Challenges to the U.S. (Paul Craig Roberts' Last NewsMax Column?)

NewsMax.com ^ | December 29, 2006 | Paul Craig Roberts

[Toddsterpatriot]

In her historical mystery, "The Daughter of Time," Josephine Tey (a pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh) has Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, while confined to his hospital bed, solve the 15th century murder of the two York princes in the Tower of London.

The princes were murdered by Henry VII, and the crime was blamed on Richard III in order to justify the upstart Tudor's violent seizure of the English throne.

Tey makes the point that if a 20th century mystery writer can detect the truth about a 15th century murder, historians have no excuse to persist in writing in school textbooks that Richard murdered his nephews. British historians remained loyal to the Tudor propaganda long after the Tudors were no longer around to be feared or served.

At the beginning of the scientific era, men had the hope that the ability to discover truth would free mankind from superstition, dogma, and the service of power.

The belief in truth was powerful.

Truth would deliver justice and bring an end to status-based privileges and the falsehoods propagated by privilege. The faith in truth was short-lived. Today, propaganda is everywhere ascendant.

In the panoply of left-wing propaganda about Augusto Pinochet, it is nowhere mentioned that Salvador Allende was appointed president of Chile by the Chilean congress, which three years later called on Chile's military to oust Allende for his totalitarian ways. Instead, Allende is portrayed as a "popularly elected president who was overthrown by a tyrant."

Every week, another apologist for President Bush compares "Bush's fight for Iraqi freedom" to Abraham Lincoln's "fight to free the slaves."

The American Civil War was not fought to "free the slaves," as Thomas DiLorenzo and other scholars have thoroughly documented, any more than the purpose of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq was to "bring freedom to Iraqis."

The freedom excuse was invented after it became impossible to maintain the fictions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's connections to Osama bin Laden. Bush has yet to tell the real reason he invaded Iraq.

In the United States today, demonization and propaganda substitute for facts and analysis. Professors and journalists are quick to lend their names and voices to the untruths that rule our lives. Just as Hitler's foreign policy was based in propaganda, so is Bush's and Blair's.

The success of propaganda enhances government's illusion that it has a monopoly on truth. It is the monopoly on truth that gives the Bush regime the right to define the "Iran problem," the "Syria problem," the "Lebanon problem" and the "Korea problem," and to apply coercion in place of understanding and negotiation.

Secure in its possession of truth, the Bush administration refuses to talk to the enemies it has manufactured. It will only fight them.

When scholars such as John Walt and Stephen Mearsheimer, or President Jimmy Carter who has tried harder than anyone else to achieve Arab-Israeli peace, point out that Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians is a cause of Middle East turmoil, they are immediately denounced as anti-Semites.

Columnists and academics who know nothing about the Middle East or its troubles nevertheless understand what they are supposed to say whenever anyone mentions Israel in any critical context. And they have no compunction about saying it, the truth be damned.

Without commitment to truth, science, justice, and debate falter and disappear.

The belief in truth is fading from our society. It is unclear whether scientists themselves any longer believe in truth or the ability to discover it.

The discovery of truth is no longer the purpose of our criminal justice system. Once, prosecutors believed that it was better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent person to be wrongfully convicted. Today, prosecutors believe in high conviction rates to justify their budgets and re-election.

In the past, police solved crimes. Today, they round up suspects and pressure them.

There was no debate in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and none today in the United States. Many Americans, who imagine themselves to be conservatives even though they have never read, nor could they identify, a conservative writer, equate truth-telling with hatred of America.

They are of Bush's mindset: "You are with us or against us."

Bush supporters respond to factual articles about Iraq and the rending of the U.S. Constitution by suggesting that, as the writer hates America so much, he should move to Cuba or China.

In America today, each faction's "truths" are defined by the faction's dogma or ideology.

Each faction bans factual analysis that it doesn't want to hear. This is as true within the universities as it is at political rallies. The old liberal notion that "we shall follow the truth wherever it may lead" has long departed from America.

