Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Being a writer who attempts to discern and to tell the truth is both encouraging and discouraging. It is encouraging that some of you make monthly donations in support of the website as are your written appreciations I receive in emails. Many have written that I have rescued them from their existence in The Matrix, which is my purpose.
Discouragement comes from the ignorant diatribes that arrive in emails. I never fail to be amazed at the hate-filled ignorance of many Americans. Every time I read emails, I experience hope on one hand and despair on the other.
As I have written previously, many Americans want to hear what they have been inculcated to expect to hear. They are brainwashed, incapable of thought or evaluating evidence. If they don’t hear what they have been trained to hear, they respond with denunciations. To see so many Americans totally incapable of thought and reason makes me question the point of my efforts. Then I remember Margaret Mead’s statement that it only takes a few determined people to change the world.
In the 21st century, the neoconservatives have been those people. They have changed the world for the worst. Now we must change it for the better.
As Morpheus tells Neo: “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
In the film, Neo is The One who has powers to defeat the Agents who protect The Matrix, but I am just an ordinary person although with extraordinary experience. The Agents who protect Washington’s Matrix are focusing on truth-tellers. The alleged library of Osama bin Laden contains many of Washington’s critics. Washington’s release of the fabricated bin Laden library suggests that Washington intends to discredit its critics by associating them with bin Laden, and failing that to deal with critics in more harsh fashion.
It is discouraging that many readers are incapable of seeing the difference between the Cold War, non-jobs-offshoring days of the Reagan presidency and neoconservative Washington’s post-Reagan assault on the economic and political rights and civil liberties of the American people and on the lives and prospects of millions of people via war or sanctions in eleven countries (Serbia, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, and Russia).
I have explained so many times that Reagan’s two goals were to end stagflation and the Cold War. In order to end stagnation, Reagan’s administration changed US fiscal and monetary policy. Reagan did not change the policies in order to enrich the rich. He threatened the Soviets with a military buildup and imaginary weapons systems such as Star Wars that he could not produce, and he prevented the success of left-wing political takeovers in “America’s sphere of influence” in order to make the point to the Soviets that there would be no further expansion of Soviet influence. This was done in order to bring the Soviets to an agreement to end the Cold War. Reagan was advised, probably correctly, that hardliners would not allow Gorbachev to agree to an end of the Cold War if left-wing governments were proliferating in Washington’s sphere of influence.
Reformist governments in Granada and Nicaragua were not threats to the US. They were stymied, although Nicaragua more or less prevailed in the end, in order to send a message to the Soviets. Reagan believed that ending the Cold War and the threat of nuclear armageddon was more important than Grenada and Nicaragua’s left-wing, possibly Marxist, governments.
The air traffic control strike was not an attempt by Reagan to break the unions. Reagan was a union member and he was elected President with union votes. The air controller strike was illegal. It was done, on bad advice, to test Reagan and if he folded to break his presidency before it could get underway. This was completely obvious. No president, least of all Reagan, is going to throw away his chance to stop stagflation and the Cold War for the sake of an illegal strike by air traffic controllers.
With their ignorance of the Reagan years, how can Americans possibly understand the difference between 20th century America, which was far from perfect, and the 21st century neoconized and deregulated America in which the American Empire, both political and economic, is pursued universally at the expense of everyone except the One Percent?
Ronald Reagan did not claim the power to ignore habeas corpus and to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law. This crime was the achievement of America’s first 21st century president, George W. Bush.
Ronald Reagan did not claim the power to assassinate US citizens on suspicion alone without evidence or due process of law. This crime was the achievement of America’s First Black President, Obama.
The American left-wing is impotent, because it cannot recognize the rise of American Caesars beginning with Bill Clinton’s second term. Under George W. Bush and Obama, the accountability of the executive branch to law ceased to exist.
It was Bill Clinton who deregulated the US financial system, but hardly any Americans understand that. Many are prepared to put Clinton’s wife into the presidency completely unaware that they would be furthering the One Percent’s assault on their economic existence. I do not intend to imply that the Republicans have a candidate who would do any different.
I am not Neo. Neither is Edward Snowden, William Binney, Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, John Pilger, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, or any of the other writers who attempt to speak the truth. Against our voices are arrayed a massive number of voices of fools, well paid Internet trolls, the presstitute Western print and TV media and NPR.
It is such an unequal fight that I wonder at my participation. My participation has reduced my income and my social acceptance in influential circles. Try to imagine a former Wall Street Journal editor and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury who cannot publish in the mainstream media or appear on a TV program, except to be denounced in absentia.
