War Propaganda Always Wins

From my archived blog at donaldjeffries,wordpress.com

Note: This is another in a continuing series of previously published articles. Please subscribe to my primary Substack at donaldjeffries.substack.com

Remember the Maine. And the Lusitania. And Pearl Harbor. And Kuwaiti babies being thrown from incubators. Stop the dreaded Huns. And the evil Krauts. And the dirty sneaky rotten Japs. And the wide-eyed Arabs. Stop those dominoes. Stop Al-Qaeda. Stop Isis. Stop Isil. Stop Islamo-Fascism. If you see something, say something.

Donald Trump’s absurd decision to bomb Syria once again, for the old canard of “using chemical weapons” on their own people, reminds us once again that the War Party always wins. This ridiculously transparent false flag had even less “evidence” behind it than the “weapons of mass destruction” fairy tale.

It doesn’t matter that Trump rightly criticized our involvement in Syria, and elsewhere, numerous times over the years and during his presidential campaign. Promises are made to be broken, especially the promises of politicians. And the fact that Trump talked about getting out of Syria literally a few days before this fortuitous “chemical attack” only demonstrates how obvious these false flags are, and how philosophically malleable Trump is.

In my upcoming book, Crimes and Cover Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963, I will provide a timeline of how the American military sprayed its own cities with diseases and chemicals, and conducted hideous experiments on its people, for much of the twentieth century. The vaunted Allies used gas as far back as World War I. But that was different- we are always the “good guys.” When we do it, it’s justified. For our government to be outraged over “chemical attacks,” even if they were real, is about as hypocritical as it gets.

I will be detailing a lot of the atrocities committed by our “good guys” in America’s perpetual warfare, in this new book. Readers will discover that the establishment “liberals” of every era wholeheartedly supported the wars of their times. Just as few Americans realize that Pat Buchanan, for example, is probably the most high profile anti-war advocate in the public arena now, they would never guess that someone like Henry Ford was the loudest voice for peace in his time.

Meanwhile, the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens of the world don’t push for peace. They, like the Clintons, Gores, Obamas and Bidens, fully support this mindless “war on terror.” When they are the alternatives to the neocons like John McCainiac, Lindsay Graham, Nikki Haley and Paul Ryan, then you recognize that there are no political “choices” available to thinking Americans. As Huey Long called it long ago, before he was assassinated himself, we can pick Tweedledee or Tweedledum.

Donald Trump’s many enemies on the left are fully behind him on bombing Syria. If anything, they want him to go further, to meddle even more, kill more people and sacrifice American lives needlessly. This is reminiscent of how the neocons attacked Barack Obama as some kind of weak “Muslim” because bombing and/or occupying all those Muslim countries was somehow not enough. It’s unclear just what the establishment left and right want here, but it certainly isn’t peace. It’s never peace.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, the stock market rises and falls like a roller coaster, mirroring in many ways the unpredictable personality of our tweeter-in- chief. Our infrastructure continues to be left untouched, much as it has been since the Eisenhower administration. Somehow, if it we are to finally try to upgrade our crumbling roads, bridges and power grids to something approximating First World standards, we must get some special funding to do so. Raise the gas tax or something.

But while our crucial infrastructure cannot be rebuilt without new or increased taxes, this latest bombing of another sovereign nation was accomplished with no questions asked. Why do we always have money for bombing, occupations, and nation building, but at the same time we “must” curtail “entitlements?” By “entitlements,” of course, I’m referring to Social Security and the like, which every worker pays into over the course of a lifetime. They are absolutely “entitled” to their money back, but the name suggests that they are getting some kind of “free lunch.”

Perhaps the money is always there for war, because the budgets of our many intelligence agencies remain top secret. Why don’t the citizens financing this bureaucratic nightmare have a right to know how much is being spent, or what it’s being spent on? Are any of our “representatives” clamoring for public disclosure on this front? The answer is obvious. But you can bet that these “representatives” will be happy to promulgate the latest batch of war propaganda with straight faces.

I remember back when the first Gulf War was about to launch, amidst those histrionics from the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, posing as an innocent young victim. My family and friends were outraged, demanding that we “do something” about Saddam Hussein. “That man is insane!” they would exclaim. Much like Assad now, Hussein “used gas” on his own people. The fact that this gas had been provided to them by the United States, who had long supported Hussein, didn’t matter. None of these people could have found Kuwait on a map the week before, yet now they were ready to send their first born to die in an effort to save those babies.

Bogeymen change, but our leaders always keep them, lingering in the shadows, and ready to be trotted out on stage when the need arises. Hitler will probably never be topped, but the newest models are invariably compared to him. H.L. Mencken described it perfectly a long time ago, when he wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

At this point, the latest and greatest “hobgoblin” changes, from North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, seemingly every week. However, there is always some bogeyman there, to keep Americans distracted. After all, if there weren’t all these mad men lurking everywhere, who “hate our freedom,” Americans might very well finally awake from their slumber, and look all around them. They might notice the Third World infrastructure, the loss of their civil liberties and personal freedom. They might notice the absolute corruption everywhere.

“There is no such thing as a good war, or a bad peace,” Benjamin Franklin advised us. America has been at war for virtually its entire existence. We are always drawn into wars against our will, according to our leaders, because of these ever present bogeymen, and the fact they keep doing dastardly things which force our hand.

H.L. Mencken’s attributed comment that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” was a paraphrase of what he actually said, but it’s an accurate paraphrase, and a cynically astute assessment of American collective naivete.

If P.T. Barnum was around today, he’d be salivating. Most Americans are “rubes” to at least some extent. They’re so easily fooled, the propagandists often don’t even change the mantra that was used so effectively in the past. While you seemingly can’t get American voters to throw the bums out of office, as witnessed by the regular 96% re-election rate of our congressional “representatives,” they are always lusting for war, and ready to “sacrifice” for the government that has done nothing for them, except take their money.

In today’s world, a sucker is born not every minute, but every second.