No Truth Allowed

Why is it seemingly impossible for a viable candidate for the Presidency in the United States to tell the truth?

“A society that has lost the ability to discern truth from falsehood can no longer be considered democratic.”
— Chris Hedges, in conversation with Sonali Kohatkar

I watched the debate with a coterie of like-minded friends. While somewhat satisfied that our guy, to the extent that he was our guy, acquitted himself adequately against his opponent, there was an universal sense of anticlimax in the room, to which Keith Oberman as a neutered shadow of his former self, in conversation with Pat Buchanan in the post-debate spin, was merely the icing on the cake. The range of debate was more and more limited as the night wore on, with unchallenged lies falling on all sides, like ripe fruit in the fall.

Why is it necessary that Obama constantly reiterate his intention to uptick Afganistan; to kill, not capture, Ben Laden; to deal harshly with the supposed threat from Iran?

Obama mentioned the middle class several times, but the poor only once, and failed to point out that the earmarks McCain railed against amounts to one percent of GDP, as our economy melts down under the weight of a three trillion dollar unnecessary war (fifty times Rumsfeld’s estimate of 60 billion), and military expenses that exceed fifty percent, before the housing bubble burst, which is only one in the bottom row of this house of cards.

Clean coal and nuclear in your energy plan, Senator Obama? When you factor in the all costs of production, including the costs to society, nuclear is a net negative and ‘clean’ coal is a pipe dream compared to the same dollar invested in the true renewables of solar, wind, tidal, wave or geothermal.

Accept Georgia and Ukraine into NATO? Just how non-paranoid do you think you can require the Russians to be? Do you really want to re-start the cold war with a nation that has 10,000 nukes lying around, whose bordering states contain as would be buyers Islamic terrorists? Whose economy is depressed in part due to our economic policies, such that those who look after those nukes are probably hurting for a little more domestic income?

Ben Laden appears to have taken credit for the deaths of close to three thousand US citizens on September 11, 2001 (though this is not included in his FBI wanted file for lack of evidence), and many before in the bombings of the USNS Cole, and the two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Certainly that makes him a mass murderer, but there is obviously a method to his madness. Seriously asking the question “why they hate us” seems off the table, even if only to properly understand one’s enemy. Could it be the same reason he went to war against the Russians, which pleased us so much at the time that we helped him raise and train his army of mujahideen? That reason would be self-determination, what he sees as self-determination anyway, for the Islamic people (with himself as chief mullah no doubt), whose nations and resources have been preyed upon by Western governments and corporations since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

Acknowledging this would take more than a thirty-second sound-bite, make Ben Laden look like something of a revolutionary, and probably not win any votes. It would however go a good way to explain why the more innocents we kill when we go after him with the heavy hand of our military, the more popular he becomes with people who would otherwise not care much for his ideological approach. Revolutionaries have always been viewed as terrorists by the established powers they oppose, and hailed as heroes by those who felt oppressed by those powers. This approach is pretty much guaranteed to loose the hearts and minds. Thus Ben Laden is now revered by many in the rugged terrain of Peshawar, an area that has not been successfully dominated since the time of Alexander the Great, who wisely protected his advance by marrying into a local royal family.

McCain alluded to this in his more cautious approach on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but his stay in Iraq for a hundred years and “bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb bomb Iran” will not win any friends either.

As mass murders go, we’ve killed more than Osama’s three thousand innocents in Afghanistan. If we turn our eyes to Iraq, a country we now generally acknowledge had nothing to do whatever with September 11th and posed us no threat, that number becomes closer to a million, and four million made refugees, breaking the support systems of neighboring governments still attempting to remain friendly to us.

Yet we remain, hesitant to leave before we have “stabilized” the nation, which translated from DC speak means insuring continued access to oil resources by western corporations on terms amounting to control. As much as we may value those lives lost on September 11th and consciously or unconsciously place them above the lives of those million others, we must allow that others value the lives of their loved ones as much. So where does that leave us in the eyes of the world, on the scale of justice? Our policies have served to impress on the world Ben Laden’s view of us. By this measure George Bush is Ben Laden’s biggest fan, and, unfortunately, neither the stated Middle East policies of Obama nor McCain will bring us the honor we seem to think we deserve and must find before we finally leave exhausted and bankrupt.

Our goals in the Middle East will not be realized by a “surge” in Afghanistan or “strategic strikes at high value targets” in Pakistan, as such will only impress further upon the majority of the population that we hold their lives of far less value than our own. They cannot be expected to fall in line with such a message. If we succeed in our goal to “kill” Ben Laden, ten more will arise in his place.

Surely, someone as bright as Obama knows this, just as he must know that the people of Iran should not be judged by a right-wing religious leader playing to his constituents. When our own nation and that of Israel have proven time and again we are willing to be the aggressor outside our national boundaries to ‘defend’ our ‘national interest,’ we only prove Ahmadinejad’s point when we proclaim him and Iran a threat for doing what they have every right under international law to do — which, rhetoric about the Zionist state aside, according to the IAEA, is all they are doing.

Those who do take a stab at telling the truth to the American people poll in the single digits, and are marginalized by the media, who owe their jobs to the military/government/media complex. Many in the public are becoming aware that the media are themselves mucking up the system in some way. From ferreting out the truth they’ve been reduced to funneling events to the public through the lens of their powerful owners, limiting the range of debate to that pitiful expanse we saw before us.

Perhaps if we are lucky survival will clue people in to paying attention to their own true interests before it is too late, rather than being stampeded out of fear into fascism.

Our guy encourages us to hope, and hope we must, that he has more integrity than he lets on and is smarter than the positions he takes, which I guess the polls inform him he must. At this point it’s a pretty slim hope.