The shadow history of the United States of America and also of the world is a history of murders and massacres that are done by cynical and arrogant men in the seats of authority who have an overbearing thirst for power and wealth. They invent enemies and threats in order to manufacture large-scale wars to gain even more power and wealth than they had before, while thinking nothing of mass human suffering and bloodshed, even the blood of the people they were elected to represent. The welfare of the people is not their concern.
If the people become educated and informed about the real reasons for why there is war in the first place then the entire enterprise of war will be finished, and no longer will profit-driven and power-enhancing wars stain the pages of history. There will never be a peaceful age when there is public confusion and public ignorance instead of public enlightenment. Wars can only be fought by America as long as ludicrous stories and beliefs are continually invented to keep the business of war going and to keep the people in a perpetual state of historical amnesia.
American historian David McCullough speaks about the dangers to human liberty when the people of a nation are trapped in a state of ignorance and historical amnesia in this interview with Bruce Cole, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. McCullough says that "it’s in our human nature to want to know about the past," and know it intimately, and deeply. People who don't know history are spiritually and mentally deprived. They are less human for not knowing the true history of human events. McCullough connects the importance of history to the progress of liberty, and says that the preservation of freedom is not possible without an educated and informed public. He quotes John Adams, who said that "Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties."
McCullough praises John Adams's Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was "radical in its day" because "it's saying not just that it would be a good idea to educate people, it’s saying it’s the duty of the government. We “cherish” these interests, that the good society, the good life, is the life of the mind, and the life of the mind is the life of the spirit."
Knowing history is not just important because it helps the people to keep their freedoms intact and alive, but it is a condition for human survival and human civilization. McCullough says:
I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species. For nine-tenths of the time that human beings have been on earth, knowledge that was essential to survival was transmitted from one generation to the next by the vehicle of story.It matters what kind of stories we tell ourselves. Do we believe 9/11 was done by Islamic extremists or by people in the highest positions of authority in Washington? If we follow logic and practice common sense then we must choose the later story because it is the true history of who was behind the September 11 attacks.
My strong feeling is that we must learn more about how we learn. How do we really learn something so that we don’t forget it? I’m convinced that we learn by struggling to find the solution to a problem on our own--with some guidance, but doing, getting in and getting our hands dirty and working it.
How we understand the past enables us to confront the problems of the present with a good sense of how these problems evolved, and how they can be solved with a clear eye. We can't put to bed the forces of war and chaos who have gained control of the Pentagon and the CIA if we don't have any idea about why they are awake in the first place. What motivates the big guys inside the CIA and White House who were behind 9/11 is not the security of the United States, or the health of the American republic, but the acquisition of power and the continuation of their treasonous control over America.
The composition of a world-historical story like the one about terrorism and 9/11 is a big project. Smart minds were needed to create the architecture of a false reality and a false history that the people really believe to be true. One of the principal minds that helped to craft the story about 9/11 and influenced how the public perceives and understands that event is Philip D. Zelikow, the director of the 9/11 commission. I have written twice about Zelikow before so I won't discuss his role in the 9/11 crime in much detail here. Zelikow decided early on in his academic career to serve the interests of the powerful and wealthy in Washington, and that's natural. Once a system of corruption and evil is in place and its gears are in motion then it will attract men and women of talent and genius to put grease on the gears. Karl Rove is another brilliant propagandistic mind behind the construction of the pseudo-realities of the American empire.
In the present era history is managed and constructed by a group of dominant and predatory men in America and the West. But they are not gods who can tell myths as if they're sitting on Mount Olympus and get away with their crimes forever. Once their version of history is no longer believed in by the people, they are finished. They will literally be done and put away, in a heads chopped-off kind of way. When you aim big, you fall big. People who have treason and large crimes in mind are not under the delusion that they will be let off the hook once the people find out about their evil deeds. All tyrants aim to erase the memory of the people, paper over history, and repress free thought and free speech because the preservation of memory and real history along with the exercise of uncensored speech can generate a revolt and empower the people to destroy the diabolical plans of their rulers.
Aleida Assmann, a researcher of literature and culture at the Goethe-Institut, has written extensively about collective memory, and the fusion between memory and history, power and myth. In her 2008 paper, "Transformations between History and Memory," she writes that, "Historians can play contrary roles: they can either support the play of political power or challenge it; they can act as architects or critics of national memory constructions," (1). Assmann says that under authoritarian regimes a false history is constructed and manufactured to serve the interests of the regime, which is then presented to the public as real history.
