In the United States, facts, an important element of truth, are
not important. They are not important in the media, politics, universities,
historical explanations, or the courtroom. Non-factual explanations of the
collapse of three World Trade Center buildings are served up as the official
explanation. Facts have been politicized, emotionalized, weaponized and simply
ignored. As David Irving has shown, Anglo-American histories of World War 2
are, for the most part, feel-good histories, as are “civil war” histories as
Thomas DiLorenzo and others have demonstrated. Of course, they are feel good
only for the victors. Their emotional purpose means that inconvenient facts are
unpalatable and ignored.
Writing the truth is no way to succeed as an author. Only a
small percentage of readers are interested in the truth. Most want their biases
or brainwashing vindicated. They want to read what they already believe. It is
comforting, reassuring. When their ignorance is confronted, they become angry.
The way to be successful as a writer is to pick a group and give them what they
want. There is always a market for romance novels and for histories that uphold
a country’s myths. On the Internet successful sites are those that play to one
ideology or another, to one emotion or the other, or to one interest group or
another. The single rule for success is to confine truth to what the readership
group you serve believes.
Keep this in mind when you receive shortly my September
quarterly request for your support of this website. There are not many like it.
This site does not represent an interest group, an ideology, a hate group, an
ethnic group or any cause other than truth. This is not to say that this site
is proof against error. It is only to say that truth is its purpose.
Karl Marx
said that there were only class truths. Today we have a large variety of
truths: truths for feminists, truths for blacks, Muslims, Hispanics,
homosexuals, transgendered, truths for the foreign policy community that serves
the military/security complex, truths for the neocons, truths for the One
Percent that control the economy and the economists who serve them, truths for
“white supremacists,” itself a truth term for their opponents. You can add to
the list. The “truth” in these “truths” is that they are self-serving of the
group that expresses them. Their actual relation to truth is of no consequence
to those espousing the “truths.”
Woe to you
if you don’t go along with someone’s or some group’s truth. Not even famous
film-maker Oliver Stone is immune. Recently, Stone expressed his frustration
with the “False Flag War Against Russia.” Little
doubt that Stone is frustrated with taunts and accusations from completely ignorant
media talking heads in response to his documentary, Putin, based on many hours of interviews over two
years. Stone came under fire, because instead of demonizing Putin and Russia,
thus confirming the official story, he showed us glimpses of the truth.
The
organization, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, published a report
that completely destroyed the false accusations about Trump/Russian hacking of
the US presidential election. The Nation published
an objective article about the report and was assaulted by writers,
contributors, and readers for publishing information that weakens the case,
which the liberal/progressive/left in conjunction with the military/security
complex, is orchestrating against Trump. The magazine’s audience felt that the
magazine had an obligation not to truth but to getting Trump out of office.
Reportedly, the editor is considering whether to recall the article.
So here we
have left-leaning Oliver Stone and leftwing magazine, The Nation, under fire for making information available
that is out of step with the self-serving “truth” to which the
liberal/progressive/left and their ally, the military/security complex, are
committed.
When a country has a population among whom there are no truths
except group-specific truths, the country is so divided as to be over and done
with. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The white
liberal/progressive/left leaders of divisive Identity Politics have little, if
any, comprehension of where the movement they think they lead is headed. At the
moment the hate is focused on the “alt-right,” which has become “white
nationalists,” which has become “white supremacists.” These “white
supremacists” have become epitomized by statues of Confederate soldiers and
generals. All over the South, if local governments are not removing the
statues, violent crazed thugs consumed by hate attempt to destroy them. In New
Orleans someone with money bused in thugs from outside flying banners that
apparently are derived from a communist flag to confront locals protesting the
departure of their history down the Orwellian Memory Hole.
What
happens when all the monuments are gone? Where does the hate turn next? Once non-whites are taught to hate whites, not even self-hating
whites are safe. How do those taught hate tell a good white
from a bad white? They can’t and they won’t. By definition by Identity
Politics, whites, for now white heterosexual males, are the victimizers and
everyone else is their victim. The absurdity of this concept is apparent, yet
the concept is unshaken by its absurdity. White heterosexual males are the only
ones without the privilege of quotas. They and only they can be put at the back
of the bus for university admissions, employment, promotion, and only their
speech is regulated. They, and only they, can be fired for using “gender
specific terms,” for using race specific terms, for unknowingly offending some
preferred group member by using a word that is no longer permissible. They can
be called every name in the book, beginning with racist, misogynist, and
escalating, and no one is punished for the offense.
Recently, a professor in the business school of a major
university told me that he used the word, girls, in a marketing discussion. A
young womyn was offended. The result was he received a dressing down from the
dean. Another professor told me that at his university there was a growing list
of blacklisted words. It wasn’t clear whether the list was official or
unofficial, simply professors trying to stay up with Identity Politics and
avoid words that could lead to their dismissal. Power, they tell me, is
elsewhere than in the white male, the true victimized class.
