"The Moojas Know We Can't Stay Forever . . ."

The Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975.

Everything seems to be about word definition these days. In a world where for most people reality is made up all but entirely of words, that’s crucial. Put another way, the power to manipulate opinion by manipulation of language is the stuff political power is made of today. Equivocating, twisting, and otherwise torturing the meaning of words is the chief stock in trade of the modern government and its resident propagandists.

Think about it. Not only does democratic rule depend upon control of the public’s opinion, so does tyranny. No tyrant doubts that the people can pull him down: there are always too many “subjects” to defeat in open warfare, should they revolt. Tyranny, of course rules by fear – “kill one and terrorize a thousand.” So, however, does democracy. “Government,” George Washington observed,” is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

But whereas tyranny originates from fear, democracy begins with public choice. And choice depends on opinion. “There,” Shakespeare said, “is the rub.” The tyranny of the majority must not only obtain power by shaping the public’s opinion, it must keep power the same way. Is it any wonder, then, that in the Twenty-First Century with its marvels of science and technology – space flight, nuclear-powered vessels, brain and heart surgery, and the rest – propaganda and the methods of mind and opinion control should have been a proportionately funded and concomitantly developed science? Assured control of what you think, my friends, is of paramount importance to those who aspire to power and control of your money and destiny. It is in point of rationally incontrovertible fact the matter daily uppermost in their minds.

And we, the people of the United States, live largely – decisively so, anyway – separated by science and technology from the real world and its reality. Recently, I learned that most children in a local high school didn’t know what a callous was. Most were incredulous when I explained. Amusingly perhaps, all but a tiny percentage gave a job at MacDonald’s as an example of hard work.

Where things like the war in Iraq are concerned, everything becomes surreal for most – a percentage as high as eighty percent. No one, including young men and women about to leave for Iraq and mortal combat, has any real idea about the reality of a gunfight. Some years ago, teaching law enforcement personnel, I found the same thing. In every instance of the kind of ignorance encountered and refer to here (and I interviewed literally hundreds over a period of years and across the length and breadth of the nation), I found reality supplanted by a Hollywoodian special effects, made for television, virtual-only reality.

During preparation of this website, I took issue over something pontificated to the public by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that being the “humanity” of our precision bombing (surgically accurized ‘Shock and Awe”). When I pointed out the actual effect of a two-thousand bomb’s detonation, a number of people honestly questioned my description. They didn’t believe me, apparently even when they had read the same figures on internet websites. It didn’t take me long to realize why. All of the same people had no concept whatever of blast effect. The gas-fire explosions of Hollywood and television, you see, produce only fire and smoke in theatrically huge proportions, no blast. Debris from the special effects “blast,” moreover, floats through the air, rather than hurtles at screaming, bullet-like velocity.

During premier of the movie entitled Saving Private Ryan, I was among veterans interviewed by a local television station concerning the flick’s then much-vaunted reality. I said I hadn’t seen the movie, probably wouldn’t bother, and that the idea of reality in a movie about war struck me as pretty silly. To the interviewer’s protestations, I responded with the question, “How does the combat in Saving Private Ryan smell? Have you any idea how a bunker smells after everyone in it has been blown to shreds by a shell or grenade?” The woman at the table next to mine choked, then sat staring at her plate obviously struggling to keep ingested the bagel she had been eating.

And so on. TV and the movies are at least a virtual reality, a visual, even emotional depiction. Words are something else, too – something capable of even more surrealism. I used to entertain and tease my sons by demonstrating that I could with words alone create in their minds a ten-ton chocolate Sunday, topped by a five hundred pound cherry. I could create a king in France (there is no King of France, you know), marry him to a princess – the Princess of Lower Slobovia, no less – and the like. It was great fun.

And it’s the stuff political power is made of. I won’t bore the reader here with a re-iterated description of the staggering volume of prevarication to which the public is being subjected these days by our media and government, however. My point relates more to a news item on television this morning, that having to do with the most recent tactical device to be employed by “insurgents,” combatants engaged in “sectarian violence,” or whatever today’s bon mot may be. The tactic, first Fox News, then CNN, said, is that of including small children among occupants of an explosives-laden vehicle intended to first penetrate check points, then be detonated with the children inside once the bombers have exited the vehicle and fled.

