As the Arab world fights, America sleeps

As the Arab world fights, America sleeps

By Larry Chin

Global Research, February 5, 2011
Online Journal

As people across the Arab world take to the streets to fight for democracy, and an end to oppression and tyranny, the oblivious, uninterested and acquiescent American public has done virtually nothing.

The average American has not taken to the streets to join in solidarity. The vast majority of Americans are largely unaware of the cataclysmic events happening outside of the information bubble within US borders.

The bewildered herd

Decades in the making, the product of decades of institutionalized conditioning, mass ignorance, passivity and acquiescence continues to be the Anglo-American empire’s lifeblood and protectant. A powerful and increasingly centralized mass media, blocks, blacks out and manipulates information, while spewing official propaganda and deceptions, and vast amounts of inane, brain-addling, mind-numbing entertainment opiates.

As written by Noam Chomsky in What Uncle Sam Wants, some 80 percent of the US population, the “bewildered herd” as described by Walter Lippmann, is the target of corporate mass media. “These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable---if they see too much of reality, they may set themselves to change it.”

Never has this been more obvious than today. The lead front page story of the January 31 San Francisco Chronicle is a lengthy piece warning about the potential stress caused by watching the Super Bowl.

What meager mainstream corporate US media coverage of the events in Egypt has consisted of Washington talking points, and selective sound bites and footage focusing on the potential for mob rule, anarchy, looting, and terrorism. Violence and all false flags designed to discredit the revolution, particularly the thuggery on the part of agents of Mubarack, are pushed to the forefront, to justify a violent Tiananmen Square-style “crackdown.” Little of any mainstream US media treatment has been devoted to the true nature of the event. The peaceful, jubilant, festival-like demonstration of true democracy of February 1, shared by Egyptians of every variety is seen only in coverage by independent and foreign media, and Al-Jazeera, the news network most feared by the West.

The laughable doublespeak of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others are repeated without question. The fact that Obama and the Western powers fear democracy, and oppose whatever threatens the Anglo-American Middle East war and oil agenda, is given no attention.

No mainstream analysis bothers to expose how the Obama administration and the Western powers continue to manipulate the game by playing all sides; how the CIA has already co-opted and infiltrated opposition groups, and is attempting to line up new CIA assets, torturers like Omar Sulieman, and Washington-endorsed plants to take over from Mubarack, whom Western leaders still view as their Middle East bastion.

No mainstream analysis has dared break down how decades of Anglo-American geostrategic policy, and the manipulations of the IMF and World Bank, created the horrific conditions that have sparked revolts in successive nations---Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, etc.---with more to come. No objective views that connect the obvious dots: if Egyptians seek to depose Mubarack’s repressive regime, then the entire Anglo-American agenda that controls the likes of Mubarack is on trial.

No mainstream US reporting has detailed the backgrounds of the cast of criminals being trotted out by Mubarack and Obama to quell the situation, such as Omar Sulieman. And who has questioned why Obama hired Frank George Wisner (longtime Washington and Wall Street asset , executive of AIG, and son of legendary CIA operative Frank Gardiner Wisner) to negotiate with Mubarack (who is Wisner’s personal friend)?

What little “analysis” is presented to the American broadcast public has consisted primarily of the hawkish views of former military-intelligence officials from one of the Bush presidencies, or “strategic Middle East experts” from the Council on Foreign Relations and other think tanks, posing as august and objective commentators. Witness the succession of neocons, including Frank Gaffney and John Bolton spreading fear and advocating military action.

A dead country

Whereas Egyptians (and Jordanians, Tunisians, etc.) are fighting for democracy, the average American assumes he or she is entitled to it, even as its own government continues to strip Americans of more and more of their liberty with every passing hour.

As written in 2006 by Mike Ruppert, post-9/11 quiescence “comes at a time when US crimes are far worse and more far-reaching than they were in 1970; certainly in the eyes of the world. In 2001, the US government both facilitated and executed the attacks of 9/11 against its own people, killing thousands of its citizens as an excuse to launch a neo-imperial conquest for energy. A few Americans held small rallies, organized some ineffective groups, bought a few hundred thousand books and DVDs, listened to a few radio programs and lectures, and then quietly lined up to have their bags, emails, credit histories, minds and bodies searched. Critical mass was never achieved as Executive Orders, along with the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts, shredded the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments to our Bill of Rights.

“After the 9-11 attacks the US government lied to create a war for oil in Iraq telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, almost-ready atom bombs, poison gas and deadly germs. We were told that he helped execute the 9/11 attacks. It was all lies, and no one has held the US accountable for the hundreds of thousands of deaths (murders) in Iraq and Afghanistan since then. Few have tried to hold the government accountable for 2,500 Americans who have died needlessly, and those who have, have been remarkably ineffective.”

US presidential elections were stolen in 2000 and 2004 through rigged electronic voting software and intimidation. Not one drop of blood was spilled anywhere, even as the US Supreme Court rendered an illegal decision supporting the overthrow of the Constitution and trampling the rights of individual states.

“I never thought I would call the 60s and 70s ‘the good old days.’ I would cry tears of joy today to see just one campus overrun by a modern equivalent of the Students for a Democratic Society. I would cheer to see a general strike paralyze a city. It would be living proof that American character had not been submerged, drugged, weakened, and rendered anemic beyond revival.

“My country is dead. Its people have surrendered to tyranny, and in so doing, they have become tyranny’s primary support group; its base constituency; its chief defender. Every day they offer their endorsement of tyranny by banking in its banks and spending their borrowed money with the corporations that run it. The great Neocon strategy of George H.W. Bush has triumphed. Convince the American people that they can’t live without the ‘good things,’ then sit back and watch as they endorse the progressively more outrageous crimes you commit as you throw them bones with ever-less meat on them. All the while, lock them into debt. Destroy the middle class, the only political base that need be feared. Make them accept, because of their own shared guilt, ever-more repressive police state measures. Do whatever you want.”

Post-9/11, the US population has done nothing, even after now nearly a full decade of open criminality by Bush-Cheney, and its continuation, the Obama administration. Nothing, as an America increasingly becomes a police state. Nothing about their own injustice, suffering and economic collapse, despite the fact that injustice and income inequality in the US is worse than it is in Egypt.

What little true opposition does occur within the US is squashed as well as ignored. Mainstream US news networks deliberately blocked reporting on the recent protest by Veterans For Peace, during which numerous important figures such as Daniel Ellsberg, chained themselves to the White House to oppose war in Iraq/Afghanistan.

What is even more ominous, in stark contrast to the rest of the world, increasing portions of the American populace militantly embrace (and commit violence for) their oppressors. Witness the ascendency of the Tea Party, the increasingly outrageous power of corporations and right-wing radicalism, and the recent mid-term election that sent new hordes of right-wing demagogues to the US Congress.

Having ignored or slept through the past weeks and months, the US populace will undoubtedly sleep through and/or willingly ignore what unfolds in the Middle East. The cataclysmic impact of events has set off desperate actions by governments throughout the world, but to the average US citizen, it is nothing but a momentary flash on a TV screen. Turn the channel to something more fun.
If this is indeed a global revolution, America will be the last place it happens. If it ever does.


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© Copyright Larry Chin, Online Journal , 2011

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