Saturday 30th of March 2024

braun had brains but he was still a nazi.... beware of prophets.....

In an exclusive interview with Independent Australia, Russell Targ, American physicist, parapsychologist and author of nine books dealing with the scientific investigation of psychic abilities, discusses the unlimited potential of 'remote viewing'.

Remote viewing (RV) is the focus of Russell Targ's latest books, The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof Of Psychic Abilities and Third Eye Spies: Learning Remote Viewing From the Masters.

 

BY SUE ARNOLD

 

As one of the co-creators in a 20-year-long Stanford University program investigating psychic abilities, Targ’s journey into the unexplained paranormal abilities of the human mind is an extraordinary one.

Understanding what remote viewing means is essential to the next steps in this unusual journey.

Perhaps the best explanation of remote viewing was given by Targ in an interview with the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing at the University of Minnesota: 

You have to find the off switch in order to do remote viewing. This was all understood 2,500 years ago. Patanjali (a Hindu sage), a hundred years before Christ, wrote that in order to see into the distance and see into the future, you have to quiet the ripples in your brain waves. He said you could then see into the distance, see into the future, heal the sick and diagnose illnesses, all of which are being done presently...

 

People quickly learn to separate out their mental noise... People can learn to do this in one afternoon. And after that, it’s all practice. I describe learning to do remote viewing like riding a unicycle. It doesn’t make sense and then someone will spend an hour with you and then off you go. It goes from impossible to easy.

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is described as “sensing with the mind”.

The military, political, social and economic potential of remote viewing is exponential — only handicapped by a significant unwillingness of society to accept its possibilities.

RV was first initiated by Targ and Harold E Puthoff, who created the Stanford Research Centre in 1972. He and Puthoff also worked on the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency’s Stargate Project.

Ingo Swann, an American psychic and visionary artist who was also a co-creator of RV, participated in the Stargate Project. He taught Targ and Puthoff how to do remote viewing. Swann has described himself as a“consciousness researcher who had sometimes experienced altered states of ‘consciousness’”.

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary examples of RV was Swann’s proposed study to Targ and Puthoff to remotely view the planet Jupiter prior to the Voyager probe in 1977. Both scientists had doubts about the resulting descriptions because of the impossibility of verification.

But one evening in 1973, Swann used his ability to see Jupiter. According to subsequent reports, it took him about three and a half minutes. Swann claimed to see bands of crystals in Jupiter’s atmosphere, like the rings of Saturn. Voyager’s probe five years later confirmed the existence of Jupiter’s rings.

Targ was a pioneer in the development of laser and laser applications which attracted a great deal of government attention. But he was keen to transition to utilising ESP specifically with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Targ told Independent Australia:

“I said, ‘I’ve built stuff for you for the last 15 years. I’m a genuine scientist who would like to teach people how to get in touch with their psychic abilities'.”

Government defence personnel wanted to be “shown something psychic”. 

Said Targ:

“I said, 'If I do something for you, you’ll think it’s a trick.' It would be embarrassing for them if they were looking for a kidnapped soldier to ask a mystic in California to find him. Instead, I’ll teach them how to do it. I’m very skilful in guiding people, giving them confidence they can do it.”

Targ guided one of the personnel to describe the location of his offsider. As a result, he was able to provide a very good description and drawing of a park and fountain where his offsider was subsequently confirmed as present at the time.

Implementation of an RV program was also spurred on as a result of a discussion with Werner von Braun, well known as “the father of space travel”, about the oxygen loss problems experienced during the historic Apollo 13 mission to the moon.

Werner von Braun indicated it would be good if astronauts could be taught to remote view problems with their spacecraft.

Targ approached the director of NASA to propose a support program to teach people to get in touch with their psychic abilities. 

NASA accepted.

Targ explained:

I had the promise of money, together with involvement of one of the astronauts. I went to the president of Stanford University and he agreed we could start a program there. What I started became a 20-year program known as the Stanford Research Institute [SRI] investigating psychic ability. The SRI was a $20 million [AU$30 million] program launched during the Cold War and supported by the CIA, NASA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Army and Air Force intelligence. That was the beginning of remote viewing.

