John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“We Need Great Historians - Our Knowledge of WW2 Is Completely Wrong”
“The use of history as propaganda prevents us from learning from history. Thus, we continue to make the same mistakes.”
Yes, indeed.
I think it important to point out that our contemporary history - that is, journalism - suffers in precisely the same way. The accumulated stories of journalism, after all, in part become the stories of history.
There are many divisions of various characteristics among human minds, and I think a legitimate one is a basic divide between those who see truth as a basic pursuit and those who see manipulation of events as a basic pursuit, avoiding any concern with truth.
I am not sure that this is widely appreciated, but I think the division does relate to other basic psychological divisions.
Many of the people in any society who seek power tend to be either narcissists or even psychopaths, and we know how much concerned with truth such minds are. Indeed, for such people, truth is just what they say it is, what we might call the ultimate egotism, egotism over reality.
There is no cure for such minds. We will always have some of them among us. Society must defend itself from them with forms of checks and balances never considered by the largely failed political system created by America’s Founding Fathers.
But that is not an easy thing to do since such individuals are often people of great superficial charm and strong drives, qualities which contribute to success in politics.
Given a leader who has a dark agenda, the same qualities in others will make them attractive for appointment to various powerful offices. Just look at the entire recent crop of Trump appointments. You literally could not find a more hellish bunch.
So long as a nation like the United States accepts that it is desirable to pursue world empire, all of these factors automatically come into play. Dark operations abroad require the services of the people who otherwise would be the least desirable people in the world to appoint to anything.
And so long as you have such dark projects going, you will absolutely require a great deal of lies and cover-up so that the general population does not understand what is happening. Here, automatically, the press is enlisted. It cannot be allowed to honestly investigate and tell citizens the truth. It must support the lies and deception. It would be accused of disloyalty or even treason if it failed in its unwritten obligations.
I’ve said it many times, but it is worth saying again, that you cannot have both a world empire and a decent society. They are completely incompatible. Just look at an abomination like Guantanamo or the CIA’s gulag of black sites for torture. How can such behavior in any way be compatible with the words of the Bill of Rights? Clearly, it cannot. So, taking all of your Nazi-like impulses and just moving them offshore, so average Americans do not have to see them, is okay?
There are a thousand matters such as that which arise in the course of empire, and they all involve lies and deception and hiding. Benghazi? I know what it was, but every American politician will continue to lie. Just as they all lie about the obvious provocations in Syria – all carried out by the mercenary-fake jihadi gangs America has always supported - with faked chemical attacks as an excuse to bomb poor Syria’s army yet again while self-righteously proclaiming your own ethical “principles” of war.
I think ordinary Americans do not appreciate this fully, and there’s almost no one “out there” in the press or in the ranks of academic history and certainly not in the kind of politics America practices – a political duopoly which literally floats on big money with both parties being equal supporters of empire and its associated utter lack of ethics - to tell them otherwise.
It is hard to feel even a small impulse of hope. If you choose to do evil – and by God, what else are matters such as Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, or acceptance of the living hell into which the Palestinians are consigned? – then you cannot have an honest press nor, for the most part, honest historians.
It all starts with a corrupt political system, and America’s politics are as utterly corrupt as you will find on the planet. They are completely governed by big money and the interests of big money. Everything else follows – the lies, the wars, the psychopaths serving, and an immense amount of killing and destruction.
No journalists and no historians, except a very few tolerated as outliers or eccentrics, can be expected to stand up to that.
