Not Even A Mushroom Cloud Will Make Them Doubt The Narrative

 

It is hard to admit that you were wrong. It is harder to admit you were wrong on a very serious subject. Even harder to admit you were wrong when the group you belong to was wrong, because it means you will have to go against the crowd. It is harder still to admit you were wrong when doing so makes it obvious that a group you felt superior to was right. That is the kind of blow to the ego very few of us are willing to endure.

For the reasons stated above, people who fell in line with the Russiagate narrative are never going to admit they were wrong, not even to themselves. They will never permit themselves to consider that all their emotional energies were diverted from opposing Trump on any issues of substance into being unwitting dupes to the unelected deep state that has a self-admitted goal of complete global hegemony. Russia was the next nation on their list, and so the propaganda campaign had to be kicked into high gear. Democrats, this time, proved to be the subjects most useful for this purpose.

Hillary Clinton embraced the by-now debunked lie that Russia hacked her e-mails in order to save face and have someone to blame for her failure. Blame and Hillary do not coexist very well, so she was an easy sell. The Democratic Party cottoned to the Russiagate narrative because it meant they didn’t have to do a post-loss post-mortem to see what they had done wrong. A party every bit as beholden to moneyed interests as the Republican Party has no interest in contemplating what it might need to do for voters other than virtue-signaling. The media, perhaps, found it easiest of all to go along with the story of Russia interfering in the U.S. elections. For one thing, it absolved them from doing any actual journalism on their own: they just had to repeat the assertions from anonymous sources they were being flooded with on a daily basis. For another thing, they never had to take accountability for what they reported: They could take an accusation — say Putin having video of prostitutes peeing on Trump — speculate on what Putin might be making Trump do to keep the video hidden, and then move on to the next “bombshell” when the previous one had proven to be a dud. Lastly, Russiagate was a HUGE moneymaker for the establishment media. As Executive Chairman for CBS News said about Donald Trump — and which was doubly true for all establishment news outlets regarding Russiagate: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” For a while, Rachel Maddow was flying high doing nothing more than quoting from the Steele Dossier the way Joel Osteen quotes The Bible.

And of course, all the neo-cons went along with Russiagate because it advanced the agenda that they first put into practice with the invasion of Iraq. All those ghoulish demons from the pits of the Republican Party slithered over to join with the Democrats to blame Russia for what the American people and both their corrupted parties did to themselves. And the Democrats welcomed them with open arms like some prodigal son. This unification with what they once considered all that was evil they now called “bipartisanship”. “How could we be wrong when even our worst enemies agree with us?” In this way, George W. Bush was no longer a villain but became one of the good guys, like something out of a poorly written professional wrestling script.

People in an emotional state are easily manipulated. That is why those who were crushed by Hillary’s loss fell for Russiagate like a hungry trout for a well-tied fly. That’s why anyone who wasn’t emotionally invested didn’t. Anyone who was able to go to bed the night before the election because they didn’t think the survival of Western culture relied upon Hillary’s victory saw the Russiagate narrative for what it was: a lie, an excuse, a call for increased tensions against yet another country, a joke, pathetic.

Biden has had time to give us a good idea of what a Hillary Presidency would have looked like. Both being obedient servants to corporate power and the military, there is little difference one’s influence could have made. Hillary might have been more full-throatedly supportive of the military industrial complex, but without the 4-year buildup that was Russiagate, it would not have been as effective. Indeed, tying Trump to Russia was a stroke of (evil) genius on the part of those who dictate our international politics.

But like I said, it is hard to admit you’re wrong when you have so much emotionally invested in a narrative. I know I am not going to convince anybody to change their mind, let alone admit their complicity in a lie that quite possibly could be more damaging than any other lie told in human history. The only people who will read and relate to this are those who already know the truth. But that does not mean I can’t make the lie sit a little less easily in some people’s minds. I can still remind them that people other than Trump supporters, paid Russian trolls, and useful idiots can hold a position contrary to their own. I can still make self-delusion hurt a little bit.

*Dearest reader: I admit I am guilty of using what Professor S.I. Hayakawa referred to as “snarl words” in this article. Snarl words are “highly connotative language that often serves as a substitute for serious thought and well-reasoned argument.” I further admit I have done so in order to provoke an emotional response rather than a substantive debate. If I felt substantive debate were possible on this issue I would have refrained from such behavior. I honestly believe there is no way of arguing this subject with believers without provoking an emotional response. Please note that I am at least upfront about this and that it is a form of arguing that I normally find offensive.

