Storytellers of the American Narrative
By Manuel Valenzuela
10/26/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The creators of American reality, those propagators of charades and mirages who dwell inside the hallways of the Ministry of Truth – otherwise known as the Corporate Media – continue their dance of deception and whitewash, festering in their offices of propaganda, directing the narratives and the epics hundreds of millions of Americans consider truth. Much like the disappearance of warmth giving way to the crispness of cold arrives with each annual changing of leaves, so the remarketing of American reality is altered by the changing faces of circumstance. Today, this change is the complete disaster that is the occupation of Iraq, an endeavor whose initial fruition could not have taken shape without the blitzkrieg marketed incessantly into every home and mind in America by the Department of Propaganda, the Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists.
With the complete and utter failure of America’s experiment with hubristic imperialism outside its hemisphere, with the complete collapse in confidence by the people of the government and its leaders, with the fictional war on terror losing muster, with the American people questioning the Iraq debacle in growing numbers, the masters and lords comprising the Establishment have been forced to alter direction and appease the minds of the masses. Inside the Ministry of Truth the decision has been made, therefore, to open the curtains, if only minimally, to a small manifestation of truth and fact that has for three years been kept hidden from the people and that sheds light on the Iraq War and its horrific reality.
In the upper echelons of the Establishment’s pyramid and the corporatist power structure, there has arrived a realization that Iraq is and will remain lost, a miserable failure turning more putrid every day, forever becoming a gash that will not heal, a ghost whose lack of placidity will for decades haunt the psyche of America. The Bush Crusade, once seen by the elite as a harbinger of empire and hegemonic power, an excursion becoming the genesis of perpetual wealth and richness, has instead transmuted itself into the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the Pax Americana. In the span of three years, Iraq has surpassed Vietnam, in the totality of the circumstances, as a perpetual burn whose scab will continue to be pulled off by the shame of what America did to Iraq, by the embarrassment of such apparent failure, by the geopolitical suicide it committed in Mesopotamia and by the severed image of the nation in the eyes of the world.
For the American masses, meanwhile, a great discomfort at the disaster unfolding and the failure apparent has been born, as if the growing number of rotting corpses throughout Iraq have exported their terrible stench across the Atlantic to the far reaches of America, finally arriving to wake from the doldrums of comfort and laziness the minds of millions of American people. Yet these millions of Americans grow disquieted not because of the genocide committed by their military, not because of the death of 655,000, or the displacement of 1.5 million, but because of the complete failure in not succeeding and winning, because of the death of almost 3,000 occupying soldiers, for creating a new memory of debacle, quagmire, defeat.
The narrative so-meticulously concocted and crafted by the Ministry of Truth, of an America destined by the Christian deity for greatness, incapable of defeat, always triumphant in victory, forever carrying the torch of goodness, chosen to fight the forces of evil, a beacon of freedom and liberty to the world, has been shown as the sham that it is, a fantasy laced with the glazed sugar coating of Hollywood perfection and brainwashed delusions. The aura of arrogance, the spirit of invincibility, the confidence of victory, the manifest destiny of America has taken a severe and humiliating blow at the hands of a mosaic of “rag tag,” “sub-human,” “third-world,” “dark-skinned,” “Arab and Muslim” resistance fighters, or mujahadeen. The glorious mirror of fables of American prominence that has for decades been used to condition and brainwash the masses has been blasted into pieces by a war of choice and by a cabal of mass murder and criminality.
The job has thus fallen to the Ministry of Truth and its agents of propaganda to once again reassemble the many pieces of the smoking mirror and reconstruct in the mind of the American masses the fantasy and fiction of an America that only exists in the thoughts of the brainwashed and the easily manipulated. The mirror of American preeminence, splendor and greatness that has been used for decades to make servants of the population must be refurbished, lest the people wake from their hypnotized stupor to see that the American Dream is but one more charade, one more level of control over their lives, one more fantasy injecting fog and haze into myopic eyes, one more mirage whose true nightmare remains hidden by the warm glow of the television.
The reality of American life, with its elaborate system of chains and shackles that clandestinely enslave millions to the elite through the mechanisms of predatory capitalism, together with the true nature of America’s domination over the planet, destroying Earth, pillaging resources, ruining nations, birthing enormous suffering, killing millions, enraging billions, must never be allowed to penetrate past the firewalls of propaganda that have since birth been implanted inside the mind of the American masses. The Delusion of the American Dream must remain steadfast and firm so that the Earth’s Nightmare may be allowed to continue. Disastrous endeavors that dispel the self-aggrandizement inherent in America’s delusions attack the basic core of the American people’s conditioned minds, creating the mechanisms by which the citizenry begins to question the fiction they have lived all their lives.
If leadership can be so incompetent as to give birth to debacle and utter failure, even with the greatest military and resources the world has ever known, then how can it govern the rest of the nation’s problems? If defeat, eventual retreat and loss of nearly 3,000 troops, along with the maiming, of both body and mind, of countless tens of thousands more, is the result of an adventure that was supposed to end with flowers and candy thrown at our feet, signifying a marvelous, heralded victory proclaiming American greatness, then what has happened to the only nation blessed by the Christian deity? What does a humiliating withdrawal from Iraq do the American psyche when years of brainwashing seemingly disallow the reality now experienced from ever rising? With the Iraq failure – much like the Vietnam example before – firmly impressed upon the precepts and beliefs the system inculcates into our minds, contradicting that which we have been taught about ourselves, at odds with the fictions hammered into our psyche, an audacious challenge to the constructs of what the state and the corporation say is our reality is issued, making millions breathe above the murky water of lifelong conditioning, oftentimes for the first time.
For in the American narrative, the invincible American military, the most moral and virtuous in the entire world, fighting evil wherever it may rise, protecting humanity from evildoers, is not supposed to struggle against dead-enders, dark-skinned sub-humans or third-worlders. It is not supposed to get trapped in quicksand or quagmire, fighting for survival against an army of resistance fighters, most of whom were simple peasants before occupation. It is not supposed to become that which it has been sent to fight, yet transformed into terrorists and torturers and rapists and mass murderers has it become, dispelling the fallacies of the Dream we all believe to be real and true. In times of disaster and unwinnable war, where frustration and discontent grows, where unsettling facts become the thorns bursting the bubble of infallibility, the fantasy of what we think we are and the reality of what we truly are clash in a fiery battle for truth, unleashing in the mind of the less gullible the beginning sprouts of doubt, forging the genesis of what is a vortex of uncomfortable epiphanies and awakenings.
It is when the Dream jousts with Reality that awakenings to truth emerge, as always after violent storms of thought penetrate a brainwashed mind that refuses to pull its anchors from the draining harbors of control. Like two armies engaged in hand to hand combat, the Dream conditioned and Reality experienced meet on the battlefield of thought, creating volatile and uncomfortable conundrums tearing a mind that has never been confronted with a challenge to what it thinks is truth and reality. In times beset by inevitable questioning of the state and the so-called leaders of the people, when decisions and policies lead to defeat and failure and debacle, leading to embarrassment and deep collective introspection, millions of citizens will confront the dark Dream, wondering why its tenets and axioms have not held firm, finally seeing the light, realizing that the Dream they lived no longer corresponds with the Truth they now see, in the process shattering the smoke-filled mirrors that surrounds them and becoming aware of what has been done them, and who is responsible.
Rewriting the Iraq Script
What strategic defeats such as Vietnam and Iraq do is to plant doubt and uncertainty in the minds of Americans regarding the fictions taught and inculcated from cradle to grave. What wars that are not won and incompetent occupations accomplish is to irrigate the fields of slumbering minds with the enriching fluids of emancipation, if not throughout the population then certainly in the realities of tens of millions, enough for a movement to grow and a momentum to infiltrate into the collective conscious of the American people. Thus, the danger to the Establishment of the Iraq War disaster is that if it is allowed to fester and continue hemorrhaging, just as its momentum dictates that it will continue to do, the American mind may indeed sprout forth the reason and logic and cognitive thinking that has been appropriated for decades by the system, creating the necessary mind shock and thought tempest that might spring in the masses the enlightenment and renaissance that the elite are frightened to death of.
