May 4, 2011

War on Terror: The Official Grand Narrative Vs. The Counter-Narrative

In the past few days I have come to understand more clearly how the war on terror as a drama is maintained and advanced by the script writers in America's shadow totalitarian/psyop state. The framing of Osama Bin Laden's death is a perfect current example of how totalitarian propaganda works. I bet Hitler and his evil gang are looking down on the secret totalitarians in Washington with respect and admiration. Or, they may be looking down on the population of America and saying to themselves if only the German people were this gullible and uniformed.

It is interesting to compare American and Western society at large from 2001-2011, and German society in the 1930s. When future historians look back on these two periods in history, one of the major similarities they will find is that both societies were being conditioned and brainwashed in anticipation for a large world war. They may also note that totalitarian propaganda works wherever and whenever, and under good conditions as well as bad.

By the time the German people came under the dark spell of propaganda and mass hypnosis they had already suffered a decade of economic turmoil, a defeat in war, and changes in government. Compare this with what the American people experienced leading up to the day when the totalitarian propagandists officially hijacked America on September 11, 2001: there was no economic depression, and America won a major war in the Gulf the decade before. In other words, it doesn't matter when or where and in what circumstance totalitarian propagandists take over and lead the people to war. When evil men get in charge of a government they use the same formula to brainwash and hoodwink people because it works the same in every society.

Human psychology can be manipulated by power-hungry and bloodthirsty men for their own selfish ends no matter the nation or historical age. It doesn't make a difference if evil men take power in Germany, America, Israel, Russia, Iran, China, Rome, or Mesoamerica, the result is always the same: war, destruction, and mass death.

The truth is that people everywhere are gullible and led by their leaders when they declare to the people that the country is under attack from an "evil" enemy beyond the country's borders. We know the legend of Osama Bin Laden was constructed to serve this purpose, and it has consistently proven useful for the totalitarian U.S. National Security State as a mythic enemy to scare the American people and as a sacred martyr to be used to attract clueless followers in the Muslim world to fight against America, and hence justify U.S. presence in the Middle East.

The American people are waking up to the fact that they are treated like lab rats who are tricked and conned by their leaders for evil and undemocratic purposes. But understandably, it takes time to relearn history and rethink major events like 9/11. Totalitarian propaganda is emotion-based, bold, and consistent, that's why it works so well. But there is a bigger, and deeper reason why a lot of people are not able to break out of their state conditioning, which is the nature of how cultures construct narratives about who they are, why they fight, why they are at war, why they are being attacked, what they stand for, and other eternal and cosmic questions.

People may better see that 9/11 was an inside job if they view the official version as a grand metanarrative that was constructed by professional academic experts and totalitarian propagandists like Philip D. Zelikow, the Director for the 9/11 Commission. According to Wikipedia, a metanarrative, "is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge," and that, "unifies and totalizes the world, and justifies a culture's power structures." When it comes to the war on terror, a metanarrative was invented that was based around a group of "evil terrorists" headed by a grand villain in the form of Bin Laden.

The made-up story of the 9/11 attacks fell in line with the mythic narrative about "the clash of civilizations" that was invented by American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American literary theorist countered Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis with his own "Clash of Definitions." Said argued that there is an official culture and a counter-culture in every society. The two cultures do battle over ideas, the understanding of reality, and the definition of the identity of their society. The official culture in power dominates the society by constructing myths and fables that are useful for serving the interests and goals of a powerful few. Rebellious voices from the bottom question the official myths and fables and construct a counter-narrative about history, good and evil, and the relationship between the state and the individual.

The psychological war between the two cultures is a war between the myths and lies of power versus the truths of history and the memory of the people. In modern Western society the term "conspiracy theorist" was created by servants of the official dominant culture to delegitimize and smear anybody who questions the official narrative of history which is imposed on people through the media, the education system, the state, the church, and other cultural and social organs of society.

Instead of "conspiracy theorizing" the people who question big events like 9/11 and JFK are actually reconstructing lost history, and building a counter-narrative that, in the end, if believed in by the people, will bring down the politically powerful from their role as occupiers of the official culture, and terminate their diabolical designs for the future of the society.

Said emphasized the difference between official cultures and counter-cultures in all societies, and how each side competes with the other. There is tyranny when madmen get in power and speak for the official culture and justify official crimes by crafting an official narrative. Any kind of democratic opposition to the tyrants must begin with criticism of their official narrative of history. Said wrote:
Anyone who has the slightest understanding of how cultures work knows that defining a culture, saying what it is for members of the culture, is always a major, and even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. There are canonical authorities to be selected and regularly revised, debated, re-selected, or dismissed. There are ideas of good and evil, belonging or not belonging (the same and the different), hierarchies of value to be specified, discussed, re-discussed, and settled or not, as the case may be. Moreover, each culture defines its enemies, what stands beyond it and threatens it. For the Greeks beginning with Herodotus, anyone who did not speak Greek was automatically a barbarian, an Other to be despised and fought against. An excellent recent book by the French classicist Francois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, shows how deliberately and painstakingly Herodotus sets about constructing an image of a barbarian Other in the case of the Scythians, more even than in the case of the Persians.

The official culture is that of priests, academics, and the state. It provides the definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries, and what I have called belonging. It is this official culture that speaks in the name of the whole, that tries to express the general will, the general ethos and idea which inclusively holds in the official past, the founding fathers and texts, the pantheon of heroes and villains, and so on, and excludes what is foreign or different or undesirable in the past. From it come the definitions of what may or may not be said, those prohibitions and proscriptions that are necessary to any culture if it is to have authority.

