The propaganda operation that is constantly being conducted by the Israeli and American intelligence services and mainstream media is just something to behold. An all-out propaganda war on the collective American mind is being waged, and unlike combat warfare, this war creates the division among the people being attacked, so anybody who diverts from the official narrative is called a kook, a crazy person, or some other demonizing name.
Populations under information warfare are so submerged in government lies, and media propaganda, that they are unable to objectively judge reality, and hardcore facts. So, members of an army who raid an unarmed ship are described as poor victims, while those who defend themselves against the attack are judged as cruel and manipulating monsters. Glenn Greenwald explains this warped thinking much better than I do:
"One of the more amazing developments in the flotilla aftermath is how a claim that initially appeared too self-evidently ludicrous to be invoked by anyone -- Israel was the victim here and was acting against the ship in self-defense --has actually become the central premise in Israeli and (especially) American discourse about the attack (and as always, there is far more criticism of Israeli actions in Israel than in the U.S.).Andrew Sullivan has also offered great analysis in his post "Israel Derangement Syndrome":
How could anyone with the slightest intellectual honesty claim that Israel and its Navy were the victims of a boat which Jon Stewart said last night looked like "P Diddy's St. Bart's vacation yacht"; or that armed Israeli commandos were the victims of unarmed civilian passengers; or, more generally, that a nuclear-armed Israel with the most powerful military by far in the Middle East and the world's greatest superpower acting as Protector is the persecuted victim of a wretched, deprived, imprisoned, stateless population devastated by 40 years of brutal Israeli occupation and, just a year ago, an unbelievably destructive invasion and bombing campaign? The casting of "victim" and "aggressor" is blatantly reversed with such claims -- which is exactly the central premise that has been driving, and continues to drive, U.S. foreign policy as well."
"This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned. And you will notice one thing as well: no regret whatsoever for the loss of human life, just as the hideous murder of so many civilians in the Gaza war had to be the responsibility of the victims, not the attackers. There is no sense of the human here; just the tribe.
Something has been wrong here for a very long time, and now it is inescapable. Until the discourse is rescued from the victims of Israel Derangement Syndrome, Israel and America will slowly be drawn into wars they cannot ultimately win, lose every other ally they ever had, and embolden and fortify the very Islamist forces we are seeking to defuse and defeat."
What is both ailing America and Israel is a syndrome. The governments of both nations have been lying to their populations about government policies for the past sixty years, but in the last decade, both governments were captured by the "loony tune" right-wing faction of the political spectrum; Cheney and the neocons in America, Netanyahu and the Likud party in Israel.
"Perhaps the most significant aspect of the incident (beside the loss of innocent life) is its glaring confirmation of this long-established, deeply destructive fact: there is no outrage that Israel can commit that the United States government will not countenance."America's political leaders said nothing to Israel when the American naval ship the USS Liberty was attacked by Israel in 1967. They again said nothing when an American citizen named Rachel Corrie was consciously murdered by an IDF bulldozer while protecting the home of a Palestinian. After Israel's criminal raid of a humanitarian ship this week, in which an American citizen named Furkan Dogan was brutally killed, America's political leaders are still siding with Israel. And they have remained silent about the harm done to another American citizen by the IDF named Emily Henochowicz, who attended a protest against the Flotilla raid in the West Bank and was shot in the eye with a tear gas.
Justin Raimondo writes:
As Raimondo rightly says, truth and justice are under blockade in America, but also in the West, and basically in the entire world. But Ground Zero is America. America is Gaza in the propaganda war against the truth. It is there that evil has been given impunity in this era. It is there that reality is denied most firmly and unconsciously, and support is given to the most egregious of crimes. So it is there that the siege on the mind must be lifted if liberty and justice are to reclaimed in this century."The Israel Lobby controls official Washington: Congress is, as Pat Buchanan trenchantly observed, "Israeli-occupied territory." Yet one would think that, in spite of these circumtances, the wanton murder of an American on the high seas by Israeli commandos would provoke an angry response from Washington. Unfortunately, one would be wrong.
