A History Of Lies Part 3: American Trilogy

  "Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to

Strawberry Fields

Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about" - The Beatles

"What is history but a fable agreed upon?" - Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” - Joseph Goebbels.

"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government's actually doing is worse than you imagine." ― William Blum

We live in a world of absurd black comedy.

The JFK Assassination was an especially cynical work of theatre. A public spectacle for its own sake. If we discount the magic bullet theory as intellectual honesty compels us to - see New Orleans District Attorney Jim Harrison's testimony here - then we are left with a high level conspiracy to remove a sitting president. But there's an awkward plot-hole. If the point had been simply to knock Kennedy off, they could have done it discretely. An accident. A plane crash. Poisoning. Instead they blew his brains out in the middle of a parade in front of the whole world. What for? Why go to such elaborate lengths? To send a message to all future presidents who dare go off-script? Or to send a message to the American people and the wider world?

"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume."

And bring up the volume they did.

9-11 was a much more elaborate production, but suffered from the same plot-holes. There was no need for the infamous 19 devout Muslim hijackers who liked to snort cocaine and hang out with pink haired strippers since the buildings were brought down with explosives. It doesn't take a degree in engineering to know that pancaking - a progressive collapse due to asymmetric structural failure - does not happen at near free-fall speed. These were concrete and steel megastructures - not matchstick models. The mass of debris ejected horizontally also confirms explosion rather than collapse, as does the testimony of dozens of fire fighters at ground zero.

The arguments for controlled demolition are overwhelming, and frankly tiresome. We must conclude therefore that the hijacked planes were there for special effects. But again, why go to such elaborate lengths? What message were they trying to send?  

In the holy trinity of Pax-American hoaxes, the Apollo project with its crowning Apollo 11 mission stands alone, if only for its low-quality props. This is an actual photo of the lunar landing module courtesy of the NASA archives. To the untrained eye it appears to be constructed from black cardboard, curtain rods, roofing paper and gold foil, with scotch tape to holding it all together. Scotch tape. Not even gaff. I guess one 'conspiracy theory' can be quickly dismissed - this doesn't appear to be the work of Stanley Kubrick.

Here is a photo of the Apollo lunar roving vehicle. Admittedly better designed and executed than the LEM, the world's first portable electric folding car packed down to the size of a large suitcase and could be assembled in minutes in the field. Note the hi-tech antenna used to send radio signals back to earth, some 200 000 miles away. This would need to be focused within one or two degrees of accuracy to avoid missing the earth by tens of thousands of miles - meaning, you'd probably want to stick that thing the ground. And by the way where are all the battery packs?

Never mind the dense and potentially lethal environment of the Van Allen radiation belts which surround the earth, let alone the extremes of temperature on the lunar surface (127 degrees Celsius to minus 173 C) which the specially designed Hasselblad camera and Kodak film had to survive, to say nothing of the astronauts themselves. Never mind the question of how they escaped the  thermosphere, where temperatures above 1800 C cause hardened steel to melt into a puddle - 12 years later NASA's space shuttle Columbia would use specially developed ceramic tiles to achieve an altitude of 274 km.

"You're a lawyer for capitalism, I'm a lawyer for communism. Let's dance." - Kruschev to Nixon, 1959, The Kitchen Debate.

The moon landing was truly a giant leap for mankind. NASA estimates that it took more than 400,000 engineers, scientists and technicians to accomplish this momentous task which will never be repeated because apparently NASA's dog ate its homework. Are we supposed to believe 400,000 people kept mum on this colossal hoax? I can't answer that, but it's worth considering that of the 130 000 scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, only six people ever knew they were building an atomic bomb in Nevada. As to "Why didn't the Russians call their bluff?" What would be the point? Suffice it to say that while the N-1 moon rocket may have had its problems, the Soviet space program was simultaneously producing its first generation solid propellant ICBMs.

The Apollo hoax still boggles the mind in its sheer audacity, to the point where most find it easier just to go along with it, rather than confront the questions it raises. With the Soviets out of the space race, was beating the Russians to the moon even that important? Or did it have more to do with the $220 odd million in private contracts which needed to be somehow justified? Or was it the powers that be once again sending a message? "We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive."

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire

We live in a world of absurd black comedy based on absurd myths. America, the shining city on a hill – a phrase borrowed from John Winthrop, an early pilgrim writing about the America he imagined. Unfortunately the America he imagined bore no resemblance to the brutal theocracy which was established in Plymoth county. “There were several crimes that carried the death penalty: treason, murder, witchcraft, arson, sodomy, rape, bestiality, adultery, and cursing or smiting one’s parents”; America, defender of ‘universal values’ like freedom, democracy and human rights. Because nothing spells freedom, democracy and human rights like a predator drone bombing a wedding party in a poor Middle East country; Capitalism, the world's greatest economic success story. Because nothing spells economic success like record unemployment, homelessness, mass incarceration and the return of 19th century diseases like tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, and cholera.

The disjunct between myth and material reality is impenetrable. The two cannot be reconciled, and so we find ourselves living with a condition bearing all the hallmarks of acute schizophrenia: our thoughts and experiences seem out of touch with reality, we suffer from historical amnesia and seem to lack any sense of agency. “The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid”, writes Terrance McKenna. Or is it rather that we are facing an engineered epistemic crisis; a kind of mass gas lighting where any attempt to hold onto our sanity - even the assertion of biological reality itself - is labeled heresy? (see also 'conspiracy theory', 'fake news'.)

Amid all this there is the current meme that will not go away, the fourth part in our inappropriately titled trilogy and a further testament to our cognitive dissonance. The messaging around the Epstein saga could not be more obvious: "We control you, and if we want to traffic your children to control your pathetic, puppet politicians, there's nothing you or anyone else can or will do about it." - Jared Beck.