Here at VT we have been discussing the concept and reality of controlled opposition for many years. Zahir Ebrahim’s new essay is a worthy contribution to that discussion.
Kevin Barrett, VT Editor
The Dying Songbird
By Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Abstract
Just because someone takes an opposing stance does not necessarily make them a real opponent. The two sides may be in cahoots to corral the public mind, or the opposition may be contrived to put on a stage show, or fabricated to convince those reluctant of the chosen course of action, or co-opted knowing fully well which side of their bread is buttered. They are, whether wittingly as mercenaries and Superman, or unwittingly as useful idiots and stooges, all part and parcel of the gift of Mephistopheles to mankind. How does this gift work? Not by appearing repugnant to its audience so that the gift is instantly rejected by any sound of mind, but by appearing appealing and seductive based on the psyche of each individual, group, and group-think composition. This is so basic a real-world 101, so basic a realpolitik 101, so basic a Machiavelli 101, so basic a street-savvy 101, that the fact that one even has to state it explicitly, and repeatedly, just shows how little the modern public mind understands. How much it has been craftily dumbed down between bread and circuses, despite its well to do productive members often possessing superlative educational degrees and other professional pay-stub earning qualifications. So what is real dissent? What is its purpose?
The whole aim of practical politics of dissent by genuine gadflies to power is to prevent the future fait accompli that is being engineered by ‘history’s actors’ in the present. This is why genuine dissent, that with real teeth and non-zero efficacy, cannot be permitted to exist and flourish. It is instead replaced with manufactured dissent as an essential part of statecraft itself when the illusion of dissent and public opinion is to be maintained in a ‘free’ democratic society.
Rehearsing crimes of power after these crimes are fait accompli; after all the barbers in town already know it; after their disclosure as the narrative of official history through FOIA declassification, whistle-blowing and deep-throatleaks, and in posthumous confessional diaries of monumental war criminals, none of which really reveal any real secrets, or only do so ex post facto when it is already a fait accompli; is either the job of the professional historian who relies on officialdom to write the official history pre-sanctioned by power by what it chooses to document and what it chooses to make-believe to posterity, or of manufactured dissent!
Let the twain: a genuine intellectual gadfly vs. fabricated dissent and its useful idiots, not be confused with each other!
The latter is the Superman who echoes the axioms of power underneath his supercilious dissent with it, or tells the obvious truth ex post facto, both to the applause of the instruments of power itself, while collecting all the well-intentioned activists and consciences around him. He is the collection-agent of power. His con-job is to ensure that dissent does not stray too far from home. The world is full of the latter, a modern necessity to complement the manufacturing of consent; to cunningly constrain dissent within acceptable limits when dissent is permitted in a ‘free’ society.
This brilliant Superman herdsman often comes anointed with super advanced degrees, titles, accolades, is well-published, most cited, and speaks with an MIT, Harvard or Oxford accent. He is as powerful in his dissenting “United We Stand” message to his tiny herd as the Superman orator is in his “United We Stand” message to the mainstream herd. The Superman herdsman of dissent is the more brilliant twin in the Hegelian Dialectic of manufactured consent vs. manufactured dissent.
Manufactured dissent is also easy to spot. It almost always states the obvious – rather than the un-obvious. It cleverly keeps the real secrets secret or obfuscated by not going there. It focusses on the effects and stays silent on the cause. It usually also runs with the foxes while hunting with the hounds. It happily eats from the same plate that it purports to spit into. And the most avant-garde of the lot even run with infantile absurdities to make all dissent appear infantile and absurd in the eyes of the mainstream public, lest the latter inadvertently stray from their own home pastures. And since Adolph Hitler had empirically demonstrated the truth of his statement: “The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated over and over.”, the Superman of dissent too repeats the same big lie of the establishment upon which consent is being engineered among the masses!