This reality is the danger both to the system that has worked to perfection for decades – which has served to virtually enslave and make surfs of the masses – and to the Establishment that is its chief custodian. A debacle of the Establishment’s own making, granted life through its own hubris and incompetence and complete manipulation of the People, the Iraq War now threatens the very group that collaborated to give it wings. The Establishment pushed for war and invasion and occupation, using its vast tools of propaganda and manipulation to set the country on the path towards war. The Establishment allowed lies and deceptions and blatant manipulations of falsity to pass through its barriers and gatekeepers, granting the green light for complete acceptance by the People of a war known to be immoral and illegal before it was even begun.
Today, what the ruling class of America helped birth has become a Frankenstein unleashed and unchained, threatening to eviscerate both the American bubble granting the elite control and its delicate yet omnipresent Dream that although strongly threaded, remains a fragile concoction of fantasy, brainwashing and perpetual conditioning, from the cradle to the grave. Having become a monster that has taken on a life of its own, albeit after succeeding in the complete looting of America’s treasury in favor of the elite, though now threatening the interests of its masters and the power of Establishment, the Iraq War must therefore be injected with a cocktail of the elite’s antibiotics, made to be reborn, recreated and remarketed so as to appease the growing rumblings and discomfort of the American people, so as to prevent disgruntled frustration from mutating into vociferous opposition. Its reality must be reigned in, controlled and spun according to the interests of the elite, before it spins out of control, out of the reach of the ruling class’ tools of mass manipulation. It must be contained before it spirals beyond even media repair, becoming the spark that launches a challenge of the system by the people.
For the Establishment, damage control using its Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists must be meticulous, surgical and rapid, like a barrage of artillery fired upon the American populace, altering the perception of a losing adventure, creating a new fiction arranged within the parameters of the American Dream. It must be enveloped with the sugar coating inherent with the American narrative, with the fable of greatness and virtue so as to reclaim millions of minds lost, so as to prevent the erosion of millions more. And so the manufacturers of American reality, those whose job it is to create the perception millions believe is the real world, have been assigned with the task of launching a new campaign of smoke and mirrors, trying to reclaim an eroding Dream and a lost war of choice.
The repackaging of the debacle in Mesopotamia, which will be done by spinning and manipulating its realities and truths in such a way as to maintain dormant the awakened mind of the citizenry, thus preventing the lower classes from ever rising to challenge power, will of course be implemented with the Establishment’s weapons of mass deception and manipulation, namely, the Corporate media, both on camera and in print. In order to freeze a rapidly boiling pot of anger at the war itself and thereby assuring, at least for a few decades more, the domination of the many by the few through the hypnotizing catatonia of the masses, the Establishment will bombard the airwaves and the printed opinion pieces with the propaganda of a perceived victory in Iraq, of an honorable handover of power, of competence defined and honor triumphant. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Iraqi government will be made the incompetent, the warmongers, the corrupt, the institution that cannot establish security or peace, even though it never stood a chance at governance, being born with two arms fused behind its back, inheriting a debacle of historic proportions that even history’s best leaders could not salvage. The new Iraqi government will be blamed for civil strife, sectarian violence and the continuing decline in security and standard of living, even though it was the Americans who sowed what the Iraqi government must now reap.
The American media, being the always reliable stenographers of the state and the Establishment, will concoct the fiction blaming the continuing catastrophe on the fledgling government, for in the American narrative, where the Dream must stick to its Hollywood script, the American government, as always saturated and controlled by the elite themselves, perpetually filled to the rafters with Establishment figures and minions, will in the end triumph over evil, fighting virtuous and honorably for a victory that although difficult, is nonetheless real. In the continuing narrative, the Establishment will be made the heroes of the epic, competently battling those alien barbarians from Arab lands, gallantly protecting our security and ways of life, yet struggling to reign in the few bad apples within its ranks that made the Iraq war more difficult than it should have been.
For the Iraq War will never be seen as illegal, immoral or as the catastrophe it has become; it will never be seen as a failure created by the Establishment itself, which of course it is. Erased from American reality will be the role the elite and its media whores had in cooking up and serving on a hot plate a war of choice that was always fated to end in disaster. The decision made by America’s Establishment will never be given the aura of predestined failure, which it was, but instead will be marketed as a triumphant struggle made all the more difficult by the arrogance and incompetence of a few bad apples that deviated away from the steadfast leadership of the elite. It will be said that the war became what is has turned into not for failure to learn or apply history’s lessons but because it was badly managed by who else but by a few bad and seemingly notorious apples who failed to listen to the sage advice of who else but the Establishment. As with any Hollywood production, fall guys and patsies must be and will be sacrificed, and this narrative will offer no divergent plots from any previous incarnation.
The Iraqi resistance, or mujahadeen, will never be given the credit objective history will invariably give them, nor the respect earned on the field of battle. They will never receive commendation for outthinking, out-planning, outsmarting and outmaneuvering the occupying forces and its leadership. The American people will never know Iraqi freedom fighters outstrategized the occupying military, though America’s future military leaders certainly will, for they will be made to study the tactics, thought processes and strategies of the resistance, only clandestinely acknowledging respect to the mujahadeen by absorbing the lessons it taught America in Iraq. Inside the Ministry of Truth, hard at work implementing the American narrative, Iraq’s freedom fighters will have their triumph erased from American memory, their success never given light, its curtain of reality never lifted for the masses to see.
Instead, peasants, sons and fathers, the meat of the Iraqi resistance, at one time average people like you and me, most fighting for their nation, their resources, their honor and their way of life, dong what millions of Americans would do if it was invaded and occupied, will always be known inside America as Al-Qaeda, as the terrorists we had to fight over there so we would not have to fight them over here. Of course to the rest of the world the truth will always be known, the resistance will always be acknowledged, its victory will always be real. In America, however, resistance and freedom fighters will have never existed in the cities and towns of Iraq, for to the American narrative, good always triumphs over evil and, since America has the exclusive monopoly over good, then certainly Iraqi resistance must be labeled as evil, though international law and opinion would beg to differ.
In the American Dream, since America is always victorious and good always triumphs over evil, it naturally follows that America is never evil and always good, which consequently implies that it never suffers defeat at the hands of evil. Logically, therefore, its invasion and brutal occupation, its torture, rape, dehumanization and mass genocide, its disappearances and false imprisonments, its pillaging of resources and its looting of Iraq’s finances, its decimation of Iraqi society, the displacement of 1.6 million Iraqis, the chaos and anarchy and civil war are all deemed products of good, for America is the catalyst and oftentimes the enabler of all that has afflicted Iraq and its people. The forces fighting against this supposed evil, trying to rid their land and cities and neighborhoods of the American pestilence, must therefore be considered evil, and by consequence defeated by America’s military.
In the black and white script of the American narrative – since those are the only colors we are allowed to dream in – the battle of good versus evil is thus determined by the constructs of an America that cannot do bad against a force that cannot possibly be considered good, no matter what the rest of the world thinks. The easiest way for the Ministry of Truth to erase the valid guerilla war waged by the Iraqi resistance against the American occupiers, and erase any thoughts of the people considering the resistance in positive language, therefore, is to label freedom fighters as member of Al-Qaeda, the always reliable bogeyman and barbarian whose usefulness to the Establishment does not seem to diminish with time.
If every resistance movement on Earth can be labeled as belonging to a terrorist organization, imputed to the dreaded image of Al-Qaeda by the simple act of resisting the wrongs of governance, the devastating exploitations of the ruling class or the crimes of a nation’s elite, then naturally the interests of the ruling class can better be protected. Conditioning the masses to detest and fear those movements battling the crimes and corruptions of the world’s ruling classes – particularly those affiliated with or belonging to the American Establishment – with those movements oftentimes fighting for the interests of the masses themselves, succeeds in eliminating a massive group of potential sympathizers and erodes any potential for fraternity and solidarity between freedom fighters and the masses.