In a democracy, politicians in key positions of power have to be gifted actors because they have to perform their appointed roles in front of the public in order to keep the public out of the loop and make sure that real history is never leaked. It is a tough job to tell fake stories to the public and pretend that it is the truth, and some politicians like George Bush are not as gifted rhetorically as others. Also, a little cold-bloodedness helps a great deal for a person who takes on the job of selling monstrous lies to the people.
After the fall of a totalitarian regime there is also a fall of history, that is, the regime's history. Once that happens, the people experience the rebirth of truth and discover the real history of their lives and their world that was denied to them by their political leaders. Assmann writes:
A new awareness of the interactions between history and memory was triggered by the profound political changes of the 1980s and 1990s, when new memories emerged and old ones were seen in a different light. After 1989, with the thawing of frozen memories and the opening of archives, both memory and history took on a new force that carried them into the center of the public arena. Historians were baffled by the enormous impact of living memories that they had hitherto considered to be a negligible entity. A historical caesura always introduces the chance to narrate the past in a different way. Such a moment of retrospection can become a moment of revelation; then it suddenly becomes obvious that what had been presented and passed as objective history turns out to have been a biased construction of political memory. The experience of a fundamental change of values exposed the contingence of earlier accounts of the past. In such situations both history and memory become self-reflexive; a sense is developed of their constructedness by discovering that memory has a history and that history is itself a form of memory. (2).
The totalitarian regime in America is in a unique position because unlike the Soviet or Nazi regime, America is a global superpower, which means its version of history automatically becomes global history. Never before has such a state existed in any period of human civilization. We are truly living in crazy and exciting times. The only state that has challenged the official story of 9/11 is the regime in Iran, and preparations have been made to make war on that nation, so it is not wise for states to speak the truth about Washington's designs. Those who don't go along with the new global political paradigm will not survive. But, of course, nothing in history is guaranteed.
According to Assmann, the media under totalitarian regimes plays a big role in crafting and maintaining an official version of history which serves the regime. It has been well documented that the CIA has a great influence in the U.S. corporate media, and continually spreads disinformation and lies through the media about crimes that are committed both inside the U.S. and abroad. Assmann:
Authoritarian institutions such as the church and totalitarian states aim at a monopoly over truth and the past. Whereas in premodern culture, there were neither media nor institutions of writing independent of power and authority that could back up independent accounts of the past, the institution of censorship served the function to destroy rival media and carriers of counterhistories that threatened the stability of a uniform view and an authoritarian view of history. Totalitarianism can therefore be described as an attempt to restore the premodern state monopoly over history under modern circumstances and with modern means. (3).
Assmann's writing deserves to be better known because her understanding can help people to come to terms with the present course of history and confidently challenge the hegemonic lies of the empire in Washington. It should be a good thing to speak the truth about 9/11, especially if such talk leads to the collapse of the bankster-owned regime in Washington because it is engaged in monumental acts of evil and deception. Such regimes must collapse for human civilization to move forward and for people to live freely and safely.
Other writers like Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt have also broadened our understanding about totalitarian regimes. The American people, as well as the people of other Western countries, can learn a lot from the experience of the German people after the Second World War as well as the people who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union.
There is no reason to be afraid of the truth. The worse it can do is trigger a rethinking of the past. Why is that so difficult? What is holding people back? Is it the feeling of guilt or shame? Nobody who bought the official propaganda about 9/11 and the war on terror should feel guilty about what has happened since then or be ashamed of their conduct, especially the soldiers who are fighting and dying in the wars in the Middle East. Soldiers are the victims of the corrupt war machine in Washington. The guilty are the war criminals in power who constructed a false narrative that justified the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, who knowingly lied about 9/11 and who continue to knowingly send men and women to their undeserved and untimely deaths.
The tyrants in Washington can tiptoe around the truth for now, but sooner or later they will fall over their twisted words and collapse under the growing weight of facts because, as Benjamin Franklin said, "A lie stands on one leg, truth on two."
Notes:
1. Assmann, Aleida. "Transformations between History and Memory." Social Research 75.1 (Spring 2008): 49-72. Print. Pg. 59.
2. Ibid. Pg. 61-62.
3. Ibid. Pg. 63-64.