For instance, just look for all those who share the common establishment “truth”: OBL and Al Qaeda successfully invaded the most armed to the teeth superpower in the world on 9/11, magically hijacked four airliners in the air with box-cutter knives within a matter of an hour, rammed them into two tall buildings and magically demolished three in a feat of demolition which before that day had never been carried out in the entire written history of mankind. All this was planned and orchestrated by an Islamofascist Ali Baba from the Hindu Kush mountains armed to the teeth with cellphones and AK-47s, in collaboration with an illusive database named “Al Qaeda”. The names of the believers of this fantastic fable in the who’s who of dissent is surprising. These include some of the biggest and most celebrated names in dissent to keep company with the Neo-cons, the Pentagon, the State Department, the World Bank, the IMF, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, the United Nations and all its member countries, and the Bush-Obama Administrations: Noam Chomsky, Francis Boyle, the late Howard Zinn, former Congressman Ron Paul, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Scott Ritter, Dennis Halliday, Michael Moore, Helen Caldicott, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Greg Palast, Amy Goodman, Daniel Ellsberg, Nelson Mandela, Arundhatti Roy of India, Tariq Ali and Pervez Hoodbhoy of Pakistan, etc.
Once the big lie is cleverly conceded to officialdom without question, all dissent with empire’s barbaric acts against its proclaimed enemies is effectively made futile: “either you are with us or with the terrorists” (George W. Bush). Because, as the empire is now given the license to arguably claim, it is only protecting itself from the diabolically brilliant and most superior foe that is even able to penetrate the strongest superpower on earth’s super militarized defenses on its own native soil! Then dissent all you want – so long as you keep that core lie intact in all your adumbration: “’No thank you.’ We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs.” (Arundhatti Roy). The argument is cleverly moved away from forensically examining the crime as Sherlock Holmes might do, to the best way to deal with the criminals by presupposing who the criminals are: ‘they attack us because we have been over there … I am suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us … ‘ (former congressman Ron Paul). Thus both, the establishment chiefs manufacturing consent, and the dissent chiefs manufacturing dissent, end up continually reinforcing the same presuppositions of the system, the same big lie; the former by openly advocating the big lie, the latter by openly refraining from challenging the big lie. Both are propagandists; the former by commission, the latter by omission. British essayist Aldous Huxley captured the implication of silence and the crime of omission most elegantly in his Preface to Brave New World:
‘The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an “iron curtain” between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.’ — Aldous Huxley, Preface (circa 1946) to Brave New World, 1931, Harper, pg. 11
That is how the Superman herdsman leads the pack of useful idiots in manufactured dissent. He craftily lowers the “iron curtain” of ignorance between the masses and such facts or arguments as the system regards as undesirable or necessary to enforce. And he cleverly echoes the core lies of empire in toto, or presupposes them in his argumentative and tedious dissent. The focus is most craftily shifted from the crime to ex post facto anti-war critique of empire’s “imperial mobilization” – after “imperial mobilization” is a fait accompli:
“Of course as I told you, I never believe the government, or rarely believe the government. Do I believe the government version of what happened? Well, I am skeptical. Do I believe that the government was in the conspiracy to do this? I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the situation, and the truth is, I don’t care that much. That’s past. … the whole argument that the people are engaged in, about, was the government behind a conspiracy to blow up the two towers, to me that’s a diversion from what we really have to do, deal with the fact that whatever, whoever was behind 9/11, the government took advantage of that, to take us to war, and to put us on a disastrous course, and it’s that war, those wars, that disastrous course we have to deal with. I don’t want to go back to the controversy that I think is endless controversy, and just gets in the way of dealing with the immediate situation.” (Howard Zinn, November 18, 2008)
It is not merely a lucky coincidence for empire that the most prominent leaders of dissent all inevitably retain the big lie of empire intact, each according to their own genius mind. From the tag team of Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn on the left, to the tag team of former US congressman Ron Paul and Fox News anchor Glenn Beck on the right – and a hundred and ten lauded names in between – the empire has the full gamut of respectable dissent field covered. There is something for every malcontent in the 31 flavors of dissent.