The fear and insecurity spawned by the term Al-Qaeda instantly rewires all circuits in the American mind that connect to logic, reason and critical thinking, allowing the state and the ruling class to better control the people. Any valid grievances or causes freedom fighters in Iraq or any other nation might have that would excuse their resistance are thus ignored, becoming a lost echo in the dark chambers of the American mind. By marketing Iraq’s freedom fighters as Al-Qaeda terrorists, when American intelligence has found that only 5 percent of fighters are from outside Iraq, with only a small fraction of that fraction sympathetic to Al-Qaeda, the American people, already conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to tremble in fear at the mere mention of the name, will instantly develop barricades inside their minds, disallowing any deviance beyond what they have been brainwashed to believe.
Thus, a freedom fighter waging guerilla war to expel a brutal occupier will never be seen as a valid movement. A people forced to expel an occupying power intent on stealing its resources, dehumanizing its citizens and destroying its society, oftentimes by no other choice but by killing and maiming American soldiers, will never be seen in the American narrative as anything other than terrorists and barbarians and sub-human, dark-skinned Arabs. The conditioning into black and white, good versus evil thinking has been as methodical as it has been perpetual. The job assigned to the Ministry of Truth is therefore made much easier.
All Hail the Ministry of Truth
The elite’s interests will of course be protected and defended by the Ministry of Truth and its hordes of presstitutes, for the Corporate media is and always has been the tool of the Establishment, over the years having become its undying weapon against the masses, its always reliable firewall of brainwashing and conditioning. As has always been the case since the inception of television, he who controls the media controls the masses, and he who controls television controls American reality. Since it controls the perceptions of America’s reality, and since the Establishment is the master of the Ministry of Truth, then naturally everything aired, voiced or imaged through the monitor will inevitably have as goal the protection and expansion of the ruling class’ interests.
The Ministry of Truth is the reason why the American people have only members of the ruling class to elect into higher office. It is the reason government has for decades furthered the interests of the Establishment at the expense of the People. It is the reason the masses vote, without fail, against their own interests, every election given a choice of the lesser of two evils belonging to the same two-headed hydra, both almost mirror images of the other, both designed to protect and expand the power of the elite and the corporate world. The differences between the two parties are today slim and marginal, with one mutating towards fascist ideologies and tendencies while the other, once progressive and liberal, caring for the interests of the people, has since 9/11 shifted center right, becoming what the Republican party used to be, a conservative amalgam of ruling class incompetents.
Because the Establishment is itself best served through conservative-based ideology, thriving off the structures of predatory capitalism, through greed, selfishness and the mechanisms of corporatism, finding sustenance through the exploitation of the working and middle class, creating control through organized religion based on primitive thought, and increasing its grip over America through the perpetual dumbing down of its people, it follows that the corporate media, the Ministry of Truth, must itself be molded from conservative ideology. It must enable the dumbing down of America to continue, afflicting each and every new generation of citizens, each made more ignorant than the previous generation. As such, the fictions that the Ministry of Truth disseminates and that invariably become America’s reality are conservative-based, right-wing in nature and corporatist in belief.
The appearance must be made, and the manipulation of ideas must be engendered, as to make the People’s visions and goals the same vision and goals sought by the Establishment. The people must be made to believe that by pursuing and expanding the Establishment’s interests their own lives will be made better. This, of course, is but a farce, for the interests of one group are incompatible and mutually exclusive of the other. This explains in part the dominance of conservative thought by a majority of Americans, and of America itself, which includes centrist dogma and much left-of-center ideology, most of which is considered center-right in the more progressive, and by consequence enlightened, nations of the world. In fact, most progressive, liberal ideology in America today does not even begin to touch or compare with the mainstream, progressive, liberal belief system of many western European nations. Those views would be and are in fact considered radical and extreme in America, yet they are the evolving ideologies of the world’s most progressive societies.
Indeed, where one would expect a more progressive, educated and secular society (with all three being intertwined and correlated) due to the vast wealth in resources and human capital, where there is enough treasure to make enormous investments in education, the complete opposite is true. America is one of the most conservative nations in the developed world, even as the wealthiest nation of all. Certainly the systemic conditioning by the Ministry of Truth over the masses is one reason for this truism. Certainly the highly influential guidance of the corporate media of both our society and our culture should be burdened for a major share of fault in the virtual halt in evolving progressive thought in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen. In this conditioning of the People of conservative thought are the interests of the Establishment thus protected and furthered, after all.
Inside the Ministry of Truth, America’s departments of smoke and mirrors are hard at work, busy creating and re-creating the perception of reality of 300 million American citizens that must never be allowed to see beyond the bubble of the Dream. It is in these dark rooms where marketers and public relations gurus and spin masters and damage control experts and media executives and political Machiavellis gather, where America’s fantasy-laden reality is engendered and molded, where the strategies and campaigns conditioning Americans how to think are given life, to be disseminated through the airwaves and in print, penetrating minds and lives, making us the mere servant class of the elite. What can we expect, after all, out of an institution which has since its inception been financed and supported by the Establishment? What interests will be furthered and powers expanded by the corporate media when it is owned and operated by the corporate world, itself owned by the ruling class? What is to be expected when the Ministry of Truth is pregnant with the pretenders and contenders of elitism, the wanna bees of the ruling class, its placenta bursting with the elite’s sons and daughters and heirs to the thrones of propaganda and the Establishment? In the end, what can be expected when the hand that feeds the Ministry of Truth is part of the same body whose other hand exploits and oppresses the working and middle classes?
When it is understood who the Ministry of Truth works for, whose interests it has always pursued, then it becomes obvious whose version of reality we will forever see and be conditioned to accept. The Ministry of Truth does the bidding for the ruling class, doing its dirty work, concocting the excuses to wage war, the cataclysmic events needed to mobilize an entire population, the manipulations needed to create the citizenry’s acceptance. The Iraq war was allowed to transpire because of the direct role of the Ministry of Truth and all who work inside its bowels. Its lies and deceptions were flaunted while its truths and realities were purposefully hidden. The voices of dissent and debate were made extinct while those of warmongers and pro-war talking heads were granted an audience. The entire mechanisms of the corporate media were used to sell war to the American people, in the end succeeding in making Iraq and Iraqis the equivalent of Al-Qaeda. After that was accomplished, war was a foregone conclusion.
It was and still is the Ministry of Truth that terrorizes the masses with the state’s propaganda of fear, using every opportunity to wage psychological warfare against an entire population. It is the Ministry of Truth that whitewashes and suppresses vital documents and findings and the voices of whistleblowers, choosing to keep America in the dark even as the world entire sees the light. So much of the Iraq war has been swept underneath a rug of silence, for the Establishment knows that it was video and audio from Vietnam that gave birth to mass opposition to war. It was the Ministry of Truth that helped end the quagmire in Vietnam, which is why the Iraq war has been lived inside the vacuum of a black hole. The ruling class, it seems, learned their lesson well, which is why Americans are clueless about a war that seems to not exist within the confines of our borders and shores. It is the reason a complete media blackout exists, with only media embeds acting as the state’s stenographers allowed to report a fraction of what is occurring.
The ruling class’ decision to invade and occupy Iraq, done knowing the enormous profits and wealth that was about to be created, could not have happened without the instruments of the Ministry of Truth working in unison to make sure it indeed happened. If one thinks about it, the task was monumental, yet it was achieved with triumphant success. Dissent, protest and debate had to be silenced and erased while the lies, deceits, fictions and manipulations needed to give life to an illegal and immoral war were allowed to blossom, without even a whisper of questioning or debate, without so much as a hint of objectivity. War was decided upon, and war was what America was going to get. The entire engine of propaganda and perception-based reality was thus greased with the lubricant of Iraqi blood, flowing in obvious recognition of what transpired inside the Ministry of Truth, yet made invisible to the millions of eyes dependent on the corporate media for information.