It is also true that in addition to the mainstream, official, or canonical culture, there are dissenting or alternative unorthodox, heterodox cultures that contain many anti-authoritarian strains that compete with the official culture. These can be called the counter-culture, an ensemble of practices associated with various kinds of outsiders--the poor, the immigrants, artistic bohemians, workers, rebels, artists. From the counter-culture comes the critique of authority and attacks on what is official and orthodox. The great contemporary Arab poet Adonis has written a massive account of the relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Arabic culture and has shown the constant dialectic and tension between them. No culture is understandable without some sense of this ever-present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fecund.
Said also pointed out that imperial oligarchies of different nations go to war with each other, or plunder less powerful countries by making up a story of their own cultural exceptionalism and superiority. The invaders are glorified as the "good guys" and the "civilized" who are on a mission to kill the "bad guys" and bring culture to the "barbarians." Said writes, "competing powers invent their own theory of cultural or civilizational destiny in order to justify their actions abroad."

America's 21st century myth-makers positioned America as the tamer of "terrorists" and the white knight on the hunt for Arab demons. Huntington played a large role in constructing this narrative, and of course, the events of 9/11 reinforced the narrative of the "barbaric" Arab who is just oozing with hatred and venom in his veins.

Said added that every culture crafts its own image as the civilizer of barbarians, the destroyer of savages, and the harbinger of freedom, or democracy, or progress, or whatever it may be. Said wrote:
Britain had such a theory, Germany had one, Belgium had one, and, of course, in the concept of manifest destiny the United States had one, too. These redeeming ideas dignify the practice of competition and clash, whose real purpose, as Conrad quite accurately saw, was self-aggrandizement, power, conquest, treasure, and unrestrained self-pride. I would go so far as to say that what we today call the rhetoric of identity, by which a member of one ethnic or religious or national or cultural group puts that group at the center of the world, derives from that period of imperial competition at the end of the nineteenth century. And this in turn provokes the concept of "worlds at war" that quite obviously is at the heart of Huntington's article. It received its most frightening futuristic application in H.G. Well's fable The War of the Worlds, which, recall, expands the concept to include a battle between this world and a distant, interplanetary one. In the related fields of political economy, geography, anthropology, and historiography, the theory that each "world" is self-enclosed, has its own boundaries and special territory, is applied to the world map, to the structure of civilizations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny, psychology, ethos, and so on. All these ideas, almost without exception, are based not on the harmony but on the conflict, or clash, between worlds.
Since 9/11, the evil leaders of America, England, and Israel have made it their political and spiritual mission to confuse the people of the Middle East and the West, to indoctrinate each culture about an invented warrior called Bin Laden and his band of warriors called Al Qaeda, and to make each side believe that there is an inherent conflict between Islam and the West that cannot be resolved except through total war.

Most of the people of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East have not bought the propaganda because they are not living near or inside the dead cultural centers of the imperial powers. They know 9/11 was an inside job and that the war on terror is a massive fraud because of their cultural distance to the West. As Said writes, those who are "objects of the imperial gaze, so to speak, respond by resisting their forcible manipulation and settlement."

It is a miracle that millions of people in America and the West have also woken up and broken their mass political conditioning by their governmental leaders about the false war on terror and the threat from "evil Muslims." Although there is not much free speech in Western society today, it is not totally suppressed, which is why there is a good chance that America will be saved and restored, along with other Western countries.

Also, the power of the internet and the courage of renegade truth-tellers like Alex Jones, David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, William Cooper, and others have made it hard for the corrupt power elite in America to get away with their evil crimes.

The real war for the public mind is never over. The truth about 9/11 cannot be quietly sidelined to history. We are in a race against time, and a race to restore real history that has been suppressed by the official culture and governments. It is a fun race which is why so many people are waking up and joining it.

It is a hard task to overcome mass propaganda and official state deception, but nothing is impossible, especially not in America, which was born in revolution and has a history of fighting for freedom. The truth is not easily defeated by tyrants. There are more good men than bad in this world, so as long as the truth is protected and preserved there will be a great change and a great restoration coming in the future.

The French writer Albert Camus wrote on September 15, 1944 that Hitler could never have succeeded because the truth is more powerful than deception:
A lie may achieve victory when truth is afraid of its own strength. But there comes a time when the truth refuses to die and takes up its sword. From that day forward, the lie is doomed, and realism is sapped of its strength.

What can spirits liberated from hatred as well as weakness learn from the terrifying example of Germany in agony? That in history as in other realms, genius never lies in falsehood but is contained entirely within truth aware of its own power. It took us ten years and millions of dead to recognize this obvious fact. Having paid so dearly for this lesson, at least we won't forget it. (Camus at Combat; pg. 38).
In the present age of government terror and government mayhem, a time for the truth and the resurrection of freedom is near at hand.

For ten years and more radio host Alex Jones has given the lion's roar of truth on behalf of a world submerged in lies and dark propaganda. This week he invited a top government power player, public servant, and patriot Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik to discuss the war on terror, the staged state funeral of Bin Laden, and offer his own roar of truth. Pieczenik is an explosive truth-teller. He says that Bin Laden died a while ago and 9/11 was definitely an inside job. What sets him apart is that he is willing to testify in court and name names. I can hear the thunder in his voice every time he speaks. And what a sound it is!