When brilliant antipodes, like the “vulgar propagandist” Prof. Bernard Lewis, and his nemesis, “arguably the most important intellectual alive”, Prof. Noam Chomsky, agree on a sacred “truth” of empire, then those with an iota of neurons still firing on all cylinders are provided the opportunity to ponder the non sequitur. A WWF wrestling game being broadcast on all channels: in the lower right hand corner is empire’s greatest scholar from empire’s greatest university, Princeton, and in the upper left hand corner is empire’s greatest detractor from empire’s greatest technion, MIT…. ; hmmm…., sounds like they both work for the same bosses and consent is being engineered with “Operation Canned Goods” copycat of the Third Reich. It too had given Mein Führer the propaganda pretext to “goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers.” (Robert H. Jackson at Nuremberg) But then: “How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.” (Adolph Hitler)
The Third Reich had in fact mobilized its entire Reichsdom on precisely this acutely pathological observation of people; itself fabricating the “conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1996) with its “Operation Canned Goods” that gave the German public their own “pearl harbor”; and Adolph Hitler: “a propagandist reason for starting the war”. Mein Führer, by his own admission, well understood the victor’s primacy imperative that can never imagine defeat at the peak of its own hubris: “The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not the right that matters, but victory.” (Adolph Hitler, quoted by William Shirer)
That Machiavellian modus operandi for engineering the public mind borrowed from the Third Reich is unfortunately not the end of it. Some convolutions are added to the establishment’s “truths” to make discovery a tad more confusing than the aforementioned deconstruction recipe of shrewdly examining who else is echoing the big lie in conjunction with the establishment functionaries. To Machiavellianly preempt the eternal skeptics of establishmentarian “truth” irrespective of who brings it to them; to cleverly defocus their expected intransigent resistance to “imperial mobilization” by making them run on treadmills as otherwise “democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, op. cit.); a flavor of manufactured dissent also dissents with the establishment’s own “truths”.
This equally diabolical breed of Superman gadfly deliberately introduces plausible sounding false “conspiracy theories” among the skeptics and the diehard recalcitrants. It is even pedantically referred to as inducing “beneficial cognitive diversity” in favor of the establishment. To see through their snake-oil takes a bit more sophistication and a mind attuned to the vagaries of power and its many incantations.
Which is why the majority of well-intentioned activists who had previously escaped from the underground dungeons of the manufacturing consent factory are routinely trapped by this new elitist collection agency! It is elitist because it is often composed of the intellectual elite and the self-proclaimed avant-garde in intellectual thought who feel they are ahead of the herd if they don’t buy the establishment’s lies. Adolph Hitler perceptively understood this skeptical public mind and typecast it as the second majority group in a nation: “Second, those who no longer believe anything;”. The first and largest majority group he had observed are: “First, those who believe everything they read;”. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about the second group (the Type-2 demographics, the dissenting crowd of skeptics who believe nothing from official sources):
“The second group is numerically smaller, being partly composed of those who were formerly in the first group and after a series of bitter disappointments are now prepared to believe nothing of what they see in print. They hate all newspapers. Either they do not read them at all or they become exceptionally annoyed at their contents, which they hold to be nothing but a congeries of lies and misstatements. These people are difficult to handle; for they will always be sceptical of the truth. Consequently, they are useless for any form of positive work.” (Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter X)
Hitler’s phrase, “useless for any form of positive work”, was most perceptive – for these are the easily swayed audience by the baseless “conspiracy theories” invented by the agents and assets of the establishment. This audience, dominated almost entirely by the same most vocal peace activists and rabble rousers who march emotionally in anti-war protests on weekends and holidays, achieves precisely the intended purpose of the establishment: they foolishly defocus the energies of dissent from homing in onto the first cause of war-faring dystopia and the real criminals who pull the strings for its fabrication from behind the facade of elected governments.
It is neither the acme of excellence to predict thunder after witnessing lightening, nor to herald the arrival of winter after seeing the falling autumn leaves. Nor is it the acme of excellence to ‘see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd.’ Neither is it the acme of excellence ‘if you fight and conquer and the whole Empire says, “Well done!”’ And Sun Tzu goes on in the Art of War: ‘To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.’
The acme of excellence for the genuine intellectual gadfly is to point the path to the un-obvious before anyone else can see it. To be the ‘chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations’, to be a ‘witness to their mendacity’, to not fit ‘into any role that might be assigned to him’, nor fit into ‘any of the histories written by the victors’.
