• U.S. ever-ready to use “useful disasters” to further pre-planned agendas
Paul Craig Roberts
In the Western world, truth no longer has any meaning. In its place stands agenda. Agenda is all important, because it is the way Washington achieves hegemony over the world and the American people. Sept. 11 was the “new Pearl Harbor” that the neoconservatives declared to be necessary for their planned wars against Muslim countries. For the neoconservatives to go forward with their agenda, it was necessary for Americans to be connected to the agenda.
President George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil said that prior to 9-11 the first cabinet meeting was about the need to invade Iraq.
September 11 was initially blamed on Afghanistan, and the blame was later shifted to Iraq. Washington’s mobilization against Afghanistan was in place prior to 9-11. The George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan, called Operation Enduring Freedom, occurred on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9-11. Every military person knows that it is not possible to have mobilization for invading a country halfway around the world ready in three weeks.
The Orwellian PATRIOT Act is another example of planning prior to the event. This vast police state measure could not possibly have been written in the short time between 9-11 and its introduction in Congress. The bill was already written, sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity.Why? Who wrote it? Why has there been a media cover-up of the advanced preparation of this police-state legislation?
Evidence that responses to an event were planned prior to what the government said was a surprise event does suggest that the event was engineered to drive an agenda that was already on the books.
Many on the left wing are immune to evidence that is contrary to the official 9-11 story, because for them 9-11 is refreshing blow-back from the oppressed. That the oppressed struck back is more important to the left wing than the facts.
The right wing can’t let go of the fantasy either. America in all its purity and wonderfulness was attacked because evil Muslims cannot stand our goodness. “They hate us for our freedom and democracy.” The right-wing vision of a great and good America wronged is essential to the right wing’s sustaining ideology, an ideology that is prepared to commit violence in order to prove its righteousness.
Implausible stories can be useful to other agendas and thus be sustained by their use in other arguments. For example, take the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Is this a fairy tale made possible by ignoring the live interviews of the neighbors of the alleged “bin Laden compound”? According to Pakistanis who knew the person living in “bin Laden’s compound,” the person Americans were told was Osama was a long-time friend who imported foreign delicacies.
An eyewitness to the “assault” on “bin Laden’s compound” reported that when the helicopter lifted off it exploded and there were no survivors. If there were no survivors, there was no sea burial of bin Laden.
How is it that the U.S. media can produce and present a story as fact that is contradicted by the news on the ground?
Is the answer that the bin Laden assassination story served an agenda by providing evidence that we were winning?
Consider the Sandy Hook school shooting. This shooting serves as an excuse for “progressives” to express their hatred of guns and the NRA and to advance their gun control agenda. Few if any of those hyperventilating over the tragedy know any of the parents of the murdered children. They have shown no similar response to the U.S. government’s murder of countless thousands of Muslim children. The Clinton regime alone killed 500K Iraqi children with illegal sanctions, and Clinton’s immoral secretary of state [Madeleine Albright], a feminist hero, said that she thought the sanctions were worth the cost of one half million dead Iraqi children.
When I hear people talk about “gun violence,” I wonder what has happened to language. A gun is an inanimate object. An inanimate object cannot cause violence. Humans cause violence. The relevant question is: Why do humans cause violence? This obvious question seldom gets asked. Instead, inanimate objects are blamed for human actions.
In one of its reports on the Sandy Hook shooting, Time magazine noted that such events “inevitably reopen debates about gun control, or more tenuously lead people to complain about American culture itself. Yet on the very same day, a 36-year-old Chinese man attacked 22 children with a knife at a primary school in China, suggesting that there is a critical factor with mass homicides that gets far less attention.” That factor, “the core of these events,” is mental health and “our failure to address it as a society.”
Neither the right nor the left has an interest in getting to the bottom of things. The right wing is aligned with the police state in order to make us safe from “terrorism”—Muslim terrorism, not the terrorism of the unaccountable police state.
The American left is so feeble that it essentially doesn’t exist. Its issues are more gun control, approving homosexual marriage, protecting abortion and taxing “the rich.” Such misfocus cannot slow the onrushing militarized police state. American liberals have such an abiding faith in government that they are incapable of believing that beloved government would be culpable in crimes—unless, of course, it was Ronald Reagan’s government.
As tyranny envelops the land, the main goal of the left wing is to disarm the population. The American left is the enabler of the police state, and the American right is its progenitor.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former assistant undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury and former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of many books including The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, How the Economy Was Lost and others.
