John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RAY MCGOVERN IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“Orwellian Cloud Hovers Over Russia-gate
“…calls out the void of evidence at the heart of the Senate hearing with Attorney General Barr on Wednesday…”
Lies have always possessed great strength.
That is, so long as they play into some aspects of a people's predisposition, just as any lie about Russia automatically does in America. Just any lie, no matter whether shrewdly constructed or crudely, will find an American audience and some true adherents.
All of America’s intense efforts through decades of the Cold War, both at home and abroad – something which in total much resembled a fundamentalist religious movement like the three Great Awakenings in American history - certainly left a legacy of attitudes and hostilities which remains alive to this day, much resembling embers that only need a little stoking to make a new blaze.
And no effort has ever been made to clean away this immense dark and confusing legacy, as when for example modern Germany worked hard to reduce of legacy of the Third Reich. I believe the basic reason for this failure to clean and correct is the view by America’s powerful that Russia represents a kind of Carthage to America’s Rome. They want those fears and misunderstandings kept handy as weapons.
The strength of lies, especially cleverly constructed ones, is why they have been used countless times by the powerful - from Doctor Goebbels, who was real expert at them, to Lyndon Johnson and to Obama and Trump. The CIA, an immensely powerful agency given almost limitless resources, lies for a living. That is just what they do, not so much on the intelligence-collection side of that house of horrors as on the operations and administrative sides.
The United States has lied its way into, and through, a great many conflicts. We have Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia as just some of the highlights. Along the way, there were so many others, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Panama.
Now, I took Mike Pompeo at his word, completely, when he recently appeared on the campus of Texas A & M University, laughing and joking about his days at CIA, “lying, cheating, and stealing.”
But you know, sadly, a good portion of the American people do not grasp the ugly truth of what Pompeo bragged and laughed about. They either still naively believe that America is fundamentally good, a force for truth and goodness in the world, or they just don’t care, caring only about the fact that America comes out on top, just as they care about their local football team winning.
When you run a vast empire, lying just comes with the territory. All the wars and aggression require lies to support and justify them.
America’s been at it a very long time, and it is very practiced, building a continental empire on lies about the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, or the quick and ruthless annexation of Hawaii well before all the lies involved in pushing its way into every corner of the earth.
I suggest that lies have been incorporated into the very building materials of America’s vast imperial project, and most Americans are either unaware of the fact or treat it the way Pompeo does his CIA experience, as a humorous recital of frat-boy tricks.
He’s a powerful example. Here’s a man who brags that the Bible remains open on his office desk and that he is a born-again Christian, yet who openly laughs about lying, cheating, and stealing in his career. One who is deeply involved at present in a number of dark projects, as, for example, the fate of the poor people of Venezuela.
Freud’s notions of ambiguity in the human mind at work before our eyes in the workings of the world’s most powerful state.
Empires and honesty are fundamentally incompatible. As I’ve said many times, you can either have a decent country or you can have an empire. You cannot have both, and America made its choice a long, long time ago, and it has never stopped lying about what it is doing, both to others and to itself.
Here are some words on just a few details of this history, words which may interest some readers:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/john-chuckman-comment-the-remarkable-case-of-thomas-jefferson-he-wasnt-at-all-what-so-many-think-he-was-how-the-needs-of-politics-can-twist-and-exploit-historical-figures-and-myth-making-as-a/
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/