Like the powerless songbird, the powerless rebel identifies with his categorical imperative, willingly carrying even the tiniest truth-bombs in his mouthful, if not atomic bombs in his F-16, regardless of consequence to self. A higher calling that is built-in by nature into all songbirds and patriots of truth in all of creation who can rise to higher states of consciousness. Historically, epic battles have been waged by state armies with massive destruction reigned down upon humanity. In modernity, the main battleground is the battle for the mind, and truth-bombs can defeat a fleet of warships of every design.
Which is precisely why the genuine songbird is a dying breed today — the empire understands that unless that natural instinct in its peoples is co-opted and replaced with its own pied pipers to lead the public mind, it can easily defeat its fleets.
In the age of universal deceit it is rare to find such an un co-opted mind that is also free from the cobwebs of conformist thought. It is even rarer to find anyone among the public who would believe him in his own time when something can be done to interdict the non-kosher plans of the ‘history’s actors’. The genuine gadfly to power is almost always either ignored, marginalized, or administered the hemlock which he drinks with great relish.
By himself, the genuine gadfly is the lonely songbird with a droplet of water in its beak rushing to douse the great fire lighted by Nimrod. By keeping it isolated and lonely, by preventing the drop from becoming a deluge, the songbird is shrewdly protected from realizing its aim. All the freedom of speech in vacuum and one still dies of asphyxiation! It is not the freedom to speak, but the freedom to be heard that is denied to the songbird. The journey of mankind from tyranny to tyranny is paved on the songbird’s unheard songs. An empirical truism that is reflected in both: the fate of prophets of antiquity who were the ‘chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations’ and ‘witness to their mendacity’, easily abandoned by their own peoples when not killed or exiled by the rulers; and the fate of prophets of modernity for whom more creativity has been brought to bear in keeping with the more sophisticated times.
New mental illnesses have been coined in the DSM handbook of psychiatry to consign the latter day gadfly to state hospitality, defined as suffering from ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ exhibiting a pattern of ‘negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures’. New legal entitlements have been framed to label anyone who challenges power, as the ‘terrorist’, for what else but to share in that same fate to the great applause and patriotic gratification of the common herd.
In effect, we are back to the early crossroads of the Roman Era in our twenty-first century, and the world turned into a giant coliseum of entertainment for the masses. All roads today lead to one-world government – the empire of the oligarchy.
In the meantime, the dying songbird sings on unheard – while manufactured dissent lives on under establishment cover cornering both the dissent publishing market and the scholarly citation market with lame rehearsals of the obvious and the absurd; and history’s actors continue to engineer future history unhindered. Ex post facto, the onlookers will become the new standard patriots just as Mark Twain captured it: “In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot”. Costs nothing to be a patriot: the hallmark of manufactured dissent! It even makes a pretty good living under establishment cover peddling the study of what the history’s actors leave behind.
George W. Bush’s White House senior advisor had captured this grotesque reality most unabashedly for the New York Times correspondent in 2004:
‘…“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”…’ (Ron Suskind, New York Times, Oct. 17, 2004)
The future generation’s manufactured dissent will use today’s songbirds’ songs as gospel truth written in god’s own hand writing. It will rehearse these songs of truth ad nauseam to lead its own choir anew in immense sense of patriotic gratification just as it does today, cunningly ignoring the songbirds of its own time. Rehearsing history while echoing the core big lies and axioms of powers du jour will remain its claim to profession as well as fame just as it is today. That is if dissent is still permitted in the George Orwell’s world under construction. The trend however appears to be more inclined in the long term towards the world prognosticated by Aldous Huxley where dissent is outright redacted from the very DNA of the standardized humanity. People made to actually enjoy their own servitude. The German philosopher Goethe had aptly summed it: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.”
Even the common herd can feel the penetrating signs of it approaching faster than the hijacked airliners that ram into tall buildings without interdiction in the most armed to the teeth superpower in history – at the American airports for instance where very intelligent peoples in the most industrious and creative nation on earth continue to quietly subject themselves to indignities in the name of freedom which no one in their self-respecting mind ought to really subject themselves to. Pretty soon, most will even be happy doing it – if many aren’t already!
A world without the songbird approaches even faster.
