by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy/Bertolt Brecht excerptsHuge corporations and foreign nations take a proprietary interest in the government of the United States because they own it. They bought it at the on-going auction called 'K-street' where is sold to the highest bidders the services of Congress, the White House and even the US Supreme Court.
Our capital is a whore house.
Those intrepid bloggers, progressives, activists who oppose this new Leviathan are understandably frustrated by the impressive 'arsenal' that is summoned against us. Nevertheless, we have among our weapons, the most powerful and it is one that the PR flacks and spin-doctors will never have access to. It is --simply --the truth. Against a multitude of lies, spin, distractions and bullshit, the truth must always triumph. It may be our only weapon. But it is the most powerful.
Below the ruled line follows an except from Bertolt Brecht's essential essay on 'truth'. Readers of the Existentialist Cowboy have often read my quote of Brecht:
A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!Following --Bertolt Brecht:
The truth must be spoken with a view to the results it will produce in the sphere of action. As a specimen of a truth from which no results, or the wrong ones, follow, we can cite the widespread view that bad conditions prevail in a number of countries as a result of barbarism. In this view, Fascism is a wave of barbarism which has descended upon some countries with the elemental force of a natural phenomenon. According to this view, Fascism is a new, third power beside (and above) capitalism and socialism; not only the socialist movement but capitalism as well might have survived without the intervention of Fascism. And so on. This is, of course, a Fascist claim; to accede to it is a capitulation to Fascism.
Fascism is a historic phase of capitalism; in this sense it is something new and at the same time old. In Fascist countries capitalism continues to exist, but only in the form of Fascism; and Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism. But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? What will be the practical results of such truth?Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties
Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat.
Outcries against barbarous measures may be effective as long as the listeners believe that such measures are out of the question in their own countries. Certain countries are still able to maintain their property relations by methods that appear less violent than those used in other countries.
Democracy still serves in these countries to achieve the results for which violence is needed in others, namely, to guarantee private ownership of the means of production. The private monopoly of factories, mines, and land creates barbarous conditions everywhere, but in some places these conditions do not so forcibly strike the eye. Barbarism strikes the eye only when it happens that monopoly can be protected only by open violence.
Some countries, which do not yet find it necessary to defend their barbarous monopolies by dispensing with the formal guarantees of a constitutional state, as well as with such amenities as art, philosophy, and literature, are particularly eager to listen to visitors who abuse their native lands because those amenities are denied there. They gladly listen because they hope to derive from what they hear advantages in future wars. Shall we say that they have recognized the truth who, for example, loudly demand an unrelenting struggle against Germany “because that country is now the true home of Evil in our day, the partner of hell, the abode of the Antichrist”? We should rather say that these are foolish and dangerous people. For the conclusion to be drawn from this nonsense is that since poison gas and bombs do not pick out the guilty, Germany must be exterminated—the whole country and all its people.
The man who does not know the truth expresses himself in lofty, general, and imprecise terms. He shouts about “the” German, he complains about Evil in general, and whoever hears him cannot make out what to do. Shall he decide not to be a German? Will hell vanish if he himself is good? The silly talk about the barbarism that comes out of barbarism is also of this kind. The source of barbarism is barbarism, and it is combated by culture, which comes from education. All this is put in general terms; it is not meant to be a guide to action and is in reality addressed to no one.Such vague descriptions point to only a few links in the chain of causes. Their obscurantism conceals the real forces making for disaster. If light be thrown on the matter it promptly appears that disasters are caused by certain men. For we live in a time when the fate of man is determined by men.
Fascism is not a natural disaster which can be understood simply in terms of “human nature.” But even when we are dealing with natural catastrophes, there are ways to portray them which are worthy of human beings because they appeal to man’s fighting spirit. After a great earthquake that destroyed Yokohama, many American magazines published photographs showing a heap of ruins. The captions read: STEEL STOOD. And, to be sure, though one might see only ruins at first glance, the eye swiftly discerned, after noting the caption, that a few tall buildings had remained standing. Among the multitudinous descriptions that can be given of an earthquake, those drawn up by construction engineers concerning the shifts in the ground, the force of stresses, the best developed, etc., are of the greatest importance, for they lead to future construction which will withstand earthquakes.
If anyone wishes to describe Fascism and war, great disasters which are not natural catastrophes, he must do so in terms of a practical truth. He must show that these disasters are launched by the possessing classes to control the vast numbers of workers who do not own the means of production. If one wishes successfully to write the truth about evil conditions, one must write it so that its avertible causes can be identified. If the preventable causes can be identified, the evil conditions can be fought
--Bertolt Brecht, The Skill to Manipulate the Truth as a Weapon
It is easy enough to identify the lies told by Bush Jr, but cloaked by passing time and various revisions of history it is more difficult to learn the truth about previous regimes, primarily Ronald Reagan whose bankruptcy of the US was --literally --papered over with new debt and old propaganda. Paul Craig Roberts, who should know a thing or two about the Reagan years, must surely understand that the US economy has been a magician's illusion at least since the Reagan years.
Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.
The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.
As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news.
The banks, now investment banks thanks to greed-driven deregulation that repealed the learned lessons of the past, were even more reckless than consumers and took speculative leverage to new heights. At the urging of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs’ CEO Henry Paulson, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bush administration went along with removing restrictions on debt leverage.
When the bubble burst, the extraordinary leverage threatened the financial system with collapse. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped forward with no one knows how many trillions of dollars to “save the financial system,” which, of course, meant to save the greed-driven financial institutions that had caused the economic crisis that dispossessed ordinary Americans of half of their life savings.
--Paul Craig Roberts, The Economy is a Lie, Too
5 comments:
Hi Len,
Have you seen the following link? It is the most astounding thing on 9/11 I have ever seen!!!!!The truth the rest of the world seems to already know.
Here it is:
http://tinyurl.com/y945cq7
The truth gets in the way of selfish behavior. The truth makes the posturing demagogue look foolish. The truth is bad for big business.
Len:
Read "The Commission" by Phillip Shenon for the inside skinny on how the 9-11 Commission was compromised and the facts that were withheld from the American public.
Steve
The tremendous damage done in Europe during the "First" World War often gives me pause.
Empires fell, entire armies mutinied, revolution swept through Central and Eastern Europe.
Brecht and Weill were seeing the aftermath of yet another failure of capitalism, their music and plays were part of a great anger which many people felt at the betrayal of what passed for civilization.
Still, the elites remained in control.
Only in the new Soviet Union was a successful transition to a form of socialist society made.
However flawed, this new socialist state was not to be allowed to survive.The outlines of a different form of social organization were to be seen, even through the terror of Stalin and the new Red elites which corrupted the social ideals of Marx and Lenin.
Germany, like all the combatants had amputees begging in the streets, an economy which was a wreck and all the clear indicators that something was terribly wrong.
They ended up going to a fascist state, the most corrosive form of corporatism.
Here in the U.S, there are canaries dying in the coal mines every hour and still the grip of popular teevee brainwashing and the mythology of "self determination" hold sway as the Empire kills and robs us all of any humanity or real hope for the future.
This country has turned to fascism, also.
The symbols and signatures are different from those of the Reich, but fascism is what it is, and has been for at least sixty years.
Patriotism is a manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome.
Our own crippled and maimed are not only the veterans, they are the poor, the uneducated, those without medical care, those set to wander the streets while suffering mental diseases.
Criminality is enthroned here, and not even millions of dead are enough to break the chains of illusion which perpetuate this corrupt system.
Donald L. Smith
Anonymous, corporate lawyer Gerald Shea, presented an extensive case to the 9/11 Commission documenting the fact that Israel was almost certainly monitoring the 9/11 terrorists inside the US.
And perhaps it's worth reminding people that in Sibel Edmond's interview by Phillip Giraldi in The American Conservative she says:
"The monitoring of the Turks picked up contacts with Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attache in an attempt to convince them to help.
Meanwhile Scowcroft, who was also the chairman of the American Turkish Council, Baker, Richard Armitage, and Grossman began negotiating separately for a possible Turkish protectorate. Nothing was decided, and then 9/11 took place."
These guys were all major US backers of Israel and have been investigated at various times for passing classified Intelligence to AIPAC, Israel's primary US lobbying agency. This was all before 9/11.
Sibel also has this to say about Marc Grossman, for a time the third highest-ranking official at the State Department and US ambassador to Turkey who is on FBI tapes arranging for the collection of $14,000 in a bribe payoff:
So these [FBI recorded] conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word "al-Qaeda" It was always "mujahideen," always "bin Laden" and, in fact, not "bin Laden" but "bin Ladens" plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them. There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent... From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.
Again, this was all BEFORE 9/11.
The idea of multiple bin Ladens being involved finds an echo elsewhere. Remember Wally Hilliard, owner of Huffman Aviation flight school that trained a number of the 9/11 hijackers in Florida? Well, it turns out that for some time before 9/11 Hilliard was flying one of bin Laden's brothers all over the Caribbean and Florida, the same bin Laden who was living in Spain and shepherding up to 200 mostly Arab flight students to Florida and Hilliard.
So the upper echelons of the US State Dept:
(1)had hands on involvement with various mujahideen and members of the bin Laden family in pursuit of terrorist exercises in the Middle East and Chechnya;
(2) utilized those same networks to engage in illegal drugs and arms trafficking (going so far to use NATO planes to bring drugs into the heart of Europe and the US);
(3) long-standing ideological commitments to Israel and Israeli foreign policy which sought US military presence in the Middle East and needed a catalyzing, catastrophic event to bring about such an outcome.
And we are asked to believe in this context that Israel did not know about the al Qaeda terrorists operating in the US before 9/11? Garbage!
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