25 Dec - Against Ignorance

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Against Ignorance

Zeitgeist

http://www.zeitgeist.com -- the truth will set you free

The three parts of this essential video address the three institutions that control us:

* Religion -- damning people who disobey the priests
* Government -- sacrificing people who get in the way of empire
* Banks -- reducing people to debt slavery

Memories of the Soviet Union 
The beautiful movie I reviewed on Sunday featured Russian folk and art songs.

http://my.opera.com/NonZionist/blog/2009/12/20/white-countess-one-of-the-best-movies-ever
These songs brought back fond memories of my 1982 visit to the Soviet Union.

Fond? How is that possible? The Soviet Union was the Enemy, the Godless Demon that was about to Gobble Us Up and Take Over the World -- so we Americans believed. We knew nothing of the unprecedented Soviet losses in World War II, nothing of the struggle on the Eastern Front, nothing of the country that saved the world from the Nazi evil, nothing of the deep and universal devotion to peace, nothing of the Soviet peace proposals, and nothing of the policies of our own government. Our government needed to justify its own lucrative war-making and its domination of the world, and so the "Soviet Threat" was invented.

Today, we are all supposed to fear the presence of religion, but in 1982 it was the opposite: Our rulers wanted us to fear the absence of religion.

Peaceful Palestine
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/sept-oct02/0209010.html
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A State for All Its Citizens -- One Palestinian's Dream of Peace
By Samah Jabr / September/October 2002, pages 12, 74
....
The Palestinians are a cosmopolitan nation, however.

We are the descendants of a mixture of cultures and civilizations that have lived in this land since the Stone Age. We have Canaanite, Semite, Aramaic, Arab, Turkish, African and European blood in our veins.

Here we were born, and here our forefathers have lived. A common history, a common passion for the one homeland and the same bleeding wound unite us.

We are not xenophobic or exclusive.

We are Muslims, Christians, indigenous Jews, Baha'is and Druze.

Over the centuries our doors were open to foreigners.

The Armenians fleeing genocide found shelter among Palestinians, Africans came to Palestine as pilgrims, were caught by the magic of Jerusalem and have stayed here ever since.

The early Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution were accepted within the Palestinian community, worked with Palestinians, lived in their towns, and intermarried with them.

According to the Palestinian National Charter, the document that lays out our national principles, Jews who immigrated to Palestine before the 1948 Nakba are still considered Palestinians.
....

Early days of Zionism
Dear Khair Bakhsh --

Thank you for raising this topic. For dozens of centuries, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together peacefully in Palestine. It was a cosmopolitan land, each ethnic group enriching the others. Then, starting around 1900, ideologues from Europe started arriving with the intention of colonial conquest. These ideologues pretended to speak for all Jews, but in fact most Jews at the time saw these "Zionists" as dangerous extremists.  

Do Palestinians exist?

Jews were lured to Palestine by Israel Zangwill's clever slogan "A land without people for a people without land". When arriving Jews found out that this advertising slogan was a vicious LIE and found that Palestine was already well populated, many were disgusted, but for most it was too late to return to their previous residence.

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In 1918, Palestine had a population of about 700,000, of whom 644,000 were Arabs (574,000 Muslims and 70,000 Christians) and 56,000 were Jews.
)+
-- Abdallah Frangi, /The PLO And Palestine/, Zed Books, 1982

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Zionists continued to pretend that Palestinians do not exist. Here is Golda Meir, for example:

+( It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.
)+
-- Golda Meir Statement to The Sunday Times, 15 Jun 1969

Even today, there are many Zionists who pretend that Palestinians do not exist. This is one of the hallmarks of Zionism: a total inability to accept the existence of other human beings.

http://forums.delphiforums.com/olun/messages?msg=14473.364 -- the Zionist negation of the Other

+( One million [non-Jews] are not worth a Jewish fingernail.
)+
-- Rabbi Ya'acov Perin in his eulogy at the funeral of mass murderer Dr. Baruch Goldstein, cited in the /New York Times/, 28 Feb 1994

Forcing Palestinians out

In addition to denying the very existence of Palestinians, early Zionist land and labor policies were designed to eradicate Palestinians and force them out. For example, Palestinians were not allowed to work on the land they had farmed for centuries, and were not allowed to buy back the land once Zionists acquired it.