Think tanks reflect the views of the donors. Studies are no longer independent of their financing. In America, truth has become partisan.

All societies have elements of myth, untruths that nevertheless serve to unite a people. But many myths serve as camouflage for evil. One of the greatest myths is that "GIs have died for our freedom." GIs have died for American empire, for the American elite's commitment to England and for the military-industrial complex's profits.

Some may have died in Korea for the freedom of South Koreans, and some may have died trying to save South Vietnamese from the North Vietnamese communists. But it is hogwash that GIs died for our freedom.

There was no prospect of North Korea attacking America in the 1950s or Vietnam attacking America in the 1960s, and none today. The Nazis were defeated by Russia before U.S. troops landed in Europe. The United States never faced any threat of invasion from Germany, Italy, or Japan.

America's wars have created hysteria that endanger our freedom. Abraham Lincoln shut down the freedom of the press and arrested editors and state legislators. Woodrow Wilson arrested war critics.

Franklin Roosevelt interned American citizens of Japanese descent. George W. Bush has destroyed most of the Bill of Rights. In 2006, Congress appropriated funds for building concentration camps in the United States.

Recently, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said that freedom of speech is inconsistent with "the war on terror." If it takes a police state to fight terror, the country is lost even if Muslim terrorists are defeated. Americans have far more to fear from a homeland police state than from terrorists.

The vast majority of the world's terrorists are the recent creations of Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and brutality toward the Palestinians. Bush is simultaneously creating terrorists and a police state. It serves no one but the police to make their power unaccountable.

On Dec. 26, Jeff Cohen explained on Truthout how war propaganda took over TV news and demonized everyone who spoke the truth about Iraq, while pushing war fever to a frenzy.

Fox "News" was the worst, with its ranks of generals and colonels who sold their integrity for dollars and TV exposure. One of Fox's loudest voices for war was a retired general who sat on the board of a military contractor.

When the Clinton administration allowed the media concentration in the 1990s, the independence of the American media was destroyed. Today, there are a few large conglomerates whose values depend on broadcast licenses from the government. The conglomerates are run by corporate executives who are not journalists and whose eyes are on advertising revenues.

They publish and broadcast what is safe. These conglomerates will take no risks in behalf of free speech or truth.

The challenges that America faces are not terrorism and oil supply.

The challenges that we face are the police state that Bush has created and the disrespect for truth that is endemic in government, the universities and the media.

The United States has entered a dark age of dogmas and unaccountable power.

COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

[AnAmericanMother]

The original hardcover and the various editions of trade paperback have had different covers (I went and looked).

Do please FReepmail me the book list. I always have time for historical reading! My undergraduate degree was in history, and I try to keep up.

[freedomdefender]

4. Twice in the last year, he has gone six weeks without writing a column. On other occasions, he has put out four columns in a week. This past week, he's already written four columns for Antiwar.com. When he puts out a lot of columns in a week, he sounds the most unhinged. 5. He never makes public appearances anymore.

You sure do follow him closely! Are you fixated on him? Obsession?

[nopardons]

I have a first edition ( hard cover ) of the Weir book and looked at it, as I described it.

The book by Williamson, that I have and described, is a trade paperback.

I love history; just not all of it. This is just one of the eras/subjects that I'm crazy about, so I've read lots of books about it, both fiction and nonfiction.

[KevinDavis]

What the heck was he talking about?????

[Toddsterpatriot]

I have no idea, but I think Our man in washington may have a point in post #43.

[AnAmericanMother]

You sure picked a period that doesn't have much hard documentation! Not much in the way of history or correspondence has survived from that

(That's part of the reason for all the debate over the Wars of the Roses and Richard III.)

Here's the cover I remember, library edition in the local Cobb County library:

[RichInOC]

When the Clinton administration allowed the media concentration in the 1990s, the independence of the American media was destroyed.

Why, yes. As we all know, the media's deathly afraid of running afoul of the government. Particularly this current administration. They wouldn't dare say or print anything to get on Dubya's bad side. No, really. Stop laughing. It's true.