Instead, what we have is the grotesque spectacle of our Vice President commending the Israelis, and the US and Israel scrambling to come up with a "joint response." What more proof do we need that the US government is the political equivalent of occupied Palestine, where truth and justice are under blockade?
For years, they’ve been spying on us, collaborating with our enemies, stealing our secrets, manipulating our politicians, and now they’ve gone so far as to murder one of our citizens on neutral ground – and still our government cannot manage even a peep of protest. A more disgusting display of cowardice would be hard to imagine."
In his classic book, "The Rape of the Mind" Dutch-American psychoanalyst Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote:
"Modern psychology has taught us how strongly the mental mechanism of denial of reality works. The eye bypasses external occurrences when the mind does not want them to happen. Secondary justifications and fantasies are formed to support and explain these denials. In Totalitaria we find the same despising of reality facts as we do in schizophrenia. How else are we to explain the fact that Hitler was still moving his armies on paper after they were already defeated?"Meerloo saw more clearly into Mankind's present situation fifty years years ago than many psychologists and pundits do today. He understood that what took place in Nazi Germany was not unique to the Germans, and to that time period in history. A society can be lied to by a government in any era, and people will accept the lies, because no society is immune from myths, and propaganda about themselves, and the larger world. Especially a society that is repeatedly told that it is in a state of a war with an outside enemy.
Meerloo said that what develops under any kind of totalitarianism is a national psychosis. "The totalitarian mind is like the schizophrenic mind;" he wrote, "it has a contempt for reality." Such contempt is what we are witnessing in many people in America, Israel, Canada, and the West, most of whom occupy positions of authority and power.
Anytime madmen gain control of the government, they will run wild with it, and their victims are everybody else in society. In our global age, everybody is a victim in the war on terror, some more so than others, but were all being denied something that is the most valuable thing in the world: the truth. And the madmen will not stop until they are forcefully stopped. Hitler had to be challenged, as do the crazy control freaks who control America and Israel today. But unlike Hitler, the crazy paranoids in America and Israel have nuclear weapons, so we must avoid war as hard as we can.
The only other way of stopping madmen in power is to stop believing in their lies and propaganda. What madmen spew is nonsense, and they will lose all their power over a community once their nonsense is regarded as nonsense, and not as holy scripture. So the way to stop the insanity is to call it out. Call out the lie of 9/11. Call out the propaganda of the Israeli flotilla massacre. Call out the toxic relationship that exists between Israel and the United States.
If conscious citizens don't stop power structures that are power-mad, if they don't stop government evil, then, by default, they give the individuals in charge their support. As Arthur Silber advises, we must all say NO!:
Thus, the refusal to "commit[] certain deeds" may spare many lives, and we can only imagine what might have happened even in Nazi Germany -- or what might happen in America today -- if a critical number of people had chosen non-cooperation, but that is not what impels an individual to say, "No," in the first instance. Rather, it is the person's commitment to being able to go on living with himself, that is, it is the primacy of the fact that the person's conscience and soul will not permit him to act otherwise. We might say that the preservation of the person's integrity is the first and greatest of rewards, but even to phrase the matter in such terms is to mischaracterize the point again. The individual's conscience and convictions will not permit him to do otherwise. That is the source of the "No."We must, as conscious global citizens, say No to the evil controllers in power in the United States and Israel. In this last decade, their psychosis has become society's psychosis because so far we have not collectively said NO to war, to torture, to illegal assassinations, to murder, to crimes. If we don't speak up and say NO NOW, then the personal hell of the powerful mass murderers who currently control America and Israel will become the world’s collective hell.
Finally, Meerloo wrote:
"The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not incidental. Delusional thinking inevitably creeps into every form of tyranny and despotism. Unconscious backward forces come into action. Evil powers from the archaic past return. An automatic compulsion to go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake with a new one; to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes the dominating end of life."
Notes:
Joost A.M. Meerloo's quotes are found in pages 122-123, in the book "The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing".