The Zionist attempt to take over Palestine led to several large riots and one massacre fueled by rumors. Hundreds of lives were lost, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Zionists used this violence as a pretext for forming terror organizations -- the Irgun and the STERN Gang. These organizations proceeded to blow up trains, bus stations, oil depots and hotels -- the Semiramis Hotel on 05 Jan 1948 and the King David Hotel on 22 Jul 1946.

The King David bombers were members of the Menachem Begin's Irgun, dressed up as "Arabs". This is an early example of "false-flag terror" -- the attack is designed so that innocent people will be blamed for the terror. Another example of false-flag terror is the 1954 Lavon Affair -- where Zionists torched U.S. facilities in Egypt, hoping that Egypt would be blamed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair -- Lavon and Operation Susannah

The Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel killed 91 people, including 17 Jews. This is a familiar pattern. Just as the Communists freely sacrificed Russian lives when it was for the good of the "Cause", Zionists have repeatedly sacrificed as Jewish lives -- all the while posing as "The Protectors of The Jews"!

The Partition scam

e Palestinians, of course, did not want to see half of their land stolen. In addition, dividing up people along ethnic lines made no sense to them. It made no more sense than dividing the U.S. according to race or religion, forcing all Lutherans to move to Tennessee, say, and all Baptists to Illinois and all Catholics to Wyoming. The Zionist "solution" -- Partition -- was designed to fail, and Palestinians rejected it.

Zionists then used that "Rejection" to portray Palestinians as Greedy Hate-filled Madmen. Because of the Palestinian "Rejection", all subsequent Zionist actions were justified -- so the Zionists argue to this day. This "Rejectionist" smear is, of course, repeated endlessly by our uncritical corporate masked-media.

What we're not told is that Palestinians were far from the only people who rejected the outrageously unjust carving up of their land. Much of the U.N. also rejected it, along with Truman's entire cabinet.

The real "Rejectionists"

In our propaganda media, Palestinians are dehumanized because they "Rejected" the carving up of Palestine. What we're not told is that the Zionists also rejected it -- but only in private.
In private, Zionist leaders saw their partition as a base for future expansion.
+( The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill -- From the Nile to the Euphrates.
)+
-- David Ben Gurion (Jews for Justice, http://www.cactus48.com/verses.html )

Kafka's kind of "Justice"

The interesting thing is that we are never allowed to see Israel as the attacker, just as we are never allowed to see the U.S. as the aggressor. According to our propaganda system, Israel and the U.S. always have Good Intentions, intentions that are Absolutely Pure and Holy and Noble in Every Way. Forget the billions of dollars that have vanished -- we're not supposed to know about THAT!

Intentions are everything in our propaganda system. And who do we ask when we want to know what Arab intentions are? -- Israel, of course. How convenient.

Thus we live in a world where the most monstrous crimes are excused, because the perpetrator, we're told, had Good Intentions and Good Genes (or Good Tribal Roots), and the most monstrous suffering -- 42 years of military occupation -- is justified because the victims, we're told, are guilty of "Hate" or Bad Intent. Although it is the Palestinians who were ACTUALLY pushed into the sea -- at Haifa, in 1947 -- we are told that Palestinians INTEND to Push The Jews Into The Sea SOMEDAY, and that alleged INTENT then justifies decades of "Punishment".

Betraying American ideals

Zionism was founded on the premise that Jews and non-Jews are unable to co-exist. Where Jews were once spread throughout the Middle East, now must Jews huddle behind Israel's eight-meter-high concrete Confiscation Wall. This is the Zionist utopia: a ghetto-state, cut off from the world. The Zionist premise is defeatist, xenophobic. It is also cynical, inasmuch as it denies the possibility of good.

Contrast Zionism with the American philosophy, based on individual freedom and equal rights for all. This philosophy has been shown to work. Under this philosophy, Jews and non-Jews alike have prospered and found security.

Einstein, Arendt, other courageous Jews: Israel has gone fascist

In a prescient 04 Dec 1948 letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and 24 other courageous American Jewish leaders warned us of the "fascistic" nature of Begin's Zionism.

http://www.jfjfp.org/background1_crits_of-Zionism/einstein_et_al.htm -- 1948 letter to the NYT, characterized the Begin Zionists as "fascist"

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/New_Palestine_Party%3B_Visit_of_Menachen_Begin_and_Aims_of_Political_Movement_Discussed -- wikisource: 04 Dec 1948 letter.

