A History Of Lies (Part 2)

A History of Lies - Part 2

“The world is made of narrative”, writes blogger Caitlin Johnstone. I guess she has a reasonable point, insofar as the stories we tell about ourselves help to define our world view and determine our interaction with the world. When we look into the deep past, it is easy to see how the recital of myths and enactment of rituals go hand in hand.

“Religious stories are “holy scripture” to believers—narratives used to support, explain, or justify a particular system’s rituals, theology, and ethics—and are myths to people of other cultures or belief systems. […] It is difficult to believe that the Buddha was conceived in a dream by a white elephant, so we call that story a myth as well. But, of course, stories such as the parting of the Sea of Reeds for the fleeing Hebrews, Muhammad’s Night Journey, and the dead Jesus rising from the tomb are just as clearly irrational narratives to which a Hindu or a Buddhist might understandably apply the word “myth.” All of these stories are definable as myths because they contain events that contradict both our intellectual and physical experience of reality.” - The Oxford Companion to World Mythology

But if the past gives us an understanding of the narrative function, perhaps the present can help us better understand it’s form. Is it possible that humans are not as removed as we might think from our ancient societal roots? The following is a perfect example of a narrative of events that seems, on its face, to contradict both our intellectual and physical experience of reality, yet which has been used in recent years to justify everything from (ritual) cavity searches at airports to drone attacks on wedding parties (human sacrifice):

“On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with box cutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.

These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.”- James Corbett

9-11 became the pretext for a global campaign of invasion and occupation which is now in its eighteenth year, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of (brown) people while leaving millions homeless or stateless, and destroyed a half dozen countries. It is a curious fact that the executive director of the 9-11 commission was a history professor who cites his area of academic expertise as “the creation and maintenance of public myths”.

In a speech to the United Nations on September 23 2010, then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the United Nations General Assembly on the subject of the 9-11 attacks, saying that there were three commonly held viewpoints:

"1- That a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack. This is the main viewpoint advocated by American statesmen.

2- That some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view.

3- It was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation. Apparently, this viewpoint has fewer proponents."

The response was a mass walk-out of U.N. delegates

In tort and Criminal Law, ‘reasonable person’ is a phrase used to denote “a hypothetical person in society who exercises average care, skill, and judgment in conduct and who serves as a comparative standard for determining liability.” Would a ‘reasonable person’ accept the ‘official narrative’ as a true and factual account of the events of September 11, 2001? Can the same test be applied to other significant events in recent history? Given the litany of proven lies which have been used to lead states to war, is it reasonable to accept any such story on face value?

During World War II millions of European Jews (along with gypsies, homosexuals, and disabled persons, it must be said) suffered terribly at the hands of their Nazi oppressors; many were forced into labour camps, while others died of starvation. This historical event is commonly known as the Holocaust. But what about the oft-cited ‘gas chambers’? Were millions of Jews really loaded into box cars and taken away to specially designed extermination camps to be killed with lethal gas and then cremated? It seems like an extraordinarily inefficient way of committing mass murder, compared to say, a bullet in the back of the head. One alternative, though somewhat less dramatic narrative claims that the Nazi war effort required a massive labour force and that Zyklon B was used for delousing. Debate around the issue is, however, strictly off-limits. Such is the power this dark myth that the method of the genocide of the Jews is no longer a matter of historical fact, but rather an article of faith. Personally I think it’s sufficient to say that millions of European Jews died, in horrible circumstances, at the hands of the Nazis, and that this by itself constitutes a ‘Holocaust’. This particular narrative of ethnic cleansing is probably not sufficient however to justify the expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland for the construction of a ‘Jewish State’. Is it possible that the story needed to be tweaked a little to justify such an extreme and ongoing reaction? Whatever the underlying facts, it is hard to think of an historical event which has been more politicised.

It is interesting to note that Ahmadinejad has also come under repeated fire for being a 'Holocaust denier', an accusation which he denies. "I'm not saying that it didn't happen at all, [but] can you argue that researching a phenomenon is finished forever, done? Can we close the books forever on a historical event?", he said in a speech given at the Columbia University on Sep, 24, 2007. Even the current 'moderate' Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has so far refused to walk back Ahmadinejad's position, saying in a media appearance in New York in September 2013 "What the Nazis did is condemned, but the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers. I am not a history scholar.'

Which brings us to the 'Xinjiang Uighur Crisis' which we hear about every day in the corporate media.

 A few observations on this - firstly that the Western media should suddenly run to the defence of a persecuted Muslim minority should be an immediate red flag to anyone paying attention – what a cynical exercise in hypocrisy! Secondly, it must be pointed out that China faces a very real threat from separatists and terrorists marching under the banner of the “World Uighur Congress”, a political entity sponsored by US government NGOs such as National Endowment of Democracy, a foundation created to do the CIA's work covertly. In fact the US has been supporting separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang since the 1950s. Not to mention the 20 000 odd radicalized Uighur Muslims said to have joined forces with ISIS in Syria.

It’s fair to say however that these elements constitute only a small proportion of the broader Uighur population, which makes up approximately 40% of Xinjiang’s total populace. About half of these would be considered middle or at least working class, but there are also many poor among these people; many living in slums, many of whom do not even speak Chinese, putting them at a great social disadvantage. In recent years it is estimated that China has spent over a billion dollars investing in new schools in Xinjiang, as well as relocating tens of thousands of nomadic Uighurs to cities where they are provided with jobs, housing, and health care. Meanwhile the West cries “cultural genocide!”

Like the daily reports of detention centres on the US/Mexican border, the ‘Xinjiang Uighur Crisis’ seems to be yet another iteration of the Jewish Holocaust motif, which appears to have already reached mythic proportions. Although the figure can vary between one, two and even three million Uighurs currently interned in mass ‘re-education camps’, the validity of this allegation, based solely on an unsubstantiated report by the sole American member of an independent committee to the UNHCR, is simply not up for debate. Are we then witnessing the birth of another genocide myth which will lay the moral groundwork for another invasion and occupation? It seems to be the obvious take-out.