Case Studies of Top Ten Gatekeepers of Dissent from Left to Right among both the Western Massa class and its carefully cultivated useful idiot Eastern House Nigger classare in the sequel: Songbird or Superman – You Decide! .
If you would like to challenge a fact or analysis or offer a correction with something more than just an opinion, or if you learnt something new here, please consider leaving a public comment. Or write to: humanbeingsfirst@gmail.com .
Postscript
This article is Chapter 9 of the author’s book: The Poor-Man’s Guide To Modernity – Oligarchic Primacy for World Government, Revised 9th Edition, 2015. Download PDF:https://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/book-poor-mans-guide-to-modernity-9th-edition-2015-zahirebrahim.pdf .
Endnotes
[1] Superman refers to Nietzsche’s superman; see Thus Spake Zarathustra – A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE by Friedrich Nietzsche (download from http://www.gutenberg.org/1/9/9/1998/ ).
[2] For a detailed analysis of manufactured dissent as a Hegelian Dialectic, see: A Note on the Mighty Wurlitzer – Architecture of Modern Propaganda for Psychological Warfareby Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/05/note-on-mighty-wurlitzer.html .
[3] For an examination of the fascinating theory behind “conspiracy theories”, see: Anatomy of Conspiracy Theory by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/03/anatomy-of-conspiracy-theory.html ; see the revealing paper by President Obama’s information Czar, Dr. Cass Sunstein, the Harvard Law Professor who openly advocated precisely the method of credibly crafting false conspiracy theories among the public in order to neutralize the ultimate skeptics of establishment’s core lies, titled: “Conspiracy Theories”,http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 ; see the forensic examination of this paper and its superficial critics in: A License to Kill: Did David Ray Griffin and Steve Lendman miss the real purpose of Cass Sunstein’s “Conspiracy Theories”? by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/10/zahir-responds-griffin-v-cass-sunstein.html
[4] For the role of genuine gadfly to power as moral agents of change see Vaclav Havel’s full quote in Responsibility of Intellectuals – Redux by Zahir Ebrahim,http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/responsibility-of-intellectuals-redux.html .
[5] For the parable of the Songbird and Nimrod see Of Ostriches and Rebels on The Hard Road to World Order by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/12/of-ostriches-and-rebels-zahirebrahim.html .
[6] For understanding the empire of the oligarchy and how it is being fashioned in stages with “an end run around national sovereignty”, see The Poor-Man’s Guide to Modernity,https://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/book-poor-mans-guide-to-modernity-9th-edition-2015-zahirebrahim.pdf .
[7] Just because someone takes an opposing stance does not necessarily make them a real opponent. The two sides may be in cahoots to corral the public mind, or the opposition may be contrived to put on a stage show, or fabricated to convince those reluctant of the chosen course of action, or co-opted knowing fully well which side of their bread is buttered. They are, whether wittingly as mercenaries and Superman, or unwittingly as useful idiots and stooges, all part and parcel of the gift of Mephistopheles to mankind. How does this gift work? Not by appearing repugnant to its audience so that the gift is instantly rejected by any sound of mind, but by appearing appealing and seductive based on the psyche of each individual, group, and group-think composition. This is so basic a real-world 101, so basic a realpolitik 101, so basic a Machiavelli 101, so basic a street-savvy 101, that the fact that one even has to state it explicitly, and repeatedly, just shows how little the modern public mind understands. How much it has been craftily dumbed down between bread and circuses, despite its well to do productive members often possessing superlative educational degrees and other professional pay-stub earning qualifications.
[a] For some arguably rich examples of respectable manufactured dissent from Left to Right who live and thrive under establishment cover and benefaction, see Songbird or Superman – You Decide! by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2013/09/songbird-or-superman.html .
[b] More contemporary examples of both respectable and outlandish manufactured dissent can be found in: Manufacturing Dissent: Weapons of Mass Deception – The Master Social Science by Zahir Ebrahim,http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/p/manufacturing-dissent.html ; its Preamble section excerpts at length from Mein Kampf to examine Adolph Hitler’s insightful characterization of the three types of public mind that is brilliantly harnessed by Western statecraft today for engineering consent.