Zionists target Jews

Are Zionists really "The Protectors of the Jews"? Do they really speak for all Jews? Definitely not.

Independent minded Jews are actually the strongest critics of Israel. Here are two such critics:

http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0212/021222.htm +(
Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivors
Sara Roy / 08 Apr 2002
....
Most painful to me was the denigration of the Holocaust and pre-state Jewish life by many of my Israeli friends. For them, those were times of shame, when Jews were weak and passive, inferior and unworthy, deserving not of our respect but of our disdain. "We will never allow ourselves to be slaughtered again or go so willingly to our slaughter," they would say. There was little need to understand those millions who perished or the lives they lived. There was even less need to honor them. Yet at the same time, the Holocaust was used by the state as a defense against others, as a justification for political and military acts.
....
)+

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http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-09/05wise.htm +(
That most Jews have never examined the founding principles of this ideology to which they cleave is unfortunate. For if they were to do so, they might be shocked at how anti-Jewish Zionism really is. Time and again, Zionists have even collaborated with open Jew-haters for the sake of political power.
)+
-- Tim Wise, "Reflections on Zionism From a Dissident Jew", 05 Sep 2001

The death of truth drags us down

Friday, 11. December 2009, 01:42:22

Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, First Strike, truth, Khmer Rouge ...

Seeking out the truth

So much of what happens in this world, happens unseen. The sun rises, half of the planet warms, billions of people are affected, but a person who goes only by the tv news shows will know nothing of this world-wide event: The rising of the sun changes the world, but it just isn't "newsworthy".

Other events go unreported because they are seen by some people and not by "the right people". In a crime, the victim sees one thing and the criminal sees another, and if the news is reported by the criminals, no one will know of the victim's story. Does this mean that the rape "never happened"? Similarly, when military aggression occurs, the victims see one thing and the aggressors or victors, another.

Unfortunately, most of our "mainstream" history books are written by the victors. Many of the victims are dead, and those who survive do not have the resources to publish their story and make it available to a wide audience. In addition, the victor dominates the media and can easily make sure that the voice of the victims gets drowned out.

Why should it matter? Who cares about history, anyway, these days? Why should we care?

We should care because our indifference to history is one of the causes of our political paralysis. If we have no past, we have no future. We are like a deer in the headlights, unable to move out of the way of the oncoming truck, because it cannot remember or understand how it got where it is. Better, perhaps, we are like the adopted child, plunked into the middle of a family the child knows nothing about: How does that child feel? Is that any way to live?

Should we then start reciting and memorizing the Official History, like people in a re-education camp? No: We already know the Official History -- history as written by the victors -- and we know that it leaves much or even most of the story untold. We are indifferent to this history because we know instinctively that it is mainly self-aggrandizement and self-delusion, and we no longer feel a need to hide behind that wall of lies. Nothing can cure our indifference, nothing but the truth and the whole truth, and to get that, we have to seek out the victims and listen to their story and judge for ourselves just where the whole truth lies. If we do not make the effort to get at the truth, then we are living a lie, living a life starved for meaning, squandering our energy on a charade.

Image via Wikipedia

My first glimpse of truth

I too grew up with the manichaean "Good Guys / Bad Guys" world view. Today, I find it incredible that so many otherwise rational adults continue to believe in this comic-book or fairy-tale worldview -- but thirty years ago, it was all I knew how to imagine. At that time, our government was "Saving the World" from the "Godless Commies". Imagine: Thirty and forty years ago, the lack of religion was the Enemy that we were all supposed to Fear and Hate. Like sheep, we believed -- just as we believe today that the presence of religion is the Enemy. Thrity and forty years ago, we saw the "Commie Devils" as heretics who "Didn't Think Like Us". We were the Good Guys, and it was our job to kill the Commies, because they were the Bad Guys: It all "Made Sense". No questions were asked. 

Shocking revelations

U.S. support for Pol Pot is one of the things that forced me to start asking questions. I pulled on a thread here and a thread there and gradually the whole tapestry of Cold War lies unraveled. Out of necessity, I learned to think for myself. Much of what I discovered astonished me.

