WarFolly.com - The Battle For Reality by John Kaminski

While watching the inane vice-presidential debate the other night, I nearly swallowed my gum when I heard vice-presidential challenger John Edwards say, "I agree that we needed to invade Afghanistan." I had had pretty much the same reaction earlier when his running mate John Kerry had informed a worldwide TV audience that, despite the high number of innocent people killed in Fallujah and other cities, he would attack Iraq "much harder" than the current mass murderer in charge of America's latest immoral war.

This demonic double whammy hammered home in my mind that for the U.S. election of 2004, there is no real opposition, no genuine choice, only differences in styles of mass killing, and a message to the world that America is united behind its curdled policies of utter injustice and contempt for everyone on the planet.

The absence of a presidential candidate who would even begin to admit to the truth of America's lies dooms us here at home to a dark future of permanent war, and the rest of the world to random extermination depending on the resources they may possess that others more powerful may covet.

The indelible message to the world is that since there is no candidate calling for actual peace and an accurate understanding of the processes now turning the world into a shooting gallery, that all Americans unanimously favor this all-out push toward world domination, and preemptive obliteration of all who stand in their greedy way.

But is this really the case, or is this merely what America mainstream mass media say is the case? In other words, do we as supposedly free people really control our own destiny, or do others control it for us in our names?

While it seems true that the peace coalition in the United States seems miniscule in this era of increasing corporate control of the mind, it is perhaps instructive to look at the behavior of the American people before and during past wars to get a better idea of what's actually going on here and now.

I am reminded of the trenchant essays of Scott Nearing in 1916, when he pointed out that Woodrow Wilson was the peace candidate who vowed to keep us out of the European war, then shortly thereafter, after a hysterical newspaper campaign vilifying fictitious German baby eaters, got us into the War to End All Wars.

Or the behind-the-scenes manipulation of Japan which compelled it to invade Pearl Harbor, which Franklin Roosevelt then used as an excuse to attack Germany.

Or the famous Gulf of Tonkin incident which 40 years later we learned never happened, but at the time was used to rationalize a U.S. invasion of Vietnam that produced millions of deaths in a pointless war that to this day no one can adequately explain?

Or the young lady, later learned to be employed by the Hill & Knowlton ad agency, who came to Washington to tell the world that babies were being ripped from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers in a campaign to convince Americans that we should start bombing Iraq. That now-disproved bit of theater happened almost 15 years ago, yet we have not stopped bombing Iraq ever since.

How many of you out there still believe that you actually control what happens in your own lives? And how many of you have reached the point where you have decided the time is long past that something be done about this?

The controlling mechanism of this present burst of American aggression throughout the world is of course the tragedy of 9/11, an apparent attack by foreign extremists on American landmark that to this day has never been adequately investigated or explained.

And yet, the American people have by and large accepted their government's clumsy story without a peep of a demand for documentation, provable evidence, or a thorough investigation. Why?

The great 9/11 coverup must be considered in the context of previous political events in which the American people accepted the facile lies of its leaders without demanding more information or an honest accounting of these extremely suspicious events.

Or, more succinctly, had Americans demanded more forthright explanations of the three big assassinations back in the 1960s - JFK, RFK and MLK - it is very likely that none of these subsequent catastrophes to the American conscience ever would have happened. But we didn't. And we still don't.

As a result, the war machine rolls on, with the mayhem creeping ever closer to home.

Almost no one I know of believes the official version of what happened in the murder of President Kennedy. After 40 years of discussion, it seems like Michael Collins Piper's "Final Judgment" furnishes the final word on the matter, that JFK was dusted because he demanded Israel open its nuclear facilities for inspection, and that he wanted to diminish the power of the Federal Reserve, so these two entities got together and concocted an elaborate scheme to blame a CIA groupie for the crime and used a CIA hit team to do the deed, with the fatal shot actually being fired by the driver of the presidential limo. You haven't read that in the New York Times lately, have you?

Once JFK's successor LBJ took over, there was a rapid rise in the amount of money funneled to Israel, a trend that since has never diminished, even though Israel destroyed an American ship (another famous noninvestigation) and basically took over the American political system through bribes and blackmail. Again, no mainstream media coverage of that.

Jump to the 1990s, right after the Bush family completed its plundering of America's savings and loan industry, adding billions to the family bank account. Not much in the newspapers about that, and certainly not the real story.

The 1990s began with the invasion of Panama (actually it was '89), about which NBC reported 45 Panamanians died, but an Oscar-winning documentary later revealed a death toll of 4,000.