Collaborators of Catastrophe
For five years now, the corporate media, along with its legions of presstitutes, pseudo-journalist hacks, government stenographers, talking heads, think tank pretenders, editor minions, executive servants and paid lackeys that comprise the acidic gases inside the bowels of the Ministry of Truth have collaborated in the giant productions called the Iraq War and the Psychological Warfare against the American People. These individuals are collaborators of catastrophe, collaborators to war crimes and crimes against humanity, granting life to genocide, rape, torture and perpetual suffering. Through their cameras and pens fear has hijacked America; through their oftentimes idiotic jingoism America has mutated to an authoritarian enclave; through their voices the greatest strategic disaster in American history has been allowed to fester; through their silence crimes of unspeakable criminality have been allowed to be perpetrated. It is because of their whitewashes and spinning and silent disregard of truth and reality that the nation finds itself threatened by enemies of democracy, liberty and freedom, not by enemies from abroad, but by those internal and entrenched, a much more dangerous cabal of terrorists than anything conjured up by the Ministry of Truth’s most creative fiction story-tellers.
These sons and daughters of nepotism, incestuous relationships, favorable opportunity and ethnic/religious correlation have been promoted into the Ministry of Truth not because of merit or talent or greatness but because of who they know, what they are and where they come from. They possess the passports of promotion, the keys to becoming gatekeepers, the signs and stars granting them access beyond the glass ceiling. They are sons and daughters of privilege and nepotism, born with the adequate religious background or the royal bloodlines of parentage. They are hired because they care nothing for reporting truth, lacking the integrity and honor much more talented individuals possess.
They are hired because they protect the interests of the mother country and those of the ruling class, easily selling out to money and greed and fame, sacrificing truth to the whips of fiction and suppression and evisceration of reality. They are, quite simply, tools and instruments set in motion to maintain millions in eternal ignorance while enhancing the interests of their masters. For this they have no remorse, nor for the devastation of truth they help maintain. Their job is the genesis of American reality, of becoming the front lines against the assault on the American people, their job the enhancement of a fictional Dream that keeps millions passive, apathetic and acquiescent. It is this group of pseudo-journalists, gatekeepers and executives that possess the magic ticket the rest of the population will never acquire, regardless of talent, ability and potential greatness. All that is needed to join this exclusive club is the right sign, star and lineage, the right connections, religion and ethnicity, as well as a willingness to both abandon truth for the Almighty Dollar and imprison the American people inside the dungeons of concocted reality.
In the real world, in places where truth prevails and reality thrives, where actual journalism lives and flourishes, where real democracy is a reality and not a fantasy, there exists in just one or two or three or four web pages or websites more talent than the entire lot of America’s corporate media, blossoming to grant sustenance and life back to editing, writing, reporting and journalism. It is inside the digital domain of the Internet where opportunity is still a reality, where talent and ability still matter, where the love of journalism can be seen and appreciated. For while the presstitutes have abandoned truth for greed and integrity for fame, on the Internet the only gains are love of journalism, love of truth, love of justice and love of knowledge.
Once again, through the Internet, We the People have truth, reality, a voice, true democracy and empowerment. In it we have found a paradigm where there is no glass ceiling, no discrimination, no nepotism and no alteration of truth. In this realm, the talent is omnipresent; the ability mesmerizing; the opportunity as open and as wide as the Pacific Ocean. The diversity of opinion and talent and brainpower has exploded onto the world stage, making pseudo-journalists the laughingstock of millions. To those working inside the Ministry of Truth, your gig is up, the Internet has arrived, taking your viewers, your readership and your revenues. When you collaborate to lie, deceive and manipulate a nation towards war, when you ignore truth and criminality as if it does not exist, when you choose selling out rather than standing up, you know the end is near. In this world, the Internet is the future; the corporate media, a thing of the past.
Enslaved to masters and pimps and sugar daddies, this group of war collaborators has helped to give birth to the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the United States. Their spin, bull manure, cover-ups, whitewashes, protection of authority, failure to seek accountability, dissemination of propaganda, silence in the face of blatant lies and failure to expose truth has made them all accomplices to what America has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention what Israel has done in Palestine and Lebanon. They are as guilty as the criminals and murderers in office.
Perhaps sensing the changing winds of discontent, perhaps fleeing from the losing side of history, perhaps unable to sleep at night guilt ridden with their failure as journalists, perhaps even sensing the shifting balance of power, this group of pseudo-journalists has begun to gently tear apart the bubble of infallibility that once surrounded the Iraq war. They have begun to offer glimmers of light where darkness once prevailed. Only Fox News, it seems – that putrid bastion of fascist and extremist right wing thought and propaganda – remains lost in the delusions and deceptions only the thoroughly brainwashed, or authoritarian stenographers, cling on to. Yet only Keith Olberman has decided that truth and reality and journalism are worth saving, worth standing up to. As the nation plummets into despotism, only Olberman has decided to do his job. Among journalists, he is the one true patriot; the one true American.
Suddenly, as if with a wave of the magician’s wand – or through the gate-keeping approval of editors and executives – the curtains containing long-held truths about the Bush Crusade have been allowed to rise, if only minimally, finally offering America’s masses glimpses of a war that since its inception has been sequestered from the beautiful minds of the populace. A prism of light has finally been turned on in the vacuum of nothingness that is the locked closet of Mesopotamia, opening up to inspection black corners and unexplored crevices, allowing glimmers of reality and rays of translucence through into the eyes of the masses. Today, when it is finally convenient, when it is finally popular, when it is finally profitable, when the debacle and the disaster and the failure can no longer be spun or hidden or manipulated, the Ministry of Truth has shifted course, spinning their collaboration away, making it disappear from the reality of America. The time to protect the system and the Establishment from the People has arrived, and the Ministry of Truth will in the next few years try to erase from memory, reality and history its role in the Iraq failure, not to mention the Establishment’s disastrous policies over the last six years. Yet America’s population must remember who it was that lit the path towards war, who it was that heated up the engine of America’s military might. We must remember the failure of journalism and the corporate media at a time when they were most needed.
Journalists and the corporate media have become collaborators to authoritarianism, abettors to the coming police state, disseminators of the propaganda spewed by authoritarians. No amount of spin or distortion can change these facts, nor the Ministry of Truth’s role in the war against the American people. A few bones and crumbs thrown our way in order to silence and appease us will not work, for we are aware of the guilt of collaborators to catastrophe.
Today real news is hidden from view, fake news is given prominence, truth is suppressed and fiction is promoted. Government and those in power are protected while those deemed enemy of the state are smeared. Myths and fables are granted attention while truths and realities are made to disappear, forever sent to the locked vaults of hidden fact where they will never see the light of day. The role of the fascist media is to protect the fascists, to smear those exposing truths, to ignore movements seeking truth to criminality, to enable the activities of the Bush cabal and to grant life to the manipulative mechanisms of the state. Its role is to keep the masses obedient, ignorant and subservient to the state, made unaware that every day their rights and freedoms evaporate, that every day they resemble the servants of the past and the serfs of the future.
That is today the role of the corporate media, the Ministry of Truth, using the television to brainwash and condition the masses, using its alluring glare to alter the brain function of human beings, from cradle to grave, using its tools to manipulate and lie to the public, all for the service of the fascist state, all for the sake of corporatism and its handlers. For what is the corporate media, with its legions of pseudo-journalists, hacks, spin masters, talking heads and untalented pretty faces dependent on airbrushes and layers of makeup, but the propagandists of today’s evolved fascist state? What are the keepers at the gate, whether from the right or the left, but the sons and daughters of Joseph Goebbels, bastard children of totalitarian thought, nursed from the bosom of history’s greatest propagandists, keeping authoritarian brainwashing alive and well, becoming the gatekeepers of tyranny, the destroyers of truth and reality.
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet essayist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com and at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net.