[c] The case of Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, an economist and self-proclaimed “Father of Reaganomics”, a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and the darling of the Christian white man’s dissent with the establishment now that Jews have replaced their former tormentors in running the world show, is particularly illustrative of both manufactured dissent as well as dissent for narrow vested interests; see: Rebuttal to Paul Craig Roberts’: ‘Washington Arrogance has Fomented a Muslim Revolution’ by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/12/letter-paul-craig-roberts-rebuttal.html .
[d] The case of the distinguished former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges is similarly telling, as yet another former highly prized establishmentarian gratuitously echoing the axioms of empire in his new role as the dissenting conscience of America. What Chris Hedges cleverly omits and what he posits in his desire to soothe his conscience is deconstructed in: Response to Chris Hedges’ amalgam of half-truths ‘A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe’ by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2011/09/response-chris-hedges-decade-after-911.html ,http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/p/gatekeepers-from-left-to-right.html .
[e] The case of the distinguished Dr. Francis Boyle, the Hans Morgenthau student, lawyer and political scientist extraordinaire, groomed at Harvard and University of Chicago, serving as the axial pivot of egregious dissent against the villainy of imperial powers at the International Criminal Court of Justice and the World Court in the Hague, is even more illustrative. Like his Jewish confrere Prof. Noam Chomsky, the good Samaritan Christian too retains the core lies of empire even while bringing criminal charges for torture against its visible helmsman at the Hague. A mental midget or a brilliant Superman? It is always instructive to adjudicate for oneself. See Zahir Ebrahim’s Response to Francis Boyle’s ‘2011: Prospects for Humanity?’ – Unlimited Imperialism and Nation-States but no Secret Rule by Oligarchy for World Government!, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2011/01/resp-francisboyle-2011-prospects-for.html .
[f] Some illustrative examples of manufactured dissent that is really only an articulation of the white man’s burden having been taken over by another more “superior race”, and the grapes are now sour for the former “superior race”, see: The White Man’s Burden appears Uniformly Distributed among Jews Christians and Atheists – how can one tell the difference? by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2011/02/white-mans-burden-uniformly-distributed.html .
[g] Some illustrative examples of fabricated dissent among the “lesser peoples”, the colonized mind, who willingly carry the white man’s burden are in the FAQ: What is an Intellectual Negro? by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-is-intellectual-negro.html .
[h] For understanding co-option which is the first prime-mover motivation for ordinary peoples to fake dissent, play controlled dissent, stay silent, or utter gibberish inducing “beneficial cognitive diversity” into the global conversation to once again diffuse or channel the opposition towards ineffective cause célébré, see The Art and Science of Co-option by Zahir Ebrahim , http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-have-i-learnt-zahir-ebrahim.html .
[i] Last but not least, for understanding the convoluted dissent of the king of global dissent, Noam Chomsky, who epitomizes the very antithesis of the dying songbird, see The Cunning Dissent of Noam Chomsky Revisited in 2015 by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2015/12/noam-chomsky-revisited-in-2015-by-zahir.html .
Noam Chomsky has contributed a great deal of meaningful vocabulary to dissent, such as ‘worthy’ vs ‘unworthy’ victims, throughout his extraordinary life of dissent. His insightful observations on thought control that become subliminal include:
Quote Noam Chomsky
‘This “debate” is a typical illustration of a primary principle of sophisticated propaganda. In crude and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed — or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern. In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe.’
‘Democratic societies use a different method: they don’t articulate the party line. That’s a mistake. What they do is presuppose it, then encourage vigorous debate within the framework of the party line. This serves two purposes. For one thing it gives the impression of a free and open society because, after all, we have lively debate. It also instills a propaganda line that becomes something you presuppose, like the air you breathe.’
‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.’
