"The
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of
the [public] is an important element in democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government
which is the true ruling power of our country.' ~ Edward Bernays
By John Pilger
June 21, 2012
Arriving in a village in southern
Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of
the 20th century. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the
Mekong River, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human
mutations lived as best they could.
Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics
hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the "collection
room" and, unofficially, as the "room of horrors". It has
shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses.
.
During its invasion of Vietnam, the
United States sprayed a defoliant herbicide on vegetation and villages to deny
"cover to the enemy". This was Agent Orange, which contained dioxin,
poisons of such power that they cause foetal death, miscarriage, chromosomal
damage and cancer.
ED: Although Dow and Monsanto’s
Agent Orange remains the best known of these exfoliates, there was actually a
full rainbow of poisons; Orange was the most common however.
In 1970, a US Senate report revealed
that "the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting
to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children".
The code name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand.Today, an estimated 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children.
Aldis hand delivered the letter to the
office of Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organizing Committee. He has had no
reply. When Amnesty International pointed out that in 2001 Dow Chemical acquired
"the company responsible for the Bhopal gas leak [in India in 1984] which
killed 7,000 to 10,000 people immediately and 15,000 in the following twenty
years", David Cameron described Dow as a "reputable company".
.
.
Cheers, then, as the TV cameras pan
across the £7 million decorative wrap that sheathes the Olympic stadium: the
product of a 10-year "deal" between the IOC and such a reputable
destroyer.
History is buried with the dead and
deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal.
And history is the new enemy.
On 28 May, President Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam.
To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no
free fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant
racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the
war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society.
ED: No mention of the insurgence of the American troops against their officers or general resistance back home!
ED: No mention of the insurgence of the American troops against their officers or general resistance back home!
.
It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey,
"one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history".
The following day, the New York Times
published a long article documenting how Obama personally selects the victims
of his drone attacks across the world. He does this on "terror
Tuesdays" when he browses through mug shots on a "kill list",
some of them teenagers, including "a girl who looked even younger than her
17 years".
Many are unknown or simply of military age.
Guided by "pilots" sitting in
front of computer screens in Las Vegas, the drones fire Hellfire missiles that
suck the air out of lungs and blow people to bits. Last September, Obama killed
a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, purely on the basis of hearsay that he was
inciting terrorism. "This one is easy," he is quoted by aides as
saying as he signed the man's death warrant. On 6 June, a drone killed 18
people in a village in Afghanistan, including women, children and the elderly
who were celebrating a wedding.
.
The New York Times article was not a
leak or an expose. It was a piece of PR designed by the Obama administration to
show what a tough guy the 'commander-in-chief' can be in an election year.
If re-elected, Brand Obama will continue serving the wealthy, pursuing truth-tellers, threatening countries, spreading computer viruses and murdering people every Tuesday.
The threats against Syria, co-ordinated
in Washington and London, scale new peaks of hypocrisy.
Contrary to the raw propaganda
presented as news, the investigative journalism of the German daily Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung identifies those responsible for the massacre in Houla as
the 'rebels' backed by Obama and Cameron. The paper's sources include the
rebels themselves. This has not been completely ignored in Britain.
Writing in his personal blog, ever so quietly, Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor, effectively dishes his own 'coverage', citing western officials who describe the 'psy-ops' operation against Syria as 'brilliant'. As brilliant as the destruction of Libya, and Iraq, and Afghanistan.
It is as brilliant as the psy-ops of
the Guardian's latest promotion of Alastair Campbell, the chief collaborator of
Tony Blair in the criminal invasion of Iraq? In his "diaries",
Campbell tries to splash Iraqi blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to
drench them all.
But recognition that the respectable,
liberal, Blair-fawning media was a vital accessory to such an epic crime is
omitted and remains a singular test of intellectual and moral honesty in
Britain.
How much longer must we subject ourselves to such an "invisible government"?
This term for insidious propaganda,
first used by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and inventor of
modern public relations, has never been more apt.
"False reality" requires historical amnesia,lying by omission andthe transfer of significance to the insignificant.
In this way, political systems
promising security and social justice have been replaced by piracy, "austerity"
and "perpetual war" ~ an extremism dedicated to the overthrow of
democracy.
Applied to an individual, this would
identify a psychopath.
Why do we accept it?
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