Well, I'm Sure Dr. Goebbels Could Tell Us.

I chose that picture today, because what I heard last night on the news reveals as never before the influence still exerted by the man known most often in history as "the evil genius". Josef Goebbels was, you see, the man who almost single-handedly developed propaganda into an art form and science. "Damage Control," most of all, was his forte.

Of course, the White House, the U.S. Army and their propaganda apologists in the television media face the daunting problem of what to do with the hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans of the wars relentlessly being demanded by the military industrial complex coup that began ruling the nation shortly after WW-2. See Operation Mockingbird.

Last night, several speakers on the various "news" programs - most notably absent in that regard, of course, FoxNews - alluded to the effect that the latest revelations about long-time malfeasance and substandard care provided veterans would have on recruiting. Hearing that they might not only wind up in Iraq but in Building Eighteen at Walter Reed Army Hospital should they not heed Senator John Kerry's earlier and much-deplored warnings about their studies, the nation's young people might begin to reject the government's blandishments regarding enlistment.

And there you have it. There you have the measure - the real one - of the patrician nation and government's interest in the plebian poor. Oh, Don Diego de la Vega's "members of the nobility" ARE looking directly at the servants, but only because the latter may very well rebel. Remember "Hell, no - we won't go?"

The nation's Veterans Administration has for decades, of course, been in execrable shape, a hell of a mess. I have already related here my own experiences and investigations having to do with the VA, and no one who has paid any enduring attention whatever to either the history of U.S. government federal administrations or the relentless pronouncements - you only have to listen: it is their veritable anthem - of corporate capitalism during my lifetime could possibly expect otherwise. The Veterans Administration is for poor people; the patrician rich do not go to the VA for medical care.

And - throughout human history - the attitude of the rich toward the poor has never changed. It is as constant and observable as the earth's rotation.

There is, in other words, no doubt - absolutely none - that everything you have been hearing in the last several days from politicians and generals - and from the contemptibly meretricious media - is a contemptuous lie. All of these people knew what was going on in the Veterans Administration and its hospitals. To deny that is absurd. I know that not only for all the obvious reasons, but because I told them so again, and again, and again, and again - all on the record which includes hearings before Veterans Administration officials.

Neither is the relatively sudden disclosure by columnists Anne Hull and Dana Priest genuine or honest. Think about it. No one, soldier who went there or relatives, nurses, service personnel - none of the literally thousands of people who knew of conditions in Building Eighteen - ever said anything to anyone? For years? Walls and ceilings covered with black mold, decaying and falling down; cockroaches, mouse shit, and the rest - nobody noticed? Nobody complained?

The literally millions of people who have seen the same elsewhere, time and time again for literally decades, have never complained to a congressman or senator? Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers were never told? None ever went to his commander?

Well, from sometime in late 1987 until 1992, I frequented - absolutely haunted -the offices of Congressman Joel Hefley, Senator Hank Brown, Senator David Pryor, and others - to say nothing of Veteran's Administration officials and hospital personnel - doing everything in my power to aid a disabled Vietnam veteran, one SFC W.R. Benton. I wrote literally scores - more than a hundred, now that this latest incident has caused me to recall - of letters to both congressmen and senators and to the media everywhere.

Parenthetically, I can't help laughing at the reaction of certain of these pompous poltroons, thinking as they must be now about what I might say and show.

I even wrote, and sent a package of documentation two inches thick, to Soldier of Fortune Magazine. Nothing I could do got any response.

But enough of that. I've said it all before - again, and again, and again. Many people would tell you that. My point here is also the same as always - that there is nothing new in all this. The behavior and mens rea of the Veterans Administration is not materially different than that of any other agency of the United States Government. It is the same as that of the White House, the Congress, and the courts (you don't relate the fact of thousands of innocent men in jail to the soldiers at Walter Reed and contemptuous manner of the VA? Really?).

It is the same as that of Internal Revenue Service, my arch-enemy of decades. Think about that for a minute. For decades (again), we have heard again and again - that despite the complicity by silence of the media - of the contemptuously merciless outrages of the IRS. Perhaps no agency of any government was ever more infamous. Across the nation, it was just about impossible to mention the U.S. version of the Gestapo without eliciting some tale of outrageous behavior from one of its victims. Every so often, 1986, then 1992, and - most recently - 1998, the government did "damage control" in the form you're hearing now with regard to Walter Reed Hospital Building Eighteen.

The same fulminating demagoguery, the same pandering posturing and fustian pontificating, the same cynical confessions and specious hang-wringing, the same Goebbels-ian "spinning" by the media. You heard it after 9-11, and Hurricane Katrina. You heard it after invasion of Iraq disclosed the absence of WMDs there. You heard it after disclosure that homosexuals in the House of Representatives were preying on pages there.

You hear it every day from the craven cowards in Congress, complicit and suborning by feigned ignorance and inaction the War in Iraq and the reasons our people are dying there for literally nothing save corporate military industrial complex greed.

Again and again and again. The public that pretends there is something unusual about the "revelations" regarding Walter Reed Building Eighteen and the Veterans Administration is doing the same thing they might otherwise complain about. Good Germans, they behave the way the government and its media does. Good Germans.

And, as long as you leave the same people in power, as long as you suck up to the likes of FoxNews and the rest, AS LONG AS YOU PARTICIPATE IN THIS PHONY-AS-A-THREE DOLLAR BILL "DEMOCRACY," you'll not only hear it all again and again, your children and their children will hear it inside the virtual prison that will hold them.

Meanwhile for me and people like me, it remains only to stand in awed wonder at what has been done to the consciousness of a nation. How, I wonder every day - it's the only reason, these days, that I watch anything on television, listen to the radio, or read the newspaper – how you can express any kind of wonder at what is merely the latest outrage perpetrated by the patricians who hold you in such utter contempt? How do you stomach the oh-so obviously scripted and canned performances of the various Thespian "personalities” of the "news" media?

I suppose I would have to ask Reichsminister Goebbels, wouldn't I? After all, he invented it.