Then came the Gulf War, when the U.S. told Saddam Hussein it was OK to invade Kuwait, but later bombed the hell out of him for doing it. There was some coverage of this, but most Americans didn't pay attention to it.

Then came World Trade Center 1, where two FBI informants gathered a couple of other Egyptians together to drive a truck full of explosives into a New York City parking garage. America's mainstream media called it a terrorist attack.

Then came Waco, which was kind of like Vietnam, in that today no one can really explain why it happened or what was the dark secret behind the government's massacre of 84 (or 103) men, women and children who just happened to be esoteric religious fanatics. The only thing most of know for sure is that the government lied before, during and after the event, and the mainstream managed to cover it up, despite covering it live.

Then an FBI sniper fired a bullet through the head of a young mother holding her baby, and the mainstream media said the government was fighting a white supremacist terrorist in Idaho. The sniper later received a medal.

Then the Murrah Building in Oklahoma exploded and the government blamed a glazed-eyed white Patriot for doing it. Funny how McVeigh supposedly used a truck full of fertilizer parked outside the building, yet the building exploded outwards. But again, mainstream media and the federal judges ignored all the contrary evidence and quickly (supposedly) fried the fingered felon.

Six years later came 9/11, and most Americans have never even thought about the facts that their government quickly destroyed the evidence and never - NEVER! - conducted an investigation into how those buildings fell and WHO did it. The government simply named the perpetrators it chose to name (all of whom probably were using false identities), and began making war on other countries which had no clear connection to the fingered false identities.

What is wrong with this picture? And worse, what is wrong with the American people that they have conceded control of their own destinies to a process and a government that is so clumsily incompetent that it can't even invent believable stories for their citizens to swallow? And yet we swallow, endlessly, pathetically.

Do you suppose it's TV? If people can sit and watch the lame imitations of life they see on the boob tube and think this is actual, real life, can they swallow their government lying to them and believe it's the truth? Is that what's going on here?

Or is it the schools? Are our school curricula so manipulative and mind-controlling that people who attend 12 years of U.S. schools not only can't think critically but can't even identify complete lies which are paraded before their faces?

Is this what is happening?

Whatever is happening, it is leading to the death and demise of everything we hold dear.

The American manufacturing base has been destroyed and most decent jobs are being shipped overseas because American labor has priced itself out of existence.

Mass consumption food is no longer safe to eat because of food additives and lack of government regulation.

You can't drink tapwater anywhere in America anymore, but President Bush insists environmental regulations are too stringent.

Virtually all of America's vaccinations are tainted by mercury and other harmful substances, which create brain damage in children and sudden death in adults. Yet we line up, ever docile, to take them, and the maladies they bring.

Our soldiers, when they're not being killed by an outraged enemy fighting for its own freedom against their corporate oppressors, are being killed by the ammunition they are forced to handle and the vaccinations they are ordered to take. Still we wave our flags and gladly sacrifice our children.

Wait ... this is a very long list; let's get to the point.

We have forfeited control of reality to our mass media. How many times have you heard someone say, "I don't believe something is really real until I see it on television. Then I know for sure it's really happening."

This is the new American paradigm, both a fear of independent self-determination and a horror of not being part of the crowd. People are afraid to think for themselves, and to question what is being rammed down their throats as consensual truth.

It turns out what is being rammed down our throats is killing us, and not thinking for ourselves will, in very short order, lead to our own deaths, because the plan is to reduce the population to what they call sustainable levels, and the chances are very good that you are not part of that plan.

This all could have been avoided if somebody, way back when or even yesterday, had had the courage to stand up and say, "This is not what is really happening. You are lying to us." Said it to the media and/or the government in sufficient numbers.

But we didn't. With each lie they get away with, the lies simply get worse, the death toll gets higher. Now we've reached the point where the government is openly trying to kill many of us, and we're sitting there smugly saying, "Well, this doesn't really affect me." Or "Perhaps some other people need to be excluded in the interests of the health of the human race."

Well, Bunky, that person, whether you realize or not, sooner or later, is going to be you.

You had a chance to stop it - even now you do - but you didn't, and you don't.

And all because you let other people tell you what reality really is. The rule is .... if you can't make your own decision, they'll make it for you. And surely you know what their decision will be.

Next time you speak with a politician, or a government employee, talk as if your life is on the line. Because it is.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Mostly he writes essays that appear in various websites on the Internet. These have been collected into two anthologies, "America's Autopsy Report" and "The Perfect Enemy." For information go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/

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John Kaminski is the author of

"America's Autopsy Report,"
published by Dandelion Books.

JohnKaminsky.com

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