War Without End (If We're Lucky)

The War Generation

We now have a generation reaching adulthood that has never known our nation at peace. We now have people old enough to join the military  to fight the war on terror whose earliest memories included the war on terror. Terror is all they’ve known, terror is the mindset they’ve been raised on.

And there is no end in sight for these children raised on terror. There is no end zone to be reached, no promised land, no ultimate objectives in this war. They have known nothing but war, and peace doesn’t seem to be raising its head anytime soon for them.

No other generation of Americans has ever been through anything like it. World War 2 lasted 4 years. People went to war and came home, intent on enjoying the peace and prosperity they fought for.  World War I lasted a brief year for us Americans,  and our entry into it was with the understanding that it was the war to end all war. That is after all the idea behind war, right? To put things to right so that the world is returned to its normal state and we can once again enjoy peace?

But that’s no longer the world we live in, not a world some of us have ever known. War is the new normal, war is just a part of life, a part of who we are, or at least who we have become.

And we’ve saddled an entire generation to the vision we’ve created. We’ve subjected our youth to an existence without the hope of--or the blueprint for--peace.

I wonder what it must be like for them. I was born in the Vietnam Era, can remember the end as helicopters rose from rooftops with people trying to hold on. I was of a generation who experienced wars that ended. Perhaps they didn’t have a clear-cut purpose or justification, but they eventually ended.

The war we’re involved in now has no end. It has no justification, summary, no purpose. It is merely war. It is the inheritance we bequeath to the generation that follows us. It is the unanswered question we never got around to solving because we were too busy taking our children to soccer practice and karate class. It was what we ignored in order to work extra hours so we could purchase a little something for under the tree come Christmas. I hope you enjoyed your new gaming system, junior.

I wonder how they view the world we’ve created for them, wonder if they can see things through the same twisted lens we see through. Perhaps when the television presents them with the information that we’ve bombed some country they’ve never heard of, it won’t register much in their consciousness. After all, why should they find it odd when it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s just what America does.

I can’t imagine them questioning it or evaluating the morality of it. It’s just something the government does, and they are not the government. The government is some foreign entity, unanswerable and uncaring to people such as they. How can they feel culpable for what the government has done, even though it ostensibly does it in their name? The people who make the decisions to bomb are as distant to them as the countries that are being bombed.

Given their lifelong immersion in it, how can they view war as anything other than a force of nature? How can they perceive of it any differently than primitive man saw the weather? Rainfall last night, bombs fall tomorrow. Earthquakes or explosions in some other part of the world but it doesn’t affect us.

How will they ever appreciate the value humanity has placed on peace when we have not educated them on the subject? How can they appreciate peace as a desired goal when we have for so long tolerated not having a goal or an honestly debated cause for war? Our wars are justified by lies and when the lies are discovered they are justified by the fact that we’re too far involved to stop. What do these children-now-become-adults think of when they hear the phrase “Blessed are the peacemakers?”

Maybe they’ll come to accept war the way other cultures accepted human sacrifice. Perhaps they’ll just accept it as a cost of existing: the gods, in this case weapons manufacturers, need to be appeased. Maybe they won’t see it at all, so detached from it as they are.

But just maybe they will see it with fresh eyes. Maybe more innocent eyes will see through the complex web of justifications we have spun for ourselves and see the incredible waste, horror, and immorality behind war. I’d like to think so. Somebody has to. For all the horror that war creates in the world today, it is but the birthing pains of the ultimate horror, one which we are marching closer to, our footsteps forward sounding with every explosion.

Nuclear war is every bit the threat it was in the cold war era, it’s just we don’t seem to worry about it, or even think about it much anymore. Once we had time for such matters but lately we’ve had other things on our mind: retirement investments, lawn care, and binge watching TV series on Netflix. We’ve gotten used to the possibility of nuclear annihilation, just as our children have gotten used to perpetual war.

So let us think no more about it and get back to matters more dear to our hearts. Let us return to Facebook and Fantasy Football. Let us shut out the world outside our window we can no more change than we can the weather. After all, there are new videogames to be played, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield. That’s an activity you can engage in with your child, a bonding experience. Or instead you can read a book, one of those post-apocalyptic ones that seem so popular these days. Don’t worry unduly about the children’s future, they’ll work it out, just like we did. What we don’t think about can’t hurt us, right?