We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Keeping the Myth and the Islamic State Alive

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.

The US Empire and its partners in war crimes (the medieval Gulf kingdoms, Turkey, and Israel) have employed a grand myth of Islamic terrorist armies acting independently to sow discord in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, as a propaganda cover to promote their sponsorship of these terrorist armies in order to overthrow the Syrian government. The success of Russia's injection of forces to support the Syrian government, at the latter's invitation, has threatened this myth and Empire propagandists, who control nearly all corporate media, have had to work overtime to invent new lies to prop up this myth. Cartalucci sums up this dilemma in the following paragraph and expands on the use of phony terrorist armies in the rest of the article. (I took the liberty to edit this paragraph to add greater clarity to it.)
...many of these groups face defeat within Syria, prompting their foreign sponsors into two courses of action: 1) posing as the forces responsible for their defeat as the US and Turkey are attempting to do amid their respective, illegal incursions into Syrian territory, and 2) creating a narrative to serve as cover for the evacuation and harboring of these militant groups elsewhere for future use.
Someone, who is an unidentified "military-diplomatic source", has likely exposed the second narrative of this propaganda: the semi-encirclement of Mosul by Empire's coalition of forces in this piece entitled "US, Saudis to grant 9,000 ISIS fighters free passage from Iraqi Mosul to Syria – source".

This grand myth is like all the other myths (War on Drugs, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, the assassinations of the John & Bobby Kennedy, ML King, etc.) promulgated by the Empire's corporate media. With the huge wealth that the transnational capitalist class has accumulated, they are now able to create whatever myths that support their criminal actions and have their media and entertainment corporations (even educational institutions) repeat endless narratives to support the myths until they become "reality" for most Americans. That is precisely why Karl Rove made that infamous statement shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Today the American people (and many others) are like Truman Burbank in the "Truman Show". At the beginning the character doesn't realize that his existence and notion of reality is thoroughly controlled by the show's directors. But towards the end Truman is starting to realize that his view of reality does not make sense, and eventually he escapes this artificial reality of the "show". I keep asking myself: can this happen to all the present day Trumans of the world?