Link: Theory Discussion – Advocates for Truth
Advocates for Truth
I think one of the more difficult concepts to grasp for most folks living in an objectively corrupt, neofeudalist oligarchy during a time of such overwhelming malfeasance is the simple, but rarely discussed distinction between “illegal” and “wrong” or perhaps “outrageously immoral.” All too often in Pig Empire society we exist in what author and anti-mass incarceration advocate Michelle Alexander has described as a state of “knowing, but not knowing” in regards to the open corruption, mass murder and extractivist exploitation that underpins power structures across our entire planet; or at least the portion of it that exists under our modern form of free market fundamentalist capitalism.
How exactly does that work? Let’s go a little deeper into the weeds on a subject that most sane, non-lizard brained people can agree represents a time when our leaders and institutions engaged in an activity that was unarguably “wrong” and “outrageously immoral” but didn’t turn out to be “illegal” in any way that is even remotely relevant – the disastrous War on Terror, Iraq War and CIA Torture Program buffet that transformed US society after 9/11.
What do we know? Well, we know for example that former U.S. President George W. Bush freely and deliberately lied the United States (and Britain) into the objectively illegal Iraq War. Additionally we know that the Bush government repeatedly and illegally violated the civil liberties of both military prisoners and U.S. Citizens as part of the dystopian “War on Terror.” We also know that under Bush (and Cheney) U.S. Intelligence (particularly the CIA) engaged in a massive, illegal and quite frankly horrifying program of widespread kidnapping and torture – and then spied on the U.S. Senate itself, when that body was investigating said torture program.
Yet even despite this knowledge we live in a world were George W. Bush is openly feted as a paternal symbol of American leadership during a time of crisis throughout the entire American financial, media and political establishments. In that same world former FBI Director and architect of an illegal mass surveillance of Muslims, activists and dissidents program at the bureau, Bob Mueller, is hailed as a virtuous paragon of absolute justice who possess the very wisdom of Solomon. Men who ordered or covered up torture like Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden and James Clapper are celebrated national security pundits on the evening news; Bloody Gina Haspel was eventually promoted all the way to director of the CIA for her invaluable service to the Pig Empire, which consisted mostly of destroying the videotape evidence of CIA torture sessions.
Indeed, the only person who has ever gone to jail for torturing perhaps thousands of innocent people is the guy who ratted the architects of the program out; just as the only person to see jail time for a recorded video of U.S. helicopter pilots committing a war crime, is the woman who exposed the murders and the only person indicted when America spied on foreign leaders is the guy running Wikileaks who of course exposed the diplomatic cables that proved the crime occurred.
Now if you stop to think about all of this for a moment, you can pretty easily rationalize away this massive disconnect between obvious guilt and not just open lack of accountability, but the active hagiography of mass murderers, torturers and other “criminals” who have never been and never will be charged with a crime.
You can point to the Patriot Act, the office of the President and the weak-willed “bipartisan” sniveling of Democratic Party House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to explain why Bush was never held accountable. You can callously argue that the CIA torturers and FBI racists were “just following orders” and that’s why they weren’t held accountable. You can even point to the Espionage Act and mewl about “national security” to explain why only the whistle-blowers ever go to jail. If you’re a particularly smart fish, you might even get around to arguing that the open politicization of the American judiciary branch and its complete submission to (typically reactionary) whims of elite capital is why none of these obviously “guilty” monsters is ever held accountable.
Unfortunately, there exists at least two glaring and perhaps even fatal problems with all of these arguments.
First while all of these things may explain the fact that none of these people were ever convicted or punished in a legal sense, that fact has no bearing whatsoever on how they are perceived and presented in both the media and Pig Empire society at large. While corporate media *may* have a liability question if they admit Bush is a fundie fascist war criminal, there’s no law that says they have to actively lie to you to help cover up that fact. There is no rule whatsoever that says just because nobody went to jail for the “torturing some folks” outlets like CNN and Fox News have to keep allowing the architects of the CIA torture program to present themselves as respected national security experts without mentioning their crimes against humanity – frankly, there’s no reason they have to have these ghouls on at all. Neither do you or I have to consider mass murderers to be credible analysts of the news just because they aren’t in prison.
The second problem of course is that frankly you don’t stop to think about any of this at all; virtually nobody does because we consume media in real time and the corporate news (online, print or television) sure as sh*t isn’t going to remind you. As the media gatekeepers blithely ignore the fact that all of these guys are crooked murderous fascists, you too have to ignore these facts – at least long enough to follow the narrative.
On a more sinister level, it should be noted that while you might not even actively realize that you’re suppressing what you know, in order to process what media and political establishment are telling you, your subconscious mind certainly does – and because it’s rather hard for a healthy person to both know and forget something at the same time, it typically will discard the past information and replace it with the present information to harmonize that dissonance. In the case of Bush and the War on Terror criminals, that means pretending they aren’t all responsible for the modern U.S. police state and crimes against humanity; at first only for long enough to follow the news, but over time (for most people) in your everyday thoughts and established conception of reality. This is of course aided greatly by image crafting done on behalf of these monsters in the public eye and constant repetition of heroic narratives about them in the media.
Even if you’re a particularly astute media consumer with a reasonably good memory, this disconnect between what you know and what you have to forget often creates a kind of self doubt and leads to self censorship. You might know Bob Mueller is a piece of sh*t gestapo pig, but you aren’t gonna blurt that out when he comes on the TV screen in the break room at work if you’re surrounded by liberals who bought Russiagate hook, line and sinker. All of this is of course in addition to the fact anyone too young to remember the War on Terror will forevermore generally assume that all of these people are who the fawning media, intellectuals and political pundits say they are – heroes, exemplars of leadership and wise observers whose judgment, advice and word of honor are literally sacrosanct.