For example, I had been led to believe that NATO was "Defending Us" from the "Warsaw Pact"; I was amazed to find that the Warsaw Treaty Organization, as it was properly called, was actually formed in 1955, six years after the formation of NATO. The Official History had things backwards.

I learned that almost all of the new weapons in the race to nuclear suicide were invented and first deployed by the U.S., with the Soviets playing catch-up one to five years later. Where the Soviet Union threatened the U.S. from Cuba, the U.S., with bases all over the world, threatened the Soviets from the south, from the east and from the west. I realized that the U.S. government was not simply reacting to the "Soviet Threat": It was leading the race to global annihilation. That implied that it had the power to stop the suicide race at any point. So why did it not use that power?

Indeed, I found that there were dozens of unanswered Soviet peace offers on the table, offers calling for bilateral disarmament and containment and gradual dissolution of NATO and the WTO. The U.S. also made offers, but the U.S. offers were so outrageous and one-sided that no sane government could possibly accept them. The use of such fake proposals is something that had been called for in NSC-68, a secret 1950 Cold War document. Once, in the mid-1950s, the Soviets actually accepted one of these fake proposals, much to the dismay of the U.S.. The U.S. was then forced to reject its own proposal.  

Conclusions

This brief section presents only a small tip of one of many icebergs. What are we to make of this? How can the truth possibly be so much at odds with what we are told as children and continue to believe as adults?

One thing it demonstrates: Belief is fallible. Believing that our government is the Good Guy does not make it so. Believing that our government has a right to attack anybody anywhere does not make it so. Believing that our government's suicidal and sometimes genocidal policies are a necessary "Reaction" or "Defense" does not make it so. We have to ask where these false beliefs come from. They come from inculcated fear. They come from wishful thinking. They come from projecting the good intentions of the ordinary American onto the war-making elite.

We find that the truth is often the very opposite of what we have been led to believe. And there is a reason for this. Politicians often do one thing and say the opposite -- this is how they satisfy irreconcilable constituencies. E.g., they give medical insurance companies billions of dollars and call it "Health Care", or they take away our rights and call it a "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act". Like these mendacious politicians, governments use idealistic words as a figleaf to cover up aggression. The greater the fake idealism, the greater the aggression it covers up.

Indeed, truth is the first casualty of war -- and in a country that is perpetually at war, truth is as dead as a door-nail.

But it's worse than that. The death of truth creates a void that needs to be filled -- otherwise, ordinary people might notice its absence and start asking inconvenient questions. So the corpse of truth is revived and made to speak the very opposite of what is true. Over time, we are poisoned by these lies. We who were once free come to accept the most monstrous crimes as "Necessary" and "Good". The lies add up, till we find ourselves in a corner with "No Choice" but to torture people, "No Choice" but to nuke this or that town, "No Choice" but to wipe out millions -- we who were once free.

To recover our freedom, our humanity, our wholeness, and our sanity, we must separate ourselves from the war system and regain an independent moral sensibility. Then we must go back and ask who was the first casualty in this war. Finally, we must evict the reeking inhuman devil that now brazenly occupies the place once reserved for truth.

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There are none so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
)+
-- Goethe

Image by [martin] via Flickr

The lie about Democracy

Here is an excerpt from an article that deals with one the lies used to cover up military aggression:

http://prorev.com/shilling.htm
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The Coalition of the Shilling
The Iraqis will have to learn democracy someplace else

By Sam Smith / The Progressive Review

Tired of killing Muslims, we are now trying to teach their survivors some democracy.

There are a number of practical problems with this, among them being that the curriculum is in the hands of the most authoritarian, deceitful, anti-democratic, and constitution-wrecking administration we've ever had. But there's an even more disturbing matter: wander around your nation's capital and try to find something better. Leaving aside anomalies such as the ACLU and the Cato Institute, a few members of Congress, and a handful of anachronic journalists, this town shows virtually no interest in liberty, the Constitution, or democracy these days - except when prescribing them to those in far away lands.

This is not hyperbole; it is simple, grim fact. And also essential, because what makes a democracy or constitutional republic function are not words written on paper, not oaths uttered, nor clichés reiterated in public addresses, but natural, visceral, organic love of the principles overtly avowed. 

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