Horrible. Depraved. Despicable. But there’s a problem with the story - whether to believe it. In the first place, I – for one – actually find it hard to believe that any human being can stoop that low. It simply doesn’t seem humanly possible (at least until you consider carpet bombing, “shock and awe” with 2,000 lb. bombs, and the rest). Then there’s the fact that FoxNews has time and time again demonstrated itself willing to say almost literally anything in order to further the public’s support of this all but totally asinine operation. You can’t, in fact, rationally believe anything they say or portray having to do with the present administration and its demagogueing, messianic-appearing machinations.

More, I know about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA propaganda program designed specifically to serve exactly that purpose – to create, in other words, the Orwellian nation in which we have come lately to live.

Looking for corroboration, I switched to CNN, then channel after channel, trying to find another report of the story. After a time spent dodging the advertisements – more outright lying and fraud designed in the state of the art by the very best of opinion control experts – I found the story again. Sure enough, it was also being reported elsewhere. But was it true? This is a story about Iraq, after all, and the major media are also ruled by IRS and the government. When I had checked the BBC and Frankfurter Zeitung, the German newspaper online, I also found the story, but both sources got their story from a report by a U.S. Brigadier General, Michael Barbero.

Tilt. What’s the truth? Well, I’ll have to check with my sources in Iraq. I’ll know in a few days.

The experience nevertheless serves to make my point having to do with the Mockingbird media and the effect of words on the mind. In the hands of a skilled propagandist using state-of-the-art technology and the super-funding available to governments like ours, the mind becomes putty in the hands of an artist.

The “state of the art” has reached heretofore unimaginable proportions, none more insidious than what I’ll call pointedly the Anna Nicole Smith Tactic. Desperate to keep the public distracted from the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of divert attention from the fact of what the taxpayers are getting for their two-thirds of a trillion dollar a year military spending, the media hides this and similar truth behind the smoke and mirrors of lurid tabloid material masquerading meretriciously as news reporting.

I’ve spoken of it here before, but the latest example of the smoke and mirrors deception is more subtle, and a good example of the genre. I speak of the current flap over firings of U.S. Attorneys by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (incidentally, have you ever seen a man with a more vapid, “what’s going on – where am I?” look?). Having sworn to do something about getting our much put-upon (three and four tours in combat sounds more like German troops in World War Two than U.S. soldiers) troops, the poltroon congress needs – desperately, as I said – a distraction. Anyone who has watched these affairs can predict what will happen, and I won’t waste ink here except to point out what the Congress would undeniably rather be doing.

The pandering of lobbyists in the halls of Congress must resemble the feeding frenzy of sharks, all to assure that our young men and women stay in combat, dying and being maimed solely in order to assure continuingly massive profits for the military industrial complex. “America,” the final outcome of this as plain as the nose on your face. Worse, you have had what must certainly be the most object and demonstrative lesson in history, that of Vietnam.

And yet you stand by, in the words of Markham, “stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox.” Brain-dead, rendered effectively unaware by relentless Operation Mockingbird propaganda disseminated by the nation’s Uriah Heep media, you stand by while thousands are being maimed and killed. Buffaloed by words being wielded like a bullfighter his cape, you suck up cynical, Orwellian slogans and logically half-baked argument like the lurid prophesies of what will happen in the aftermath of our leaving.

Think! What will happen not only became inevitable with the invasion that will forever remain astonishing in my mind for its utter tactical and strategic stupidity, there is no way for us to stop it without causing over time its equivalent. People are going to die (oh, there’s a way to prevent that, but you – Mockingbird brain-washed and indoctrinated – would never do that), lots of them and no matter whether we stay or leave. We did that; we did it when we elected George W. Bush and the swine in Congress.

To quote Herb and others writing from Iraq, "The Mooja's know we can't stay forever, and when we leave, the place is all theirs. It's their country."

Yesterday, I answered mail from a U.S. Senator concerning, it said, national security. “Security?” I answered. “The way you can give us security is impeach that moron, then resign – all of you!” They won’t do that, of course – not as long as the press can go on covering up what they are. People are going to die on account of our “Mission Accomplished,” all right. Congress and the media see to that. The question is how we can justify forcing our own to be among the dead by keeping this Jack S. Phogbound gang in power.

Human sacrifice intended to appease the gods and expiate crime like what we have done in Iraq went out of fashion long ago. At that, only because it was the Mayans and the Aztecs was it ever the “American Way.”