There are four types of experiments:

  • remote viewing, in which a person describes places and events independent of space and time;
  • distant mental influence, where the thoughts of the experimenter can positively or negatively affect the physiology of a distant person;
  • whole field isolation, where someone in a state of sensory isolation accurately describes the visual experiences of someone else in another place; and
  • precognition and retrocausality, showing that the future can affect the past.

One RV experiment was financially empowering. In 1982, Targ and fellow parapsychologist Keith Harary used RV to predict silver futures in an attempt to raise funds for their research.  The results of their first experiment were highly successful, earning US$120,000 (AU$180,000) and a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal.

Their forecasts had been correct nine weeks in a row on changes in the silver futures market.

In another successful RV undertaking, RV was used by Targ and Pat Price, a psychic and retired police commissioner, to locate and identify the kidnappers of 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. Price was able to identify the ringleader in the police mug book. 

Price was also able to identify the type and location of the kidnap car, enabling police to find it in minutes.

Given the sheer extent of successful RV outcomes and the breadth of psychic possibilities, how did Russell Targ become so engaged in ESP?

Targ explained:

My father was very interested in magic. I used to go to the magic shops on 42nd Street in New York, I was an amateur teenage magician on stage. I became aware that there was real magic going on, that real magic and pretend magic was completely different. People were able to read minds and see into the distance. I became an aspiring physicist at high school.

At 89 years of age, Targ continues the long journey. 

As he once explained:

The teaching of remote viewing is principally giving people permission to do it. Society says it’s nonsense, that there is no such thing. What the remote viewing teacher has to do is use his conviction to convince a person to suspend their disbelief, quiet their mind, and describe their mental impressions of whatever the remote viewing teacher is offering as a hidden target.

Targ told IA he believes in encouraging and teaching children to make an investment in their psychic abilities: 

They need to know there’s more to them than just looking in the mirror and thinking this is who you are. You are a more spacious entity. RV should be taught in schools because it’s an ability we all have. It’s a natural ability.

 

Remote viewing gives you a more helpful view of life.

 

Sue Arnold is an IA columnist and freelance investigative journalist. You can follow Sue on Twitter @koalacrisis.

https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/how-nasa-and-the-cia-championed-an-unlikely-scientific-study,17411

 

ANALYSIS BY MR LEONISKY, ESQ.

INSIDE THE VOID…. BEWARE OF PROPHETS.

COINCIDENCES, LUCK, HISTORY… AND OUR “LATERAL THINKING”…

IN GENERAL, WE HAVE 50 PER CENT CHANCE OF BEING RIGHT OR WRONG. BUT WE LEARN TO BE RIGHT MOST OF THE TIME. OTHERWISE WE COULD DIE TOO SOON. WE NEED TO BE AUTOMATICALLY ALERT WHEN DRIVING A CAR.

WE CAN TRAIN OUR UNDERSTANDING LIKE SOME PEOPLE CAN TRAIN DOGS TO PERFORM CLEVER TASKS. AND ALSO ENJOY THE RESULT. WE ARRIVE SAFELY. THE DOG IS HAPPY.

PREDICTING THE FUTURE HAS LONG BEEN A TRAIT OF THE HUMAN UNCERTAINTY, BORN FROM HAVING TO FILL A BRAIN/MIND TOO LARGE TO JUST DEAL WITH SURVIVAL. HENCE COMES STYLISM — IN IMAGINATION, INVENTIONS, GUESSES AND RITUALS.

