Not Paying Attention

The main reason that Bush & Co., including supporting operatives like Fox News, are able to float their lies on the sea of American public opinion is that most Americans don’t pay attention.

First, the majority of Americans simply aren’t very interested in what their country does internationally. They have the vaguest idea where countries like Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Afghanistan are. A woman once said to me with a dismissive gesture, “Africa is down that way somewhere.” These are the people whose interests don't go beyond their own families, romances, jobs, health, homes, clothes, vehicles, television entertainment, and favorite sports teams.

The result: Most Americans are abysmally ignorant about everything which is important to their political leaders, to the powerful lobbyists such those which make up the Israel Lobby, and to the heads of international corporations such as armaments manufacturers and Big Oil.

But wait, it gets worse. Our rulers are happier with an indifferent population than with an informed one, but a population which accepts the beliefs it is told to accept makes the rulers even happier. After all there are elections to consider, and the need for acquiescence to taxation – especially the vast thefts from the workers needed to finance wars – and the hunger for people to join the military. And, ultimately, it is crucial to persuade people that they are better off with what they have than they would be if they rebelled.

In order to create opinions, people are bombarded every day with propaganda posing as “news” and “opinion". It follows, unfortunately, that even the terminally ignorant and uninterested have opinions. They parrot the slogans they are told are respectable, and they believe in a few simple “facts” which are usually falsehoods.

Here's the main point I want to make: If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, very little knowledge is even more dangerous. Because they are not interested and aren't paying enough attention, the mass of people believe that they have been presented with proof of facts when they have been presented with no such thing. Witness the lies which led much of the populace to enthusiastically support an invasion of Iraq. Even though reality has dampened that enthusiasm, I’ve heard that there are still Fox News followers who believe that Iraq was behind 9/11, that Sadaam Hussein was friendly with Al Qaeda, and even that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and was on the fast track to making a nuclear bomb. It is amazing how a Big Lie can outlive all proof to the contrary!

The root of the trouble is that people don’t question and don’t distinguish between proof and mere assertion. Like a microorganism that can distinguish only between light and dark, they cannot sort out the gray areas where the truth lies. They listen to a burst of double-talk and obediently come away with a “fact” and an opinion.

Here is the example which triggered my diatribe. On Sunday, an anonymous group of US officials showed journalists what they said was proof that Iranian agents had smuggled weapons to Iraq, including "explosively formed penetrators". The officials refused to allow reporters to name them or to record their briefing, but instead just released pictures of weapons.

NYT
“BAGHDAD, Feb. 11 — Senior United States military officials on Sunday literally put on the table their first public evidence of the contentious assertion that Iran supplies Shiite extremist groups in Iraq with some of the most lethal weapons in the war.”

Comment: Persons who pay attention are immediately on guard because they remember the completely fabricated “evidence” that has us mired in Iraq. To the dodos, however, the message is already clear: Iran is supplying America’s enemies in Iraq with lethal weapons! Iran is killing our boys!

“Never before displayed in public, the weapons included squat canisters designed to explode and spit out molten balls of copper that cut through armor. The canisters, called explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s, are perhaps the most feared weapon faced by American and Iraqi troops here.”

Comment: Wow! Canisters! Never before displayed in public! Even though they could have been made in Cincinnati, here they are, on display. That must prove something.

Watch for the weasel words and innuendo, some of which I’ve put in caps:

“Officials spread out on two small tables an E.F.P. and an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the OFFICIALS SAID link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. The officials also ASSERTED, WITHOUT PROVIDING DIRECT EVIDENCE, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was AN INFERENCE BASED ON GENERAL intelligence assessments.”

Skepticism came naturally to the New York Times reporter, but by now the dodos have stopped reading.

“That inference, and the anonymity of the officials who made it, seemed likely to generate skepticism among those suspicious that the Bush administration is trying to find a scapegoat for its problems in Iraq, and perhaps even trying to lay the groundwork for war with Iran.”

If the dodos had read this far, they would be attacking the reporter as an unpatriotic swine.

The officials “also LEFT MANY QUESTIONS UNANSWERED, INCLUDING PROOF THAT THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT WAS DIRECTING THE DELIVERY OF WEAPONS.”

“The officials were repeatedly pressed on why they insisted on anonymity in such an important matter affecting the security of American and Iraqi troops.

“The officials also WERE DEFENSIVE ABOUT THE TIMING of disclosing such incriminating evidence, since they had known about it as early as 2004.

“The officials asserted WITHOUT SPECIFIC EVIDENCE that the Iranian security apparatus, called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Quds Force controlled delivery of the materials to Iraq. And in A FURTHER INFERENCE, the officials asserted that the Quds Force, sometimes called the I.R.G.C. - Quds, could be involved only with Iranian government complicity.”

So, we have “proof” presented by persons who kept their identities secret who made various “assertions” which were “not based on direct evidence” but instead were based on “inferences ” which were based on “general assessments”. The anonymous “officials” “left many questions unanswered,” including questions about proof “that the Iranian government was directing the delivery of weapons.” They made other assertions “without specific evidence” -- sometimes based on inferences based upon inferences, one of the least trustworthy attempts at “evidence”.

The officials were also “defensive about the timing” of the disclosure of their so-called evidence, which has been around for three years. It appears that the “evidence” was dusted off to support the recent crescendo of anti-Iran war drums heard in Washington and Israel. The display on the tables was flimsy innuendo in the service of propaganda, not evidence that could support action.