This is naturally just one example; we could have just as easily examined the 2008 financial crisis, the ensuing bailout and the Obama administration’s failure to hold anyone accountable in that situation instead. When you know that Lloyd Blankfein (at Goldman Sachs) was the person most responsible for crashing the market and plunging the world into financial ruin, it’s awful hard to understand why he’s regularly on your TV cheerfully advising you on how to think about global economic matters.
Ok so the media lies, the courts are too corrupt to hold anyone accountable and the entire establishment is happy to rehabilitate war criminals; “so what, that was a long time ago and those folks are no longer in power anyway” you say, ignoring the fact that these ghouls keep getting recycled in future governments and administrative bodies. Fine, but what happens when this same opinion making apparatus is working on us in real time?
What happens when we can’t talk about the fact that the Democratic Party is openly rigging its primaries on behalf of establishment “centrist” candidates because everything they’re doing is technically legal? I’ll do you one better, if in-pocket or Dem Party allied liberal corporate media is in on destroying Sanders (and clearly, they are) doesn’t ignoring *legal* nomination rigging amount to a conspiracy against voters? You figure they’ll ever cover that one in Salon, or nah?
What happens when the “liberal” side of this same opinion crafting apparatus chooses to ignore and even obfuscate the fact that Joe Biden’s brain is moldy porridge, his long history of (quasi-legalized) corruption is definitely an election liability and that in addition to numerous allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching against him, a woman has also come forward in the past few days to accuse Palooka Joe of sexual assault – during an election season?
Please don’t think I’m just picking on liberals either; after all the reactionary right wing media in America is busy convincing their elderly audience that coronavirus is over and everyone needs to go back to work immediately to save “the economy” and Trump’s reelection chances. Do you really think Fox will spend the rest of their careers reminding viewers that Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler used classified information to dump stock in advance of the coronavirus crisis? Yeah, me neither.
Sticking with the coronavirus, how likely is it that the corporate media in America, either “liberal” or “conservative” will ever get around to mentioning that the new (GOP-controlled) Senate bailout package will objectively result in the complete corporate takeover of American commerce and the utter destruction of the vaunted “Main Street” our establishment professes to love?
How many times does the media (including intellectuals, influencers, think tanks and even occasionally celebrities) have to tell America that the entire government and military of Iran are “terrorists” before enough people believe it to support an invasion? How about Venezuela and the William Barr-led Department of Justice’s completely batshit claims of narcoterrorism against the United States; when does that ridiculous lie pave the way for another coup attempt against Maduro?
Frankly Trump himself might be the ultimate example of this phenomenon working on us all in real time; here we have a corrupt, authoritarian, openly deceitful rapist who was impeached in the House for violating the U.S. Constitution and every single day we all pretend his authority as president is no way compromised by these facts – principally because legally, it isn’t; indeed, to the fascists in right wing media the man remains a hero.
This begs the horrifying question – if for purely selfish purposes the establishment (including its courts) simply refuses to acknowledge or indeed, even mention the establishment’s crimes in a public discourse largely controlled by that very same, openly corporate or corporate-controlled establishment, did the crimes really happen at all? Unfortunately for a disturbingly large portion of our society the answer to that question appears to be a resounding no.
All of which is of course ridiculous. Of course all of these horrible things happened and are happening. Of course these greedbag cannibals in the establishment are responsible for these atrocities, even if they will *never* under any circumstances be held accountable by that same establishment for the ruined lives and smoldering carnage they’ve caused. The corporate media certainly has no monopoly on truth and there’s clearly a huge difference between outrageously wrong and “illegal” in a corrupt oligarchy.
Who watches the watchmen when the watchmen are all bought off? Isn’t allowing a corrupt “justice” system and a wholly corrupted corporate media to decide what is and isn’t wrong simply based on who can buy the right politicians and what the talking heads deign to mention on TV, rather a lot like putting the perpetrators of the crime in charge of the trial? That might be how it works, but it isn’t right, it isn’t true and it sure isn’t justice.
Look, I’m not here to lecture anyone but for all of mainstream America’s supposed reverence for the words of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, it’s often painfully obvious that very few people in the mainstream establishment or indeed, society at large have spent any time actually listening to what the man said. When Dr. King wrote that “we should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal…” he was explicitly calling attention to the fact that there is a difference between legality and morality. Power and wealth all too often give the ruling classes the ability to openly pervert justice, escape accountability and legalize atrocity but you simply “cannot stop reality, from being real.” The atrocities, corruption and malfeasance remain real even if none dare mention those facts.
It does no good to cluck at me that these violations of the public trust, these crimes against humanity and savage exploitation visited on our poorest, most marginalized people are all “legal.” There is no value in refusing to talk about the atrocities our *current* ruling establishment is responsible for simply because they themselves declare discussing it a “conspiracy theory.” If the establishment will not hold the establishment accountable, then this duty falls to us – the common people.
As a society and as a class, our oppression is greatly facilitated by the fact that we live lies, embrace amnesia and eat fear. The truth however is that no amount of coercive force can make you believe that lies and the absence of truth represent reality. Through some combination of denial, doubt and self censorship we all help construct the falsified head-cage this acceptance of unreality facilitates – coloring within the lines dictated to us by crooks, propagandists and mass murderers.
If we are ever going to liberate the labor class, if we are ever going to build the humane, people-focused kind of world those of us on the left dream about, we must each of us cease to help build these cages and instead destroy the bars around us and our fellows in the labor class at every opportunity. We must become incorruptible and unrelenting “advocates for the truth” in our everyday lives and stop waiting for the upper classes to rat themselves out through their own media.
Quite frankly, the emperor is a bare-assed pederast and if you don’t start saying so quickly and loudly, your kids might be next my friends.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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