BY ROMMEL YNION
WILLIAM Shirer, author of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, once wrote in his memoirs that in Nazi Germany, “truth” was just an offshoot of lies repeated – ad infinitum—especially by the Goebbels-controlled mass media that, no doubt, proved to be the heart and soul of an empire malevolently envisioned to last for at least a thousand years.
For sure, the American journalist knew whereof he spoke for he was among the first foreign correspondents who covered Nazi Germany long before it became fashionable to call it a cuckoo land, a land full of lies, illusions and yes, delusions. The round-the-clock bombardment of false and, at best, misleading information about the state of Nazism was the order of the day.
When asked after the cataclysmic war that annihilated almost half of the world’s population what truth meant to him, Shirer merely echoed Isadora Duncan (the American-born ballerina who electrified the dance world at the turn of the last century) who often shrugged off such teasers, saying: “I don’t have the faintest idea.”
Today, if we examine the world we live in, can we truly say we are different from Nazi cuckoo land?
Are we still at the mercy of the lies that mass media have bombarded us with? Lies that have somehow seeped into the bowels of our consciousness as “gospel truths”? These are trillion-dollar questions that we must answer now.
On the world stage, we can safely assume that geopolitical landscape has become the fertile ground in which mind control methods of mass media – dictated by unseen hands of the military-industrial complex – has “cultivated” the image of the United States as the world’s only super policeman who can whack “rogue states” into submission if they wiggle out of the mold of what Pax Americana has projected “world peace” to be.
Mind you, these are tricky words: rogue states and world peace. What exactly does “rogue state” mean? That if you don’t conform to American expectations, you immediately get the dog tag of being a “rogue state”?
And what does “world peace” mean? That if you antagonize American interests, we immediately become enemies of “world peace” and agents of conflicts and wars? Yes, semantics – nothing but semantics.
The tragedy of it all is that, in the geopolitical world of today, “semantics” simply stems from how the military-industrial complex of the United States has defined it to be, its tentacles controlling every nook and cranny of environments that they perceive to have the potential of jeopardizing its interests.
For example, before America pulverized Iraq to smithereens, we witnessed how CNN “painted” an image of Saddam Hussein as the architect of the Iraqi foray into the production of weapons of mass destruction, reportedly tucked neatly into silos allegedly pinpointed by American satellites whirling around the Earth.
At the end of the day, international press, headed by CNN and Fox News Channel, succeeded in “lawyering” for the United States, with public opinion accepting every point of argument in favor of America attacking Iraq to ferret out weapons of mass destruction, destroy them and bring Saddam to justice.
Ah, we all know what happened. Then United States President George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, sniffing out the oil-fields in the Iraqi dessert, the mansions of the Hussein family, and juicy construction projects for the re-building of Iraq – yes, they found everything that is lucrative to American business, except the weapons of mass destruction.
It doesn’t take genius to see that the international press, manipulated by the military-industrial complex protecting big business in the United States, only used the illusory issue of weapons of mass destruction as the key to unlock the gate of war in Iraq where the use of America’s military might meant trillions of dollars to the manufacturers of their state-of-the-art weaponry, where destruction of that Middle-Eastern state – and even annihilation of its citizens – simply presented opportunities for massive profits especially in the “rebuilding efforts.”
Ah, this is, undeniably, the true state of media around the globe– it has simply become a tool to “satisfy” the insatiable greed of the powers-that-be. Yes, it has simply become a puppet moving in accordance with the dictates of its puppeteers. Having seen that, we can now safely assume that the biggest casualty here is truth – yes, nothing but truth.
For how can truth thrive in a minefield of lies outnumbering it one-million to one? No doubt, in this day and age where only a manipulated press serves as the vanguard of information, truth is no different from a snowflake in hell, its chances for survival equivalent to zilch.
And so, if William Shirer were alive today, how would he answer if asked: What is truth? Truth to tell, I don’t have the faintest idea./PN