[Our man in washington]

4. Twice in the last year, he has gone six weeks without writing a column. On other occasions, he has put out four columns in a week. This past week, he's already written four columns for Antiwar.com. When he puts out a lot of columns in a week, he sounds the most unhinged. 5. He never makes public appearances anymore.

You sure do follow him closely! Are you fixated on him? Obsession?

Not really. I used to really like his columns. I still read them regularly, for the same reason one can't help but look at a train wreck. Anyway, I just got curious and did some quick research. Believe me, it doesn't take long to figure out what I figured out. Just go to Antiwar.com and check the date of his columns.

Also, I was interested in whether you could tell someone's mental state from the Internet. My best friend in high school became schizophrenic and started posting similar stuff all over the Internet. I noticed that Roberts was showing a similar pattern.

[nopardons]

Other eras that fascinate me have even less documentation. Nonetheless, I have been able to find some few bits and pieces , kernels of facts, if you will, about them. LOL

That's funny ( and I mean in the LOL sense )....that's the same cover as the Audrey Williamson book and NOTHING at all like the one on my Weir book. *shrugs*

OTOH, there is a cornucopia of hard documentation on my most favorite era/s, Victoria/Edwardian England and to a somewhat lesser degree, America during that time span.

[denydenydeny]

There was no debate in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and none today in the United States.

PCR's indistinguishable from Dick Durbin now.

[AnAmericanMother]

I don't know who is on the Committee That Does Book Covers, but they sure are a strange bunch.

They change the covers (I guess in the hope that some inattentive purchaser will assume it's a new book and buy another copy!) but the thing that annoys me is when the cover has nothing to do with the contents! The Penguin paperback series is the worst offender in this respect - they pick a pretty picture from more or less the same time period (plus or minus fifty years!) and slap it on there.

If you like American history in the 19th century, have you read Bruce Catton's Civil War series? He was a Yankee (from Wisconsin IIRC) but he sure could write - and he was fair.

[nopardons]

Unfortunately, I'm one of those poor souls who sometimes falls for the NEW cover and then have to return the book, because I have it already. I have so many books, that if I haven't read the book in a while, I will forget the title and rebuy. :-(

Yes, Penguin is pretty bad, when it comes to "book art"! But they do carry many a good title; so all isn't lost. The old saw" never judge a book by its cover", says it all and not in the way it was meant to!

Excuse me while I don my kevlar suit......there, that's better. I find the Civil War worse than boring; but thanks anyway, for the suggestion. The part of American history, of that era, that interests me, is the theatre, books/authors, socialites/Robber Barrons, immigration, and people's lives.

[AnAmericanMother]

Then you might like "The Life of Johnny Reb" which is a description of the daily life of the Confederate soldier, taken from letters, journals, etc. There's a corresponding volume, "The Life of Billy Yank". Bell Wiley wrote the first, I think the second one too.

(I wrote my thesis on the American Civil War, so naturally I think it's pretty interesting, or I would have written about something else.)

[nopardons]

Oh dear..........sorry to say, "THE LIFE OF JOHNNY REB" was not to my liking and I only read it because my daughter was forced to read it in the 7th or 8th grade ( she didn't like it either ) and I ALWAYS read the books assigned to her, so that we could talk about them.

But thanks for the suggestions; I appreciate your thoughtfulness.

[AnAmericanMother]

Well, to each his own (as the lady said when she kissed the cow.)

There are periods of history I don't care for . . . treating the 60s as "history" bothers me of course! < g >

[nopardons]

Oh yes, each to her/his own; that's what makes life interesting and helps to sell more books.

Some wars are more interesting than others to read about and everyone has their own reason for choosing which ones to delve into or not; same with historical periods.

Like it or not, every era is eventually "history"; as today will be, decades hence.

[Our man in washington]

So after Roberts puts out five columns in one week, he's gone ten days without writing anything.

In and of itself, that doesn't prove anything, but his manic work followed by long periods of apparent withdrawal is consistent with the behavior of a mentally ill person.

It's sad.