By Manuel Valenzuela
10/26/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The creators of American reality, those propagators of charades and mirages who dwell inside the hallways of the Ministry of Truth – otherwise known as the Corporate Media – continue their dance of deception and whitewash, festering in their offices of propaganda, directing the narratives and the epics hundreds of millions of Americans consider truth. Much like the disappearance of warmth giving way to the crispness of cold arrives with each annual changing of leaves, so the remarketing of American reality is altered by the changing faces of circumstance. Today, this change is the complete disaster that is the occupation of Iraq, an endeavor whose initial fruition could not have taken shape without the blitzkrieg marketed incessantly into every home and mind in America by the Department of Propaganda, the Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists.
With the complete and utter failure of America’s experiment with hubristic imperialism outside its hemisphere, with the complete collapse in confidence by the people of the government and its leaders, with the fictional war on terror losing muster, with the American people questioning the Iraq debacle in growing numbers, the masters and lords comprising the Establishment have been forced to alter direction and appease the minds of the masses. Inside the Ministry of Truth the decision has been made, therefore, to open the curtains, if only minimally, to a small manifestation of truth and fact that has for three years been kept hidden from the people and that sheds light on the Iraq War and its horrific reality.
In the upper echelons of the Establishment’s pyramid and the corporatist power structure, there has arrived a realization that Iraq is and will remain lost, a miserable failure turning more putrid every day, forever becoming a gash that will not heal, a ghost whose lack of placidity will for decades haunt the psyche of America. The Bush Crusade, once seen by the elite as a harbinger of empire and hegemonic power, an excursion becoming the genesis of perpetual wealth and richness, has instead transmuted itself into the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the Pax Americana. In the span of three years, Iraq has surpassed Vietnam, in the totality of the circumstances, as a perpetual burn whose scab will continue to be pulled off by the shame of what America did to Iraq, by the embarrassment of such apparent failure, by the geopolitical suicide it committed in Mesopotamia and by the severed image of the nation in the eyes of the world.
For the American masses, meanwhile, a great discomfort at the disaster unfolding and the failure apparent has been born, as if the growing number of rotting corpses throughout Iraq have exported their terrible stench across the Atlantic to the far reaches of America, finally arriving to wake from the doldrums of comfort and laziness the minds of millions of American people. Yet these millions of Americans grow disquieted not because of the genocide committed by their military, not because of the death of 655,000, or the displacement of 1.5 million, but because of the complete failure in not succeeding and winning, because of the death of almost 3,000 occupying soldiers, for creating a new memory of debacle, quagmire, defeat.
The narrative so-meticulously concocted and crafted by the Ministry of Truth, of an America destined by the Christian deity for greatness, incapable of defeat, always triumphant in victory, forever carrying the torch of goodness, chosen to fight the forces of evil, a beacon of freedom and liberty to the world, has been shown as the sham that it is, a fantasy laced with the glazed sugar coating of Hollywood perfection and brainwashed delusions. The aura of arrogance, the spirit of invincibility, the confidence of victory, the manifest destiny of America has taken a severe and humiliating blow at the hands of a mosaic of “rag tag,” “sub-human,” “third-world,” “dark-skinned,” “Arab and Muslim” resistance fighters, or mujahadeen. The glorious mirror of fables of American prominence that has for decades been used to condition and brainwash the masses has been blasted into pieces by a war of choice and by a cabal of mass murder and criminality.
The job has thus fallen to the Ministry of Truth and its agents of propaganda to once again reassemble the many pieces of the smoking mirror and reconstruct in the mind of the American masses the fantasy and fiction of an America that only exists in the thoughts of the brainwashed and the easily manipulated. The mirror of American preeminence, splendor and greatness that has been used for decades to make servants of the population must be refurbished, lest the people wake from their hypnotized stupor to see that the American Dream is but one more charade, one more level of control over their lives, one more fantasy injecting fog and haze into myopic eyes, one more mirage whose true nightmare remains hidden by the warm glow of the television.
The reality of American life, with its elaborate system of chains and shackles that clandestinely enslave millions to the elite through the mechanisms of predatory capitalism, together with the true nature of America’s domination over the planet, destroying Earth, pillaging resources, ruining nations, birthing enormous suffering, killing millions, enraging billions, must never be allowed to penetrate past the firewalls of propaganda that have since birth been implanted inside the mind of the American masses. The Delusion of the American Dream must remain steadfast and firm so that the Earth’s Nightmare may be allowed to continue. Disastrous endeavors that dispel the self-aggrandizement inherent in America’s delusions attack the basic core of the American people’s conditioned minds, creating the mechanisms by which the citizenry begins to question the fiction they have lived all their lives.
If leadership can be so incompetent as to give birth to debacle and utter failure, even with the greatest military and resources the world has ever known, then how can it govern the rest of the nation’s problems? If defeat, eventual retreat and loss of nearly 3,000 troops, along with the maiming, of both body and mind, of countless tens of thousands more, is the result of an adventure that was supposed to end with flowers and candy thrown at our feet, signifying a marvelous, heralded victory proclaiming American greatness, then what has happened to the only nation blessed by the Christian deity? What does a humiliating withdrawal from Iraq do the American psyche when years of brainwashing seemingly disallow the reality now experienced from ever rising? With the Iraq failure – much like the Vietnam example before – firmly impressed upon the precepts and beliefs the system inculcates into our minds, contradicting that which we have been taught about ourselves, at odds with the fictions hammered into our psyche, an audacious challenge to the constructs of what the state and the corporation say is our reality is issued, making millions breathe above the murky water of lifelong conditioning, oftentimes for the first time.
For in the American narrative, the invincible American military, the most moral and virtuous in the entire world, fighting evil wherever it may rise, protecting humanity from evildoers, is not supposed to struggle against dead-enders, dark-skinned sub-humans or third-worlders. It is not supposed to get trapped in quicksand or quagmire, fighting for survival against an army of resistance fighters, most of whom were simple peasants before occupation. It is not supposed to become that which it has been sent to fight, yet transformed into terrorists and torturers and rapists and mass murderers has it become, dispelling the fallacies of the Dream we all believe to be real and true. In times of disaster and unwinnable war, where frustration and discontent grows, where unsettling facts become the thorns bursting the bubble of infallibility, the fantasy of what we think we are and the reality of what we truly are clash in a fiery battle for truth, unleashing in the mind of the less gullible the beginning sprouts of doubt, forging the genesis of what is a vortex of uncomfortable epiphanies and awakenings.
It is when the Dream jousts with Reality that awakenings to truth emerge, as always after violent storms of thought penetrate a brainwashed mind that refuses to pull its anchors from the draining harbors of control. Like two armies engaged in hand to hand combat, the Dream conditioned and Reality experienced meet on the battlefield of thought, creating volatile and uncomfortable conundrums tearing a mind that has never been confronted with a challenge to what it thinks is truth and reality. In times beset by inevitable questioning of the state and the so-called leaders of the people, when decisions and policies lead to defeat and failure and debacle, leading to embarrassment and deep collective introspection, millions of citizens will confront the dark Dream, wondering why its tenets and axioms have not held firm, finally seeing the light, realizing that the Dream they lived no longer corresponds with the Truth they now see, in the process shattering the smoke-filled mirrors that surrounds them and becoming aware of what has been done them, and who is responsible.
Rewriting the Iraq Script
What strategic defeats such as Vietnam and Iraq do is to plant doubt and uncertainty in the minds of Americans regarding the fictions taught and inculcated from cradle to grave. What wars that are not won and incompetent occupations accomplish is to irrigate the fields of slumbering minds with the enriching fluids of emancipation, if not throughout the population then certainly in the realities of tens of millions, enough for a movement to grow and a momentum to infiltrate into the collective conscious of the American people. Thus, the danger to the Establishment of the Iraq War disaster is that if it is allowed to fester and continue hemorrhaging, just as its momentum dictates that it will continue to do, the American mind may indeed sprout forth the reason and logic and cognitive thinking that has been appropriated for decades by the system, creating the necessary mind shock and thought tempest that might spring in the masses the enlightenment and renaissance that the elite are frightened to death of.