RUNNING THINGS BACKWARDS, ONE COULD SAY THAT HISTORY ISN’T FIXED. HISTORY ISN’T A TRUE MEMORY OF SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ACTIVITIES OF THE PAST. UNLIKE RV (REMOTE VIEWING), GUS WILL CLAIM THAT THE PAST CANNOT BE CHANGED, BUT OUR MEMORY OF IT CAN BE. WE CAN LIE. THE MEDIA LIE. THE CIA LIES. THE CIA INFLUENCES THE MEDIA TO LIE BY OMISSION AND BY MANIPULATIONS OF FACTS. THE TRUTH IS RELATIVE BECAUSE WE CAN NEVER KNOW ALL THE FACTS, BUT WE CAN DO OUR DAMNDEST TO KNOW.

WHEN WE REVISE HISTORY (NOT IN A NEFARIOUS REVISIONIST SENSE, BUT IN A MORE ACCURATE UNDERSTANDING OF IT) WE CAN HAVE A BETTER FIX ON THE NEXT. THUS WE CAN PLAN OUR SURVIVAL AND OUR NEXT STYLISTIC ADVENTURES BETTER. IF THIS IS CALLED “REMOTE VIEWING” SO BE IT — BUT NO CRYSTAL BALL, PLEASE. SOMETIMES, WE WILL TAKE RISKS AND SUCCEED OR BE FOOLS…

THE MISTAKES WE HAVE MADE CAN BE TOOLS OF LEARNING. THESE MISTAKES CANNOT BE CHANGED, THOUGH OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THESE CAN BE. 

PROPHETS SOON LEARN THE SKILL OF THE DOUBLE MEANING AND OF THE ARCANE POSITIVE INTERPRETATIONS. 

N-RD (NON-REACTIVE DEFOCUSING) MENTIONED ON THIS SITE, HAS BEEN A MEDITATIVE PRACTICE FOR GUS IN ORDER TO REMOVE MIND BLOCKS — OR DISMISS NEGATIVE ENERGY COMING FROM OTHER PEOPLE. IT’S LIKE KNOWING HOW TO USE THE SIDE-STEPPING STONE (LATERAL THINKING), RATHER THAN FALL IN THE WATER FOR TRYING TO REACH THE STONE THAT IS TOO FAR AHEAD. IT CAN BECOME SECOND NATURE “LIKE WATER ON A DUCK’S BACK”.

DOCTORS HAVE TO KNOW A LOT OF THINGS. THEY ALSO NEED PREVIOUS CASE HISTORIES TRAINING. THIS IS WHY THEY BECOME “INTERNS” BEFORE GETTING THEIR STRIPES AFTER UNI. AS WELL, MODERN MEDICINE HAS AN ARRAY OF TOOLS TO ITS DISPOSAL, FROM NUCLEAR, XRAY AND PROTONIC MACHINES. BUT THE SCIENCE IS NOT INFALLIBLE AND SOME PEOPLE ARE IN THIS FOR FAME AND FORTUNE. THEY LIE FOR PROFIT, ON THE EDGE OF KNOWLEDGE.

GUESSING RIGHT OR WRONG BECOMES INFLUENCED BY OUR PREVIOUS CHOICES AND EXPERIENCES. MOST OF US GUESS RIGHT BUT SOME POOR PEOPLE WILL MAKE THE WRONG GUESS OVER AND OVER. THEY NEED HELP.

 

GUESSING WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THE FUTURE HAS BEEN A HUMAN ACTIVITY FOR MILLENIA.

I AM OFTEN REMINDED THAT THE VOID ISN’T EMPTY AND THERE IS ENERGY IN THE SPACE AROUND US. THIS WAS KNOWN BY THE CHINESE WISEMEN/WOMEN MORE THAN 3,500 YEARS AGO… EVEN THE IGNORAMUSES OF THE MIDDLE AGES THOUGHT ABOUT THE “ETHER” OF SPACE. THEN WE DISCOVERED ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES WHICH WE USE IN OUR RADIOS, SMARTPHONES AND WIFI… WE EVEN COOK WITH THESE IN A MICROWAVE OVEN. THE VOID ISN’T EMPTY, BUT IT HAS A CERTAIN EMPTINESS OF MATTER — WHILE BEING CROSSED BY GRAVITY, LIGHT, ENERGY AND ZILLIONS NEUTRINOS.

