May 20, 2011

The Raid and Maid: The Media Lynchings of Osama Bin Laden And Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Paul Craig Roberts says that the now decapitated IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been falsely accused of raping a hotel maid in New York and is being denied a fair trial because the mass media in the United States has effectively transformed him into a sexual demon overnight. In his articles "The Establishment Eliminates A Threat" and "The Strauss Kahn Frame-Up: The Amerikan Police State Strides Forward" Roberts lays out the evidence to prove this theory. It is more than plausible. Smear campaigns are an all too familiar story by now. It is an ordinary thing for the Western political and economic establishment to use the mindless media to smear their political enemies who do not completely follow the established program.

If a government official or puppet leader deviates slightly from the official protocol and the official way of doing business he is fired, smeared, or killed. Disobedience is not tolerated. If you don't stick to the script, you are dropped from the play. That's what happened to former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley after he criticized the treatment of Bradley Manning.

Last August, when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was smeared with rape charges, Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, wrote:
The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat“. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.
Of course, no IMF director is pure and holy. So there is no love lost for Strauss-Kahn. But the evidence is leaning towards the fact that Strauss-Kahn is a victim of a smear campaign. It is not right to judge someone guilty on the basis of a media and political character assassination. Strauss-Kahn is being accused of a crime he didn't commit, and he is being denied a fair hearing in a court of law. Let the facts and let a jury decide if Strauss-Kahn is guilty of rape, not your prejudice and your emotion.

People are so quick to judge Strauss-Kahn because, as Roberts writes, "Strauss-Kahn's indictment serves emotional needs of conservatives, left-wingers, and feminists as well as establishment agendas." People are not reacting rationally to this story. We need to remember that a person is not a rapist just because the media says so. Likewise, a person is not a terrorist just because the media says so. Most of the time, members of the media are guilty for not researching the facts and for jumping to conclusions about events and news stories like the 9/11 attacks, the official announcement of Bin Laden's death, and the smear of Strauss-Kahn.

Figures like Strauss-Kahn and Osama Bin Laden, who was also falsely accused of a crime he didn't commit, are disposable servants in the American and Western ruling hierarchy. If they are no longer considered useful to the powerful establishment in their roles or if they stop serving their parasitic, selfish, and unlawful interests then they are smeared as a villain, falsely accused of crimes, and finally killed if it has to come to that. Powerful elites and dominant states operate ruthlessly. Threats to the established economic and political order are either destroyed by the media, the justice system, or an assassin's bullet.

Western governments have abandoned all principles of morality and the rule of law. They don't even disguise their contempt for political accountability, justice, and the law anymore. When enemies need to be disposed of, then they are disposed of. Smear campaigns will continue to be effective in purging the ranks of the Western ruling class as long as the people believe the lies of the media and the lies of their governments.

We need to seriously examine our immediate reactions to media verdicts and stop falling for obvious lies uttered by governments officials. A jury should decide who is guilty and who is innocent, not journalists and governments.

Let's lay out the facts about Osama Bin Laden: Osama Bin Laden was not the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, he was not killed in a raid, and he died before President officially declared his death on May 1, 2011. These are facts. Have we forgotten what they are? Facts are not opinions. Facts are not conspiracy theories. Facts are undeniable. Definition of a fact: " Knowledge or information based on real occurrences," "Something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed" and "a truth verifiable from experience or observation." Example of a fact: The earth revolves around the sun. Before Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno came along, people who espoused this natural fact were considered crazy heretics and excommunicated by the Church.

The power of the media to make lies stand in the place of facts and to tarnish a person's reputation is almost god-like, or Church-like. The modern mass media is the single greatest enemy of justice, freedom, and due process of law that has ever existed besides the Church in the Middle Ages. We are living in a media manufactured dark age. Journalists and reporters in the media business who have a conscience and who are not mentally blind are either purged, or they are told by their editors not to touch certain stories like the 9/11 truth movement, U.S. and Israeli state terrorism, the fraudulent origins and history of the international banking system and its tentacle organizations like the Federal Reserve Bank, the engineered collapse of the U.S. and global economy, the corruption of Big Pharma, the conspiracy to establish a dictatorial global government, etc. These big stories that represent great historical shifts in Western societies remain unspoken realities in establishment media circles.

When someone like Bin Laden or Strauss-Kahn is accused of terrorism, or rape, the media repeats the accusations until they become so ingrained in people's minds that anyone who defends them are perceived as nuts and wacky conspiracy theorists. This is a very dangerous phenomenon and probably the biggest reason why there is no such thing as self-government, the rule of law, or freedom in the West. The media has been turned into a mass smear machine. There can be no justice for the victims of 9/11 if we treat the corporate-state media and mainstream journalists with respect. They are the priesthood of lies and slander.

We look back on the Salem Witch Trials now and wonder why people in Salem, Massachusetts were so quick to declare others guilty for crimes they never committed. The due process of law was not followed by government authorities in Salem, and fair trials were not given to the accused. It was a classic example of persecution mania and mass hysteria. People accused their neighbors of witchcraft without evidence. Their imaginations took over, and they abandoned the principles of reason and logic. Anybody who offered a different opinion about the situation was denounced, and demeaned.

The American playwright Arthur Miller said that the people who refused to admit that they were guilty of witchcraft were treated with greater contempt by the community and the authorities than people who played along and confessed their sins. If you declared your innocence you were killed. The ones who were let off the hook were the ones who apologized for their sins even though they never committed the acts that they were accused of committing.

In an interview about his 1953 play The Crucible, which is about the Salem Witch Trials, Miller said: "You can say for a fact that those who had the stomach to refuse to lie died. And they need not have died." Miller said his play is about the misuse of power combined with mass paranoia.

Societies that fall victim to the deadly combination of government power and societal paranoia go through hell. During periods when governments falsely accuse individuals of committing evil acts innocent people are framed and killed, victims are unjustly imprisoned, and the power of the government grows to a level that can only be classified as totalitarian and god-like.

Terrorism or communism or witchcraft are automatically connected with evil and wrongdoing, so if anyone is called a terrorist, a communist or a witch, regardless of any evidence, then they will be thrown inside a jail, tortured, and executed. The stigma of the label sticks and the damage is done. Politicians and government officials learn early on to exploit the people's fear and paranoia to grab more power, even if it means that innocent people who are falsely accused of crimes are then tortured and killed. "The primary object of the politician in these cases," Miller said, "is to scare the daylights out of the people, which is what we have been living through for a good number of years now." I don't know when he made this statement but he was referring to the persecution mania against communism and how the U.S. government exploited the social and cultural paranoia to grab power.

The U.S. government has done the same thing in the age of terror, but it is even more sinister now because unlike communism the U.S. government invented the threat of international terrorism and committed the 9/11 attacks to make the American people afraid and believe that the threat of Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism is actually real and powerful.

Watch the fascinating videos below of Arthur Miller speaking about the Salem Witch Trials. Miller's analysis has great relevance for understanding how people in high positions of power and authority are cultivating and exploiting mass paranoia, mass ignorance, and mass hysteria about terrorism to shape our world, our societies, and our lives.

Aurthur Miller speaks at Salem, Massachusetts in November 1991 on the 300th anniversary of the Salem Witch Trials.

Interview of Arthur Miller about his 1953 play The Crucible: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.