This reality is the danger both to the system that has worked to perfection for decades – which has served to virtually enslave and make surfs of the masses – and to the Establishment that is its chief custodian. A debacle of the Establishment’s own making, granted life through its own hubris and incompetence and complete manipulation of the People, the Iraq War now threatens the very group that collaborated to give it wings. The Establishment pushed for war and invasion and occupation, using its vast tools of propaganda and manipulation to set the country on the path towards war. The Establishment allowed lies and deceptions and blatant manipulations of falsity to pass through its barriers and gatekeepers, granting the green light for complete acceptance by the People of a war known to be immoral and illegal before it was even begun.
Today, what the ruling class of America helped birth has become a Frankenstein unleashed and unchained, threatening to eviscerate both the American bubble granting the elite control and its delicate yet omnipresent Dream that although strongly threaded, remains a fragile concoction of fantasy, brainwashing and perpetual conditioning, from the cradle to the grave. Having become a monster that has taken on a life of its own, albeit after succeeding in the complete looting of America’s treasury in favor of the elite, though now threatening the interests of its masters and the power of Establishment, the Iraq War must therefore be injected with a cocktail of the elite’s antibiotics, made to be reborn, recreated and remarketed so as to appease the growing rumblings and discomfort of the American people, so as to prevent disgruntled frustration from mutating into vociferous opposition. Its reality must be reigned in, controlled and spun according to the interests of the elite, before it spins out of control, out of the reach of the ruling class’ tools of mass manipulation. It must be contained before it spirals beyond even media repair, becoming the spark that launches a challenge of the system by the people.
For the Establishment, damage control using its Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists must be meticulous, surgical and rapid, like a barrage of artillery fired upon the American populace, altering the perception of a losing adventure, creating a new fiction arranged within the parameters of the American Dream. It must be enveloped with the sugar coating inherent with the American narrative, with the fable of greatness and virtue so as to reclaim millions of minds lost, so as to prevent the erosion of millions more. And so the manufacturers of American reality, those whose job it is to create the perception millions believe is the real world, have been assigned with the task of launching a new campaign of smoke and mirrors, trying to reclaim an eroding Dream and a lost war of choice.
The repackaging of the debacle in Mesopotamia, which will be done by spinning and manipulating its realities and truths in such a way as to maintain dormant the awakened mind of the citizenry, thus preventing the lower classes from ever rising to challenge power, will of course be implemented with the Establishment’s weapons of mass deception and manipulation, namely, the Corporate media, both on camera and in print. In order to freeze a rapidly boiling pot of anger at the war itself and thereby assuring, at least for a few decades more, the domination of the many by the few through the hypnotizing catatonia of the masses, the Establishment will bombard the airwaves and the printed opinion pieces with the propaganda of a perceived victory in Iraq, of an honorable handover of power, of competence defined and honor triumphant. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Iraqi government will be made the incompetent, the warmongers, the corrupt, the institution that cannot establish security or peace, even though it never stood a chance at governance, being born with two arms fused behind its back, inheriting a debacle of historic proportions that even history’s best leaders could not salvage. The new Iraqi government will be blamed for civil strife, sectarian violence and the continuing decline in security and standard of living, even though it was the Americans who sowed what the Iraqi government must now reap.
The American media, being the always reliable stenographers of the state and the Establishment, will concoct the fiction blaming the continuing catastrophe on the fledgling government, for in the American narrative, where the Dream must stick to its Hollywood script, the American government, as always saturated and controlled by the elite themselves, perpetually filled to the rafters with Establishment figures and minions, will in the end triumph over evil, fighting virtuous and honorably for a victory that although difficult, is nonetheless real. In the continuing narrative, the Establishment will be made the heroes of the epic, competently battling those alien barbarians from Arab lands, gallantly protecting our security and ways of life, yet struggling to reign in the few bad apples within its ranks that made the Iraq war more difficult than it should have been.
For the Iraq War will never be seen as illegal, immoral or as the catastrophe it has become; it will never be seen as a failure created by the Establishment itself, which of course it is. Erased from American reality will be the role the elite and its media whores had in cooking up and serving on a hot plate a war of choice that was always fated to end in disaster. The decision made by America’s Establishment will never be given the aura of predestined failure, which it was, but instead will be marketed as a triumphant struggle made all the more difficult by the arrogance and incompetence of a few bad apples that deviated away from the steadfast leadership of the elite. It will be said that the war became what is has turned into not for failure to learn or apply history’s lessons but because it was badly managed by who else but by a few bad and seemingly notorious apples who failed to listen to the sage advice of who else but the Establishment. As with any Hollywood production, fall guys and patsies must be and will be sacrificed, and this narrative will offer no divergent plots from any previous incarnation.
The Iraqi resistance, or mujahadeen, will never be given the credit objective history will invariably give them, nor the respect earned on the field of battle. They will never receive commendation for outthinking, out-planning, outsmarting and outmaneuvering the occupying forces and its leadership. The American people will never know Iraqi freedom fighters outstrategized the occupying military, though America’s future military leaders certainly will, for they will be made to study the tactics, thought processes and strategies of the resistance, only clandestinely acknowledging respect to the mujahadeen by absorbing the lessons it taught America in Iraq. Inside the Ministry of Truth, hard at work implementing the American narrative, Iraq’s freedom fighters will have their triumph erased from American memory, their success never given light, its curtain of reality never lifted for the masses to see.
Instead, peasants, sons and fathers, the meat of the Iraqi resistance, at one time average people like you and me, most fighting for their nation, their resources, their honor and their way of life, dong what millions of Americans would do if it was invaded and occupied, will always be known inside America as Al-Qaeda, as the terrorists we had to fight over there so we would not have to fight them over here. Of course to the rest of the world the truth will always be known, the resistance will always be acknowledged, its victory will always be real. In America, however, resistance and freedom fighters will have never existed in the cities and towns of Iraq, for to the American narrative, good always triumphs over evil and, since America has the exclusive monopoly over good, then certainly Iraqi resistance must be labeled as evil, though international law and opinion would beg to differ.
In the American Dream, since America is always victorious and good always triumphs over evil, it naturally follows that America is never evil and always good, which consequently implies that it never suffers defeat at the hands of evil. Logically, therefore, its invasion and brutal occupation, its torture, rape, dehumanization and mass genocide, its disappearances and false imprisonments, its pillaging of resources and its looting of Iraq’s finances, its decimation of Iraqi society, the displacement of 1.6 million Iraqis, the chaos and anarchy and civil war are all deemed products of good, for America is the catalyst and oftentimes the enabler of all that has afflicted Iraq and its people. The forces fighting against this supposed evil, trying to rid their land and cities and neighborhoods of the American pestilence, must therefore be considered evil, and by consequence defeated by America’s military.
In the black and white script of the American narrative – since those are the only colors we are allowed to dream in – the battle of good versus evil is thus determined by the constructs of an America that cannot do bad against a force that cannot possibly be considered good, no matter what the rest of the world thinks. The easiest way for the Ministry of Truth to erase the valid guerilla war waged by the Iraqi resistance against the American occupiers, and erase any thoughts of the people considering the resistance in positive language, therefore, is to label freedom fighters as member of Al-Qaeda, the always reliable bogeyman and barbarian whose usefulness to the Establishment does not seem to diminish with time.
If every resistance movement on Earth can be labeled as belonging to a terrorist organization, imputed to the dreaded image of Al-Qaeda by the simple act of resisting the wrongs of governance, the devastating exploitations of the ruling class or the crimes of a nation’s elite, then naturally the interests of the ruling class can better be protected. Conditioning the masses to detest and fear those movements battling the crimes and corruptions of the world’s ruling classes – particularly those affiliated with or belonging to the American Establishment – with those movements oftentimes fighting for the interests of the masses themselves, succeeds in eliminating a massive group of potential sympathizers and erodes any potential for fraternity and solidarity between freedom fighters and the masses.