So, the dodos now know for a fact that Iran is supplying weapons which are being used to kill our troops.

The final dangerous addition to this mix is patriotism. A former acquaintance of mine thought I was insane for not believing, before the Iraq invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He has admitted I was right but he has not lost his “patriotism”, and he still feeds on the same kind of Bush/neocon lies that poisoned his brain before his country invaded Iraq.

If I asked him today, “If the US were Iran and Canada was Iraq, and the Chinese had invaded Canada, wouldn’t you think the US would be interested in 'interfering' and supplying weapons to the Canadians?”, he would say, “Sure.”

I once asked him these things:

If Israel had been created in California instead of Palestine, based on a 3000 year old book, with the backing of Chinese military force, do you believe that America should fight to take California back? He said, “Of course.”

Would you object if Russia attacked us because we have weapons of mass destruction? He answered, “Of course I'd object!”

If Cuba had nuclear weapons and the US didn't, do you think the US would be justified in creating nuclear weapons? He replied, "Absolutely!"

My punch line is that when I asked him, “How can you apply a different set of standards to what the US does than to what other countries do?” his hesitant but loud reply was,

“Because we’re Americans, dammit!"

You can't argue with that kind of logic.

Fashion or Fact?

Today’s entry is going to consist mostly of today’s entry in my other blog, FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS. That’s not just because I’m lazy, but also because I was planning to write the same general message for this blog before I found myself writing it for the other blog.

In FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS I’ve emphasized that if most of us eliminated all of our spiritual and religious beliefs which we could trace to another person’s mind we would have very few beliefs left. In VIEW FROM THE MOON I want to apply that idea to political and social beliefs – particularly those we acquire day by day from our newspapers, magazines, radios, televisions, and movies.

Before I retired from my last stint of Life in a Box, I had lunch on working days with colleagues who, after recapping the last “Seinfield” or “Simpsons” episode and relaying office gossip, would talk about the latest national and international events. What struck me was that they would recite the previous evening’s television news commentary as if it were their own opinion. There was one woman in particular who predictably would say, with an air of having reflected long and seriously on the matter, “Well, I think . . .”and then recite verbatim what I had heard someone say on PBS or CNN or CBS or MSNBC the night before.

These were sophisticated and educated professional people, and yet when it came to political and social opinion they were nothing more than parrots. Debate was, to them, retrospectively pitting one talk show host or TV “expert” against another. There was not one original idea, much less shockingly unconventional notion, in a week’s worth of lunchtime conversation. In fact an idea outside the currently accepted pros and cons of television and radio discussions would have resulted in the speaker being declared “Nuts” or worse.

It seems to me that the ability to think outside one’s milieu, to defy the opinion prescribers of one’s times, to peek around the television screen to see what is in the darkness behind it, must be one of the rarest gifts on Earth.

Might you think that the world was flat, or that the Earth moved around the sun, unless someone had told you otherwise?

Would you think that democracy was the greatest form of government if you hadn’t been taught that it was? If you had been told from kindergarten through college that monarchy is the finest and heaven-blessed form of government, what are the odds you would believe otherwise? If you were a happy and prosperous Italian under Mussolini, or a working person enjoying new opportunities and prosperity under Hitler, might you not think that Fascism or National Socialism was the ideal political philosophy?

What if you’d been born in the ancient world when it was universally believed that slavery was a natural and proper institution – or even in the Confederate States of America? Would you automatically have condemned slavery as you probably do now? Be fair: If your parents, respected teachers, ministers,lawmakers, judges, entertainers and friends all believed that to question slavery was unspeakably ridiculous, illogical, and even seditious, would you have been likely to hold the same opinion you do 150 or 2050 years later?

Would you “believe in” Jesus or Mohammed or Jehovah or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or Mormonism or the meanings of the signs of the zodiac unless someone had taught you what to believe? Even when people change their religious beliefs they usually go from one “teaching” to another, do they not? How do they decide whose old ideas are qualified for acceptance?

In sciences like physics and astronomy and geology there are proofs available which help us to evaluate what is true and untrue . . . but what about religious, social, and political beliefs? That which constitutes acceptable social, moral, racial, and sexual views has changed radically just in my lifetime within the United States. And you can multiply that by all the countries in the world, where a political essay which might win you a prize today in China or Russia would have resulted in your imprisonment not many years ago. American university presidents and college professors have been forced out of their positions in recent years for saying things which would have been considered bedrock fact in the 1940’s and 1950’s. They are not in trouble because what they say is contradicted by updated facts, but because they are going up against propaganda and the latest fad in arbitrary preferences.

That is the most fascinating thing about all this: Virtually none of the old beliefs (for example those dating from 1920 to 1960) have been contradicted, much less disproved, by new evidence. Formerly acceptable and respectable beliefs – taught in universities, promulgated by national governments, regarded by the average person as normal and proper – on racial differences, segregation, eugenics, immigration, sexual behavior, sexual differences, sexual roles, and mores generally have changed drastically since 1900 not because they have been “disproved” but because they have been “disapproved”. People are mocked for saying things their parents or grandparents would have considered self-evident, and yet the facts have not changed. Indeed, genetic research, intelligence testing, anthropology and other areas of expanded factual knowledge have probably bolstered and affirmed “outmoded” beliefs more than torn them down.

What has changed is not what is true, but what is fashionable to believe.