End Quote
What else should one conclude of a public intellectual who makes the aforementioned most perceptive observations to critique the narrative control of status quo, and then practices the same Machiavellian maxims in his own controlled dissent against the same status quo? Let’s use the English language dictionary to help guide us:
usage : “I’ve been made to feel inadequate my whole life by someone who turns out to be a total hypocrite”
Virtually every public intellectual with few exceptions who critique empire’s burlesques, ahem, its excesses, employs the state’s own fundamental presuppositions in their dissent. As for instance, in our own modernity, that the “war on terror” is real because 9/11 was an invasion from abroad by “Islamofascist terrorists”. Then, “like the air we breathe”, the presupposition becomes the silent and unnoticed backdrop of all public conversations by both supporters as well as detractors of empire’s actions at home and abroad. Now, in the presumably free societies under assault, mainly those in the West but also the emerging democracies copying the West, one can go freely about critiquing empire’s criminal enterprise of wholesale bombing of defenseless nations in the name of self-defence while the core axiom upon which it is based remains unchallenged. Pakistan, for instance, bombs its own peoples in its tribal belt under the same rubric of fighting the “war on terror” in the name of its own self-defence. The United States takes enacts draconian police-state laws against its own denizens using the same pretext. The world follows suit.
Naturally, there will never be any efficacy in such toothless dissent against the self-sustaining exercises which are precisely designed to create more terror by the ever increasing new innocent victim populations whose entire families have been slaughtered from the skies, and hence more “war on terror” when they rise up in their own self-defence using the only weapon available to them to avenge their loved ones, creating an endless self-sustaining war that is exemplified by on-going worldwide insurgency vs counter-insurgency against now organic terror that is continually seeded in manufactured terror. This is indeed the empiricism we witness.
The exercise of this style of dissent provides a convenient collection ground to gather all the Type-2 who are bothered by all this senseless slaughter of innocent civilians, who now freely exercise their lungs to let off some steam on weekends and in weekly op-eds and in money-making books under the illusion that there is “lively debate within that spectrum – [which] even encourage[s] the more critical and dissident views.” It gives “people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” Furthermore, it yields great propaganda value for the virtues of Western style liberal democracy over autocratic governments because this exercise “gives the impression of a free and open society because, after all, we have lively debate.”
Respectable dissent publications are now taught in schools and universities to new generations to teach them “critical thinking” skills (sic!) which retain the core presuppositions of the system while spinning respectable theories of empire, such as The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 2007, by Peter Dale Scott. At election times, the carefully crafted leaders of dissent guide their Type-2 flock on where to vote, with and without illusion, but vote nevertheless, as opposed to withdrawing their public consent altogether for the facade of democratic elections that promise change but never does.
You kill many birds with Noam Chomsky style erudite dissent employing the same maxims of engineering consent that he has himself explained!
Machiavelli was invented in the West. So was its Liberal Democracy which legally permitted dissent. And thus Controlled Dissent became part of this style of statecraft. Without understanding the political philosophies that drive the theology of Western liberal democracy, its control systems, which include dissent, the Mighty Wurlitzer, and the Hegelian Dialectics, cannot be understood. These wrap the public mind in convolutions that defy not just the common man’s imagination, but also the obsequious intelligentsia’s that looks for favors and livelihood from the very system that it critiques. And the intelligentsia that is all too well read, easily becomes so invested in its own successes that it chooses to self-police rather than risk its livelihood and cult-like celebrity stature that comes by staying within the limits carved out by the system.
See Deconstructing the reality behind The Reality of the “Lesser Evil” , by Project Humanbeingsfirst.org, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-reality-of-lesser-evil.html ; see Response to Press TV’s Interview with Noam Chomsky ‘No change coming with Obama’, by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/01/respto-chomskys-nochange-obama.html ; see Not-Voting is a ‘YES’ vote to Reject a Corrupt System which thrives on the facade of Elections and Democracy! By Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/10/not-voting-is-yes-vote-to-reject-system.html ; see FAQ: Prove to me that the 9/11 Narrative is a Big Lie by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2014/04/faq-prove-that-911-narrative-is-big-lie.html ; Sanctification of the 9/11 Narrative – Long Term Impact of Sanctification of the 9/11 Big Lie, by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2014/04/sanctification-of-911-narrative-zahir.html ; see Insurgency vs. Counter-Insurgency – Case Study: Manufacturing Pretext for Perpetual Controlled Conflict and Controlled Chaos, by Zahir Ebrahim, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/10/insurgency-vs-counter-insurgency.html ; see The Art and Science of Co-option, op. cit.