The fear and insecurity spawned by the term Al-Qaeda instantly rewires all circuits in the American mind that connect to logic, reason and critical thinking, allowing the state and the ruling class to better control the people. Any valid grievances or causes freedom fighters in Iraq or any other nation might have that would excuse their resistance are thus ignored, becoming a lost echo in the dark chambers of the American mind. By marketing Iraq’s freedom fighters as Al-Qaeda terrorists, when American intelligence has found that only 5 percent of fighters are from outside Iraq, with only a small fraction of that fraction sympathetic to Al-Qaeda, the American people, already conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to tremble in fear at the mere mention of the name, will instantly develop barricades inside their minds, disallowing any deviance beyond what they have been brainwashed to believe.
Thus, a freedom fighter waging guerilla war to expel a brutal occupier will never be seen as a valid movement. A people forced to expel an occupying power intent on stealing its resources, dehumanizing its citizens and destroying its society, oftentimes by no other choice but by killing and maiming American soldiers, will never be seen in the American narrative as anything other than terrorists and barbarians and sub-human, dark-skinned Arabs. The conditioning into black and white, good versus evil thinking has been as methodical as it has been perpetual. The job assigned to the Ministry of Truth is therefore made much easier.
All Hail the Ministry of Truth
The elite’s interests will of course be protected and defended by the Ministry of Truth and its hordes of presstitutes, for the Corporate media is and always has been the tool of the Establishment, over the years having become its undying weapon against the masses, its always reliable firewall of brainwashing and conditioning. As has always been the case since the inception of television, he who controls the media controls the masses, and he who controls television controls American reality. Since it controls the perceptions of America’s reality, and since the Establishment is the master of the Ministry of Truth, then naturally everything aired, voiced or imaged through the monitor will inevitably have as goal the protection and expansion of the ruling class’ interests.
The Ministry of Truth is the reason why the American people have only members of the ruling class to elect into higher office. It is the reason government has for decades furthered the interests of the Establishment at the expense of the People. It is the reason the masses vote, without fail, against their own interests, every election given a choice of the lesser of two evils belonging to the same two-headed hydra, both almost mirror images of the other, both designed to protect and expand the power of the elite and the corporate world. The differences between the two parties are today slim and marginal, with one mutating towards fascist ideologies and tendencies while the other, once progressive and liberal, caring for the interests of the people, has since 9/11 shifted center right, becoming what the Republican party used to be, a conservative amalgam of ruling class incompetents.
Because the Establishment is itself best served through conservative-based ideology, thriving off the structures of predatory capitalism, through greed, selfishness and the mechanisms of corporatism, finding sustenance through the exploitation of the working and middle class, creating control through organized religion based on primitive thought, and increasing its grip over America through the perpetual dumbing down of its people, it follows that the corporate media, the Ministry of Truth, must itself be molded from conservative ideology. It must enable the dumbing down of America to continue, afflicting each and every new generation of citizens, each made more ignorant than the previous generation. As such, the fictions that the Ministry of Truth disseminates and that invariably become America’s reality are conservative-based, right-wing in nature and corporatist in belief.
The appearance must be made, and the manipulation of ideas must be engendered, as to make the People’s visions and goals the same vision and goals sought by the Establishment. The people must be made to believe that by pursuing and expanding the Establishment’s interests their own lives will be made better. This, of course, is but a farce, for the interests of one group are incompatible and mutually exclusive of the other. This explains in part the dominance of conservative thought by a majority of Americans, and of America itself, which includes centrist dogma and much left-of-center ideology, most of which is considered center-right in the more progressive, and by consequence enlightened, nations of the world. In fact, most progressive, liberal ideology in America today does not even begin to touch or compare with the mainstream, progressive, liberal belief system of many western European nations. Those views would be and are in fact considered radical and extreme in America, yet they are the evolving ideologies of the world’s most progressive societies.
Indeed, where one would expect a more progressive, educated and secular society (with all three being intertwined and correlated) due to the vast wealth in resources and human capital, where there is enough treasure to make enormous investments in education, the complete opposite is true. America is one of the most conservative nations in the developed world, even as the wealthiest nation of all. Certainly the systemic conditioning by the Ministry of Truth over the masses is one reason for this truism. Certainly the highly influential guidance of the corporate media of both our society and our culture should be burdened for a major share of fault in the virtual halt in evolving progressive thought in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen. In this conditioning of the People of conservative thought are the interests of the Establishment thus protected and furthered, after all.
Inside the Ministry of Truth, America’s departments of smoke and mirrors are hard at work, busy creating and re-creating the perception of reality of 300 million American citizens that must never be allowed to see beyond the bubble of the Dream. It is in these dark rooms where marketers and public relations gurus and spin masters and damage control experts and media executives and political Machiavellis gather, where America’s fantasy-laden reality is engendered and molded, where the strategies and campaigns conditioning Americans how to think are given life, to be disseminated through the airwaves and in print, penetrating minds and lives, making us the mere servant class of the elite. What can we expect, after all, out of an institution which has since its inception been financed and supported by the Establishment? What interests will be furthered and powers expanded by the corporate media when it is owned and operated by the corporate world, itself owned by the ruling class? What is to be expected when the Ministry of Truth is pregnant with the pretenders and contenders of elitism, the wanna bees of the ruling class, its placenta bursting with the elite’s sons and daughters and heirs to the thrones of propaganda and the Establishment? In the end, what can be expected when the hand that feeds the Ministry of Truth is part of the same body whose other hand exploits and oppresses the working and middle classes?
When it is understood who the Ministry of Truth works for, whose interests it has always pursued, then it becomes obvious whose version of reality we will forever see and be conditioned to accept. The Ministry of Truth does the bidding for the ruling class, doing its dirty work, concocting the excuses to wage war, the cataclysmic events needed to mobilize an entire population, the manipulations needed to create the citizenry’s acceptance. The Iraq war was allowed to transpire because of the direct role of the Ministry of Truth and all who work inside its bowels. Its lies and deceptions were flaunted while its truths and realities were purposefully hidden. The voices of dissent and debate were made extinct while those of warmongers and pro-war talking heads were granted an audience. The entire mechanisms of the corporate media were used to sell war to the American people, in the end succeeding in making Iraq and Iraqis the equivalent of Al-Qaeda. After that was accomplished, war was a foregone conclusion.
It was and still is the Ministry of Truth that terrorizes the masses with the state’s propaganda of fear, using every opportunity to wage psychological warfare against an entire population. It is the Ministry of Truth that whitewashes and suppresses vital documents and findings and the voices of whistleblowers, choosing to keep America in the dark even as the world entire sees the light. So much of the Iraq war has been swept underneath a rug of silence, for the Establishment knows that it was video and audio from Vietnam that gave birth to mass opposition to war. It was the Ministry of Truth that helped end the quagmire in Vietnam, which is why the Iraq war has been lived inside the vacuum of a black hole. The ruling class, it seems, learned their lesson well, which is why Americans are clueless about a war that seems to not exist within the confines of our borders and shores. It is the reason a complete media blackout exists, with only media embeds acting as the state’s stenographers allowed to report a fraction of what is occurring.
The ruling class’ decision to invade and occupy Iraq, done knowing the enormous profits and wealth that was about to be created, could not have happened without the instruments of the Ministry of Truth working in unison to make sure it indeed happened. If one thinks about it, the task was monumental, yet it was achieved with triumphant success. Dissent, protest and debate had to be silenced and erased while the lies, deceits, fictions and manipulations needed to give life to an illegal and immoral war were allowed to blossom, without even a whisper of questioning or debate, without so much as a hint of objectivity. War was decided upon, and war was what America was going to get. The entire engine of propaganda and perception-based reality was thus greased with the lubricant of Iraqi blood, flowing in obvious recognition of what transpired inside the Ministry of Truth, yet made invisible to the millions of eyes dependent on the corporate media for information.