OUR BRAINWAVES ARE MEASURABLE. SOME RECENT STUDIES HAVE INFORMED US THAT A DYING PERSON’S BRAIN BECOMES “SUPER-CHARGED” WITH ACTIVITY. 

ONE COULD EXPLAIN THIS, RATIONALLY. THE BRAIN  IS THE CONTROLLER AND RECIPIENT OF OUR BODY ACTIVITIES (the brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of the body's total haul).

APART FROM ACCIDENTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE BRAIN THROUGH INSTANT TRAUMA OR SLOW DEMENTIA — THE ACTIVE BRAIN WILL TRY TO IDENTIFY AND REACT TO OTHER ORGANS DYING, IN A FLURRY OF ACTIVITY. THE LESS REACTIVITY FROM ORGANS, THE MORE ACTIVE THE BRAIN CAN BECOME TO SPUR RESPONSES. IT IS WELL-KNOWN FOR EXAMPLE THAT THE PITUITARY GLAND WILL ENLARGE IN ORDER TO SEND STRONGER SIGNALS TO A DEFICIENT THYROID.

 

WE HAVE THE POWER TO GUESS THE NEXT, RELATIVELY.

AND IT’S A GOOD IDEA TO PAY ATTENTION TO THOSE WHO KNOW HOW TO GUESS BETTER. NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS. THERE IS NO SUPERNATURAL “TRICK” TO IT, EXCEPT BEING ABLE TO VISUALISE OPTIONS IN AN “INTUITIVE” MODE, IN WHICH OUR PAST EXPERIENCES ARE COALESCING IN A CALM ENVIRONMENT, AWAY FROM OUR DAILY BRAIN NOISE.

GUS’S N-RD DOES THIS... HOW DO YOU STOP YOUR BRAIN FROM RUNNING LIKE A BUSY FLY IN A JAR, AND BEING FLUSTERED BY A MIND-BLOCK OR AN INSULT? 

THE TRICK IS TO BECOME NON-REACTIVE TO YOUR THOUGHTS FOR A FEW MINUTES (OR HALF A SECOND). YOU LET YOUR MIND WANDER TO THE BRIGHTEST AND DARKEST CORNERS, FROM PAIN TO JOY WITHOUT EXPERIENCING A SINGLE BODILY REACTION. THIS IS THE KEY: NO REACTIVITY. NO EMOTIONAL VALUE. (THIS IS ALSO THE KEY TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SUCCESS). EVENTUALLY OUR WANDERING THOUGHTS COME TO A STANDSTILL — A POSITION OF CALM LIKE THE NON-REACTIVE BODY. OUR MIND AND OUR BODY GET IN STEP AGAIN, A POSITION FROM WHICH WE CAN BYPASS THE MIND BLOCKS AND MAKE A DECISION. IN GENERAL THIS DECISION WILL BE 95 PER CENT THE CORRECT ONE.

THIS MIND EXERCISE CAN BE DONE IN A SPLIT SECOND, IF WE KNOW NOT TO REACT TO EVENTS, OR OTHER PEOPLE WHO GIVE US GRIEF BY BEING ANNOYINGLY ILL-INFORMED. 

UNFORTUNATELY, I HAVE THE TEMPER OF MY GRANDDAD, ADOLPH, AND RECENTLY, CARELESSLY, I HAVE BLOWN MY TOP. SO I EAT HUMBLE PIE. MY DEEPEST APOLOGIES TO ALL THE PEOPLE I HAVE ARGUED ANGRILY WITH…

THIS IS THE KEY. I CREATE MANY THINGS IN A POSITIVE ANGER MODE. BUT SOMETIMES I CROSS THE RED-LINE OF NEGATIVE ANGER. SHAME ON ME. WE SHALL IMPROVE…

OUR SUCCESSFUL ATTITUDE IS OFTEN A QUESTION OF BEING CURIOUS, RATHER THAN KNOWLEDGEABLE.

