrage at Trump’s insulting remarks.

Where were they these last eight years?

Mike Whitney recently said it perfectly.

“They were asleep. Weren’t they? Because liberals always sleep when their man is in office, particularly if their man is a smooth-talking cosmopolitan snake-charmer like Obama who croons about personal freedom and democracy while unleashing the most unspeakable violence on civilians across the Middle East and Central Asia….No one seems to care when an articulate bi-racial mandarin kills most people of color, but when a brash and outspoken real estate magnate takes over the reigns of power, then ‘watch out’ because here comes the protesters, all three million of them!”

Obviously partisan politics, self-interest, hypocrisy, and incredible ethnocentrism are involved. Would women’s marches have occurred if Hillary Clinton had been elected? Of course not. She would have been applauded and regaled as the first woman president, and her war-mongering history against women and men would have been excused and supported into the future, just as Obama’s has been.

This is liberal war porn by default; complicity through silence.

“Hands off my pussy.” “My pussy bites back.” These are funny repartees to Trump’s comments, but they are totally ineffectual and harmless. Trump’s objectives are larger, as were Obama’s and Clinton’s. Symbolic protests attract attention, but result in the stasis of structural power arrangements, or worse. Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom” campaign resulted in more women smoking, more disease, and more profits for the tobacco companies. He preyed on the gullible. What was learned?

The Pussyhat Project resulted in a sea of pink adorned women and made for colorful images. Images, Daniel Boorstin wrote in his prescient 1960 book, The Image , were the future. That future is now. The language of images is everywhere, and it is tied to what Boorstin termed “pseudo-events” and our “demand for the illusions with which we deceive ourselves.”

Symbolically wearing your genitals on your head is surely an arresting image, but it is misplaced and duplicitous when one has not opposed the systematic brutality of the American empire’s ravaging around the world under Obama and Clinton.

Boorstin argued that this world of images would displace our ability to think clearly and understand the ways we were being manipulated. An image, he said, was “synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, simplified, and ambiguous.” Contrived and appealing to the senses – there are no pink pussycats as far as I know – they side-step thought and cannot, strictly speaking, be unmasked. “An image, like any other pseudo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.” The contrivance of the image and our knowledge of its ingenuity – e.g. pussyhats – convince us that we are smart to be taken in, even when we’re not. It’s interesting to note that the word image (Latin, imago) is related to the word imitate (Latin, imatari). It’s as though certain images can serve as mirrors (“to mirror” being cognate with “to imitate”) in which we can see and mimic ourselves, “though we like to pretend we are seeing someone else.” And seeing our images in the images, we can imitate ourselves in an endless cycle of self-love and navel gazing. Selfie culture has triumphed. The society of the spectacle marches on.

The focus on genital imagery is a reflection of American narcissism, an inward gazing, while out “there,” others are being slaughtered by our masters of war. This is the start of a pink color revolution.

Edward Bernays would be proud.

The original source of this article is Global Research

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

BEYOND THEIR WILDEST DREAMS: 9/11 AND THE AMERICAN LEFT

By Graeme MacQueen
(Special to Truth and Shadows)

ABOVE: Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.

9/11 and state officials facing imperial power

9/11 and public opinion

Conclusion

The Deep State Goes Shallow: A Reality-TV Coup d’etat in Prime Time

By Edward Curtin

Obama, CIA groomed, was smoothly moved into power by the faction that felt Bush needed to be succeeded by a slick smiling assassin who symbolized “diversity,” could speak well, and played hoops.

Without Poetry We are Dead: With It We Die Living

By Edward Curtin

—Karl Kraus

You,

The hyena with the polished face and bow tie,

In the office of a billion dollar

Corporation devoted to service;

The vulture dripping with carrion,

Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,

Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;

The jackal in double-breasted gabardine,

Barking by remote control,

In the United Nations;

The vampire bat seated at the couch head,

Notebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;

The autonomous, ambulatory cancer,

The Superego in a thousand uniforms;

You, the finger man of behemoth,

The murderer of the young men.

The Violence of Silence

by JOHN STEPPLING

“Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that.” Dylan

Symbolic Seduction: Women’s Rights, Partisan Politics, Ethnocentrism and “American Narcissism”

By Edward Curtin
THIS IS A CROSSPOST WITH FRATERNAL SITE GLOBAL RESEARCH

BEYOND THEIR WILDEST DREAMS: 9/11 AND THE AMERICAN LEFT

By Graeme MacQueen (Special to Truth and Shadows)

ABOVE: Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.

9/11 and state officials facing imperial power

9/11 and public opinion

Conclusion

The Deep State Goes Shallow: A Reality-TV Coup d’etat in Prime Time

By Edward Curtin

Obama, CIA groomed, was smoothly moved into power by the faction that felt Bush needed to be succeeded by a slick smiling assassin who symbolized “diversity,” could speak well, and played hoops.

Without Poetry We are Dead: With It We Die Living

By Edward Curtin

—Karl Kraus

You,

The hyena with the polished face and bow tie,

In the office of a billion dollar

Corporation devoted to service;

The vulture dripping with carrion,

Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,

Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;

The jackal in double-breasted gabardine,

Barking by remote control,

In the United Nations;

The vampire bat seated at the couch head,

Notebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;

The autonomous, ambulatory cancer,

The Superego in a thousand uniforms;

You, the finger man of behemoth,

The murderer of the young men.

The Violence of Silence

by JOHN STEPPLING

“Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat Well, you must tell me, baby How your head feels under somethin’ like that.” Dylan

Symbolic Seduction: Women’s Rights, Partisan Politics, Ethnocentrism and “American Narcissism”

By Edward Curtin THIS IS A CROSSPOST WITH FRATERNAL SITE GLOBAL RESEARCH

By Graeme MacQueen
(Special to Truth and Shadows)

“Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that.” Dylan

By Edward Curtin
THIS IS A CROSSPOST WITH FRATERNAL SITE GLOBAL RESEARCH