Consider the oddity of truth-tellers ostracized while presstitutes like Thomas Friedman rake in large speaking fees for lying for the Establishment. Lies told by newspapers and TV “news” programs, spoon-fed stories supported with money by Washington and vested interests, comprise the news, while truth is ridiculed as “conspiracy theory” and “Putin apologetics.”
The older you become the more you realize how little of your life is left. Is it a good decision to use one’s remaining time attempting to bring truth to people, the majority of whom are incapable of comprehending it?
As I say each quarter, this is your site. It will continue as long as you support it. As long as you have hope, I have hope. It only takes a few determined people.
ya when tptb stopped following the constitution …….. what is my duty to obey? they broke the compact and now operate at the point of a gun
The developed western economies are at a historic juncture. The only item that has caused an impasse (luckily for us) is the U.S. Congress has not placed into law the signing onto the Global Warming pseudo science. This has stopped the UN from controlling the world and eliminating national sovereignty.
Governments have lied continuously to their citizens – Truth is not an option.
Name-calling, being ostracized, referring to a scientific hypothesis as ‘the science is settled’ when real science is never settled (Einstein ‘corrected Newton’s Law of Gravity’, for example), should be a wake-up call to any critical thinking individual.
Imagine the hate-filled ignorance of *any* American who doesn’t recognize the coruscating brilliance Paul Craig Roberts.
I hesitate to post this, because it will almost certainly be misinterpreted, but this is the passage that comes to mind:
“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his
breast, “it _is_ a long time.”
“It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a long time?
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”
“It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,” said
Defarge.
“How long,” demanded madame, composedly, “does it take to make and store
the lightning? Tell me.”
Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that
too.
“It does not take a long time,” said madame, “for an earthquake to
swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the
earthquake?”
“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.
“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything
before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not
seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”
She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.
“I tell thee,” said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis,
“that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and
coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it
is always advancing. Look around and consider the lives of all the world
that we know, consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider
the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with
more and more of certainty every hour. Can such things last? Bah! I mock
you.”
“My brave wife,” returned Defarge, standing before her with his head
a little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and
attentive pupil before his catechist, “I do not question all this. But
it has lasted a long time, and it is possible–you know well, my wife,
it is possible–that it may not come, during our lives.”
“Eh well! How then?” demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there
were another enemy strangled.
“Well!” said Defarge, with a half complaining and half apologetic shrug.
“We shall not see the triumph.”
“We shall have helped it,” returned madame, with her extended hand in
strong action. “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all
my soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew
certainly not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I
would–”
Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed.
“Hold!” cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with
cowardice; “I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.”
“Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your victim
and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself without that.
When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the
time with the tiger and the devil chained–not shown–yet always ready.”
Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her
little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains
out, and then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene
manner, and observing that it was time to go to bed.
– Therese Defarge is both a hero and the real villain of A Tale of Two Cities, just one thing that makes it such an amazing book. Her tenacity is both remarkable and admirable as is her patience and willingness to work for a cause larger than herself; her hatred and thirst for vengeance are her destruction, destroying her soul long before she dies.
There is a lesson there: we need tenacity and we need faith that our cause is just, but if we allow hate and vengeance to drive us, any quest for truth, liberty and justice is doomed before it begins.
I despair.
“The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.”
Michael Parenti
Via Jesse
“And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they’re not.
And what you’re going to see and what we are seeing is it’ll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you’ll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of — and I don’t want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent — to the detriment of everyone else.”
Neil Barofsky
Do you see why there is no real reform now? Do you understand the hard choice that a person of honour and conscience is given? Who will make such an unfashionable choice when they have so few models to follow and almost no moral encouragement to find in this vile era of selfishness and greed?
Do you understand now why laws that are widely opposed by the people like the secret pre-approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership can be bullied through a Congress with an approval rating in the single digits, seemingly without a care?
And abroad
“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”
John Adams
Do you see why suddenly a nation must be broken by fraud or by force and rebuilt, bent to the will of the powerful. Why its people can be devastated by harsh policies that make no sense, its sovereignty replaced by a puppet regime, while its assets are privatized and sold?
Here is an brilliant podcast interview with Dr. Roberts on King World News several weeks ago.
Dr Roberts,
‘The US is a superpower ruled by idiots, there is a complete absence of competent leadership. The contenders for the next election are a gaggle of maniacs without enough sense to be let out of the house on their own.’
He is such a hypocrite, and insults me with the “neocon” label. He is promoting the same BS that he complains of…Just perform an hour’s research into how many different times that the US Gov’t has invaded other countries during since the last decade of the 19th Century, especially within our “Manifest Destiny” hemisphere. Oh, never mind the uber Neocon; LBJ and McNamara. I guess neocons have been around a whole lot longer than W’s Administration.
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it–always.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
– Mahatma Gandhi