by
Caitlin Johnstone
The
dynamics of the establishment Syria narrative are hilarious if you
take a step back and think about them. I mean, the western empire is
now openly admitting to having funded actual, literal terrorist
groups in that country, and yet they’re still cranking out
propaganda pieces about what is happening there and sincerely
expecting us to believe them. It’s adorable, really; like a little
kid covered in chocolate telling his mom he doesn’t know what
happened to all the cake frosting.
Or least
it would be adorable if it weren’t directly facilitating the
slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.
I
recently had a pleasant and professional exchange with the Atlantic
Council’s neoconservative propagandist Eliot Higgins, in which he
referred to independent investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley as
“bonkers” and myself as “crazy”, and I called him a
despicable bloodsucking ghoul. I am not especially fond of Mr.
Higgins.
You see
this theme repeated again and again and again in Higgins’ work; the
US-centralized power establishment which facilitated terrorist
factions in Syria is the infallible heroic Good Guy on the scene, and
anyone who doesn’t agree is a mentally deranged lunatic.
This is
also the model for the greater imperialist propaganda construct, not
just with regard to Syria but with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and any
other insolent government which refuses to bow to American
supremacist agendas. It works like this: first, the oligarch-owned
establishment media, which itself is chock full of Council on Foreign
Relations members, uses other warmongering think tanks and its own
massive funding to force deep state psyops like Russiagate and
“Saddam has WMDs” into becoming the mainstream narrative. Second,
they use the mainstream, widely-accepted status of this manufactured
narrative to paint anyone who questions it as a mentally defective
tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.
It’s a
perfect scheme. The mass media has given a few elites the ability to
effectively turn a false story that they themselves invented into an
established fact so broadly accepted that anyone who doubts it can be
painted in the exact same light as someone who doubts the roundness
of the Earth. The illusion of unanimous agreement is so complete that
blatant establishment psyops are placed on the same level as settled
scientific fact, even though it’s made of little else but highly
paid pundits making authoritative assertions in confident tones of
voice day after day.
Yes, it
is a perfect scheme. But there also happens to be a name for it.
In a
lucid essay titled “Gaslighting: State Mind Control and Abusive
Narcissism”, Vanessa Beeley writes the following:
The
psychological term “Gaslighting” comes from a 1944 Hollywood
classic movie called Gaslight. Gaslighting describes the abuse
employed by a narcissist to instil in their victim’s mind, an
extreme anxiety and confusion to the extent where they no longer have
faith in their own powers of logic, reason and judgement. These
gaslighting techniques were adopted by central intelligence agencies
in the US and Europe as part of their psychological warfare methods,
used primarily during torture or interrogation.
Anyone
who has been in an abusive relationship is likely to be familiar with
this textbook abuse tactic to some extent, because it is such a
useful tool for crippling the better judgment and alarm bells we all
have which are meant to help us avoid situations that are harmful to
us. If someone with confidence in their own clear judgement feels
certain that their significant other is cheating, for example, there
is likely to be a confrontation and some clothes out on the front
lawn. If your significant other can convince you that you are
paranoid or crazy, however, you will doubt what you are seeing and
accept the stories you’re being told by someone who appears to be a
lot more grounded in reality than you are.
Any
degree of abuse can be justified in this way. The documentary What
Happened, Miss Simone? tells an anecdote of jazz legend Nina Simone
once having been tied up, raped, beaten and held at gunpoint by her
husband, who left and then returned telling her she’d imagined the
entire thing. And it worked.
We see
the same thing today with the establishment Syria narrative and the
Russiagate psyop, which are both riddled with plot holes and depend
on the irrational position that the same establishment which
manufactured support for the Iraq invasion using lies is now
beneficent and trustworthy. But if you point out the many reasons to
be skeptical of these narratives, you belong in the crazy box.
The good
news is that there is an easy remedy for this tactic. We need only to
be thoroughly confident in our own judgment.
History
has testified unequivocally that extreme skepticism is the only
rational response to have toward establishment narratives, especially
when those narratives are beating the drums of war. The US war
machine has an extensive history of using lies, false flags and
propaganda to manufacture support for its bloodthirsty agendas, and
the adage that truth is the first casualty of war holds up flawlessly
in cases of both hot war and cold war. It is simply self-evident that
there is no good reason to take these people at their word, and every
reason not to.
Your own
educated best guess about what is going on in the world is infinitely
superior to placing unquestioning faith in an establishment which has
a vested interest in lying to you and a demonstrable history of doing
so. Trust yourself and have full confidence that your conclusions,
however imperfect, are always superior to those of known liars and
manipulators.
Never,
ever let anyone bully and cajole you for being skeptical of
mainstream narratives instead of believing the say-so of malignant
deceivers. Trust yourself. You are not being crazy, you are behaving
logically. Don’t let them gaslight you.
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