AS WE GET OLDER, THE BRAIN LOSES SOME OF ITS FLEXIBILITY AND ABILITY TO REMEMBER. OLD JOE BIDEN SEEMS TO ONLY REMEMBER THE SARCASTIC CONNECTIONS OF HIS PREVIOUS DEEDS (MOSTLY BAD DEEDS SERVED AS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS). 

 

IT’S DANGEROUS FOR US TO LEAVE A MAN LIKE HIM IN CHARGE OF THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD. WHETHER HE IS TRULY IN CHARGE OR A PUPPET OF DARKER FORCES — HE’S LOST HIS MOJO.

 

GUS LEONISKY

CARTOONIST SINCE 1951

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...........

BBC bullshit?....

 Why your life is probably a simulation

 

13 APRIL 2023|TECHNOLOGY

As new technology throws up increasingly advanced computer simulations, humanity is beginning to ask; is our reality really what we think it is?

It’s certainly a question academics are also grappling with.

To get some answers, presenter Max Tobin peers into the digital rabbit hole alongside Nick Bostrom, a philosopher with an intriguing simulation hypothesis.

Presented by Max Tobin
Written, filmed & edited by Dillon Steele

Executive produced by Howard Timberlake & Dan John

 

SEE MORE:

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0ff9hkw/why-your-life-is-probably-a-simulation?

 

MEANWHILE, BACK TO HISTORICAL REALITY:

 

BY John Pilger

 

In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away. 

Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out. 

The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.” 

Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: 

“The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.”

Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear.  Let me give you one example: 

On March 7, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.

No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A “panel of experts” presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry.

“Beijing could strike within three years,” they warned. “We are not ready.” Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough.”‘Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might mean. 

There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway “lucky” country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained “experts.” What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful. 

The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, “national security reporters” I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra.  Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.  

“How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. “Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?” 

 

Post-Modernism in Charge

The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans “foreign interference” by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean? 

Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of “identity.” American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for “advice.” Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Volodymyr Zelensky. 

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal provocations of “our” leaders. The most infamous of these, Tony Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.

The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or “neo-Nazism” or “extreme nationalism,” as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s “Jewish policy,” which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews. 

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis. 

In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists” — Nazis in all but name. 

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the “white supremacist militias” active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.” The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented. 

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the “Wolfsangel,” was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbass region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist,” regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema. 

Journalists who travelled to the Donbass were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

 

Silence of Intimidation 

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s “assets” in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous. 

The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the “important issue of academic freedom of expression” and found “Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.” Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life.”

No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last to raise his voice,” wrote Eagleton.

Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue.  America then was in a state of upheaval; Richard Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as “the movement,” had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.

On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”

At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the “political action and truth-telling” of the 1960s had failed and only “culture and introspection” would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes.  And in one sense it was.

Within a few years, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said. 

As for “the movement,” its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition. 

In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on terror” was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, “could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.” 

“At least” one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or 5 percent of the population. 

 

No One Knows How Many Killed 

The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. “No one knows how many” is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a “media personality.” 

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

He replied. “If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”

I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer.  David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s “threat,” and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been “duped,” spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.

Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed. 

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its “allies” and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools? 

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945:

“Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Barack Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported. 

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as “special operations” as no other president had done since the first Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday — reported The New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.” 

A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’

In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew…,” he said, “that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was a lie. The only “threat” was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state. 

Destroying Gaddafi’s “threat” and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the U.S., Britain and France, NATO launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”

When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: “We came, we saw, he died!” 

On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an “array of lies” — including the Benghazi massacre story.

The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.

Under Obama, the U.S. extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. 

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s “historic mission,” warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.”

In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia.” Almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his defence secretary. 

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose.”

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any U.S. administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons.” 

Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has. 

I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about “our” propaganda.

All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like “dominoes.”

Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: 3 million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.

 

John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His Cambodia Year Zero is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/05/01/john-pilger-the-coming-war-time-to-speak-up/

 

 

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