For years
commentators have recognized the shrinking arena of free speech in the United
States. Any speech that offends anyone but a white male can be curtailed by
punishment. Recently, John Whitehead, constitutional attorney who heads the
Rutherford Institute, wrote that it is now dangerous just to
defend free speech. Reference to the First Amendment suffices
to bring denunciation and threats of violence. Ron Unz notes that any website
that can be demonized as “controversial” can find itself disappeared by
Internet companies and PayPal. They simply terminate free speech by cutting off
service.
It must be
difficult to teach some subjects, such as the “civil war” for example. How
would it be possible to describe the actual facts? For example, for decades
prior to the Union’s invasion of the Confederacy North/South political conflict
was over tariffs, not over slavery.
The fight over which new states created from former “Indian”
territories would be “slave” and which “free” was a fight over keeping the
protectionist (North) vs. free trade (South) balance in Congress equal so that
the budding industrial north could not impose a tariff regime. Two days before Lincoln’s
inaugural address, a stiff tariff was signed into law. That same day in an
effort to have the South accept the tariff and remain in or return to the
Union—some southern states had seceded, some had not—Congress passed the Corwin
amendment that provided constitutional protection to slavery. The amendment
prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery.
Two days later in his inaugural address, which seems to be aimed
at the South, Lincoln said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere
with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have
no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Lincoln’s beef with the South was not over slavery or the
Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln did not accept the secessions and still intended to
collect the tariff that now was law. Under the Constitution slavery was up to
the states, but the Constitution gave the federal government to right to levy a
tariff. Lincoln said that “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence” over
collecting the tariff. Lincoln said he will use the government’s power only “to
collect the duties and imposts,” and that “there will be no invasion, no using
of force against or among the people anywhere.”
Here is Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” telling the South that
they can have slavery if they will pay the duties and imposts on imports. How
many black students and whites brainwashed by Identity Politics are going to
sit there and listen to such a tale and not strongly protest the racist professor
justifying white supremacy and slavery?
So what happens to history when you can’t tell it as it is, but
instead have to refashion it to fit the preconceived beliefs formed by Identity
Politics? The so-called “civil war,” of course, is far from the only example.
In its document of secession, South Carolina made a case that
the Constitutional contract had been broken by some of the northern states
breaking faith with Article IV of the Constitution. This is true. However, it
is also true that the Southern states had no inclination to abide by Section 8
of Article I, which says that “Congress shall have power to lay and collect
taxes, duties, imposts and excises.” So, also the South by not accepting the
tariff was not constitutionally pure.
Before
history became politicized, historians understood that the North intended for
the South to bear costs of the North’s development of industry and
manufacturing. The agricultural South preferred the lower priced goods from
England. The South understood that a tariff on British goods would push import
prices above the high northern prices and lower the South’s living standards in
the interest of raising living standards in the North. The conflict was
entirely economic and had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery, which also had
existed in the North. Indeed, some northern states had “exclusion
ordinances” and anti-immigration provisions in their state
constitutions that prohibited the immigration of blacks into northern states.
If freeing slaves were important to the North and avoiding
tariffs was important to the South, one can imagine some possible compromises.
For example, the North could have committed to building factories in the South.
As the South became industrialized, new centers of wealth would arise
independently from the agricultural plantations that produced cotton exports.
The labor force would adjust with the economy, and slavery would have evolved
into free labor.
Unfortunately, there were too many hot heads. And so, too,
today.
In America there is nothing on the horizon but hate. Everywhere
you look in America you see nothing but hate. Putin is hated. Russia is hated.
Muslims are hated. Venezuela is hated. Assad is hated. Iran is hated. Julian
Assange is hated. Edward Snowden is hated. White heterosexual males are hated.
Confederate monuments are hated. Truth-tellers are hated. “Conspiracy
theorists” are hated. No one escapes being hated.
Hate groups are proliferating, especially on the
liberal/progressive/left. For example, RootsAction has discovered a statue of
Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol and urges all good people to demand its
removal. Whether the level of ignorance that RootsAction personifies is real or
just a fund-raising ploy, I do not know. But clearly RootsAction is relying on
public ignorance in order to get the response that they want. In former times
when the US had an educated population, everyone understood that there was a
great effort to reconcile the North and South and that reconciliation would not
come from the kind of hate-mongering that now infects RootsAction and most of
the action groups and websites of the liberal/progressive/left.
Today
our country is far more divided that it was in 1860. Identity Politics has
taught Americans to hate each other, but, nevertheless, the zionist
neoconservatives assure us that we are “the indispensable, exceptional people.”
We, a totally divided people, are said to have the right to rule the world and
to bomb every country that doesn’t accept our will into the stone age.
In turn the world hates America. Washington has told too many
lies about other countries and used those lies to destroy them. Iraq, Libya,
Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and large chunks of Syria and Pakistan are in
ruins. Washington intends yet more ruin with Venezuela currently in the cross
hairs.
Eleven years ago Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez resonated with
many peoples when he said in his UN speech: “Yesterday at this very podium
stood Satan himself [Bush], speaking as if he owned the world; you can still
smell the sulphur.”
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that America is a font
for hatred both at home and abroad.
Paul Craig
Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of
prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored
with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the
protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2017 Paul Craig Roberts
Previous
article by Paul Craig Roberts: There Is a Conspiracy