Collaborators of Catastrophe
For five years now, the corporate media, along with its legions of presstitutes, pseudo-journalist hacks, government stenographers, talking heads, think tank pretenders, editor minions, executive servants and paid lackeys that comprise the acidic gases inside the bowels of the Ministry of Truth have collaborated in the giant productions called the Iraq War and the Psychological Warfare against the American People. These individuals are collaborators of catastrophe, collaborators to war crimes and crimes against humanity, granting life to genocide, rape, torture and perpetual suffering. Through their cameras and pens fear has hijacked America; through their oftentimes idiotic jingoism America has mutated to an authoritarian enclave; through their voices the greatest strategic disaster in American history has been allowed to fester; through their silence crimes of unspeakable criminality have been allowed to be perpetrated. It is because of their whitewashes and spinning and silent disregard of truth and reality that the nation finds itself threatened by enemies of democracy, liberty and freedom, not by enemies from abroad, but by those internal and entrenched, a much more dangerous cabal of terrorists than anything conjured up by the Ministry of Truth’s most creative fiction story-tellers.
These sons and daughters of nepotism, incestuous relationships, favorable opportunity and ethnic/religious correlation have been promoted into the Ministry of Truth not because of merit or talent or greatness but because of who they know, what they are and where they come from. They possess the passports of promotion, the keys to becoming gatekeepers, the signs and stars granting them access beyond the glass ceiling. They are sons and daughters of privilege and nepotism, born with the adequate religious background or the royal bloodlines of parentage. They are hired because they care nothing for reporting truth, lacking the integrity and honor much more talented individuals possess.
They are hired because they protect the interests of the mother country and those of the ruling class, easily selling out to money and greed and fame, sacrificing truth to the whips of fiction and suppression and evisceration of reality. They are, quite simply, tools and instruments set in motion to maintain millions in eternal ignorance while enhancing the interests of their masters. For this they have no remorse, nor for the devastation of truth they help maintain. Their job is the genesis of American reality, of becoming the front lines against the assault on the American people, their job the enhancement of a fictional Dream that keeps millions passive, apathetic and acquiescent. It is this group of pseudo-journalists, gatekeepers and executives that possess the magic ticket the rest of the population will never acquire, regardless of talent, ability and potential greatness. All that is needed to join this exclusive club is the right sign, star and lineage, the right connections, religion and ethnicity, as well as a willingness to both abandon truth for the Almighty Dollar and imprison the American people inside the dungeons of concocted reality.
In the real world, in places where truth prevails and reality thrives, where actual journalism lives and flourishes, where real democracy is a reality and not a fantasy, there exists in just one or two or three or four web pages or websites more talent than the entire lot of America’s corporate media, blossoming to grant sustenance and life back to editing, writing, reporting and journalism. It is inside the digital domain of the Internet where opportunity is still a reality, where talent and ability still matter, where the love of journalism can be seen and appreciated. For while the presstitutes have abandoned truth for greed and integrity for fame, on the Internet the only gains are love of journalism, love of truth, love of justice and love of knowledge.
Once again, through the Internet, We the People have truth, reality, a voice, true democracy and empowerment. In it we have found a paradigm where there is no glass ceiling, no discrimination, no nepotism and no alteration of truth. In this realm, the talent is omnipresent; the ability mesmerizing; the opportunity as open and as wide as the Pacific Ocean. The diversity of opinion and talent and brainpower has exploded onto the world stage, making pseudo-journalists the laughingstock of millions. To those working inside the Ministry of Truth, your gig is up, the Internet has arrived, taking your viewers, your readership and your revenues. When you collaborate to lie, deceive and manipulate a nation towards war, when you ignore truth and criminality as if it does not exist, when you choose selling out rather than standing up, you know the end is near. In this world, the Internet is the future; the corporate media, a thing of the past.
Enslaved to masters and pimps and sugar daddies, this group of war collaborators has helped to give birth to the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the United States. Their spin, bull manure, cover-ups, whitewashes, protection of authority, failure to seek accountability, dissemination of propaganda, silence in the face of blatant lies and failure to expose truth has made them all accomplices to what America has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention what Israel has done in Palestine and Lebanon. They are as guilty as the criminals and murderers in office.
Perhaps sensing the changing winds of discontent, perhaps fleeing from the losing side of history, perhaps unable to sleep at night guilt ridden with their failure as journalists, perhaps even sensing the shifting balance of power, this group of pseudo-journalists has begun to gently tear apart the bubble of infallibility that once surrounded the Iraq war. They have begun to offer glimmers of light where darkness once prevailed. Only Fox News, it seems – that putrid bastion of fascist and extremist right wing thought and propaganda – remains lost in the delusions and deceptions only the thoroughly brainwashed, or authoritarian stenographers, cling on to. Yet only Keith Olberman has decided that truth and reality and journalism are worth saving, worth standing up to. As the nation plummets into despotism, only Olberman has decided to do his job. Among journalists, he is the one true patriot; the one true American.
Suddenly, as if with a wave of the magician’s wand – or through the gate-keeping approval of editors and executives – the curtains containing long-held truths about the Bush Crusade have been allowed to rise, if only minimally, finally offering America’s masses glimpses of a war that since its inception has been sequestered from the beautiful minds of the populace. A prism of light has finally been turned on in the vacuum of nothingness that is the locked closet of Mesopotamia, opening up to inspection black corners and unexplored crevices, allowing glimmers of reality and rays of translucence through into the eyes of the masses. Today, when it is finally convenient, when it is finally popular, when it is finally profitable, when the debacle and the disaster and the failure can no longer be spun or hidden or manipulated, the Ministry of Truth has shifted course, spinning their collaboration away, making it disappear from the reality of America. The time to protect the system and the Establishment from the People has arrived, and the Ministry of Truth will in the next few years try to erase from memory, reality and history its role in the Iraq failure, not to mention the Establishment’s disastrous policies over the last six years. Yet America’s population must remember who it was that lit the path towards war, who it was that heated up the engine of America’s military might. We must remember the failure of journalism and the corporate media at a time when they were most needed.
Journalists and the corporate media have become collaborators to authoritarianism, abettors to the coming police state, disseminators of the propaganda spewed by authoritarians. No amount of spin or distortion can change these facts, nor the Ministry of Truth’s role in the war against the American people. A few bones and crumbs thrown our way in order to silence and appease us will not work, for we are aware of the guilt of collaborators to catastrophe.
Today real news is hidden from view, fake news is given prominence, truth is suppressed and fiction is promoted. Government and those in power are protected while those deemed enemy of the state are smeared. Myths and fables are granted attention while truths and realities are made to disappear, forever sent to the locked vaults of hidden fact where they will never see the light of day. The role of the fascist media is to protect the fascists, to smear those exposing truths, to ignore movements seeking truth to criminality, to enable the activities of the Bush cabal and to grant life to the manipulative mechanisms of the state. Its role is to keep the masses obedient, ignorant and subservient to the state, made unaware that every day their rights and freedoms evaporate, that every day they resemble the servants of the past and the serfs of the future.
That is today the role of the corporate media, the Ministry of Truth, using the television to brainwash and condition the masses, using its alluring glare to alter the brain function of human beings, from cradle to grave, using its tools to manipulate and lie to the public, all for the service of the fascist state, all for the sake of corporatism and its handlers. For what is the corporate media, with its legions of pseudo-journalists, hacks, spin masters, talking heads and untalented pretty faces dependent on airbrushes and layers of makeup, but the propagandists of today’s evolved fascist state? What are the keepers at the gate, whether from the right or the left, but the sons and daughters of Joseph Goebbels, bastard children of totalitarian thought, nursed from the bosom of history’s greatest propagandists, keeping authoritarian brainwashing alive and well, becoming the gatekeepers of tyranny, the destroyers of truth and reality.
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet essayist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com and at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net.
posted by Tapir's Rants at 12:55 PM
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