[8] For Howard Zinn’s demagoguery, diverting attention from the crime of 9/11 itself in response to a question from the public, see: http://prisonplanet.com/howard-zinn-i-dont-care-if-911-was-an-inside-job.html ; transcript from: http://youtube.com/watch?v=S-WQ5z53lW8 .
[9] The epithet “vulgar propagandist” is dissent Superman Noam Chomsky anointing establishment’s Superman Bernard Lewis in the following interview: ‘… now, until Bernard Lewis tells us that, and that’s only one piece of a long story, we know that he is just a vulgar propagandist and not a scholar.’ — Interview to Evan Solomon, CBC, part-2, minute 5:50, December 9, 2003, http://youtube.com/watch?v=bieFwutoqvA .
The epithet: “arguably the most important intellectual alive” is establishment’s mouthpiece, The New York Times, anointing Noam Chomsky. The incestuous self-reinforcement of imperial “truths” among these Superman and the instruments of the establishment who also principally share the same racial and tribal heritage, each playing their own assigned role in the Hegelian Dialectic of Dissent, should no longer be surprising. See subsection Hegelian Dialectic of Dissent, endnote [2], op cit.
[10] For an example of dissent cornering the citation market, see: Chomsky Is Citation Champ, MIT news bulletin, April 15, 1992, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1992/citation-0415.html .
[11] For an example of making a lifetime of lucrative living out of dissent, see: Noam Chomsky, Closet Capitalist, by Peter Schweizer, January 30, 2006, Hoover Institution,http://www.hoover.org/research/noam-chomsky-closet-capitalist .
[12] For empirical evidence of the facade of elected governments and why the macro policy calculus of hegemony of the superpower does not change despite changing the front faces in the White House every four years, and the most lauded dissent’s calculated inability to focus on the first-cause of that most visible dysfunction, see Response to American Congressman Dennis Kucinich: Impeachment alone does not solve the problem! by Zahir Ebrahim, June 13, 2008, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/06/impeachment-does-not-solve-problem.html ; and see Response to American criminal lawyer Vincent Bugliosi: Vanilla or Chocolate is merely the icing on the devil’s cake! by Zahir Ebrahim, April 09 2009, http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/04/vanilla-or-chocolate-icing-ondevilscake.html .
[13] To understand the motivation for Pavlovian training of Americans at US airports beyond the obvious, see Zahir Ebrahim’s letter to American Advice Goddess, Amy Alkon:http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2011/09/letter-amyalkon-tsa-trauma-and-lawsuit.html .
[14] Supplementary study: Propaganda by Edward Bernays, 1928, (download from http://whale.to/b/bernays.pdf ); watch BBC documentary on Edward Bernays at:http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/p/propagandism.html#Edward-Bernays ; listen to sociologist and essayist Aldous Huxley explain the elements of the “Ultimate Revolution”at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962: ‘we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude! This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolution shall we say.’,http://archive.org/download/AldousHuxley-TheUltimateRevolution/AldousHuxley-TheUltimateRevolution_64kb.m3u .
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.
He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard-driving weekly radio show funded by listener subscriptions at Substack and the weekly news roundup FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN).
He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
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Easy to fool the ignorant and stupid.
Back of dinner napkin exercise. Creating new surfaces requires energy input to break bonds (covalent, ionic, and metallic). Dust has a very high specific surface (ratio of surface area to mass), and therefore converting solid materials into dust requires a very high energy input. Estimate the weight of WTC I/II, the percentage of that mass turned into dust, the average dust particle size, and the average energy to break the bonds per unit mass, and you end up with a number much higher than the combination of the gravitational potential energy contained in the towers themselves, the kinetic energy of a Boeing 757 at speeds achievable in low altitude flight, and the energy contained in combustible materials in the aircraft and towers. So without any more data than that, the official story becomes as silly as claiming the towers were brought down by monkeys flying out of UBL’s posterior.
Here are a few changes in our lifestyle we have adopted as a defense against the current tyranny against our basic freedoms in the U.S. especially since the false flag attack on 9/11/01 by Bush, Cheney, Four Star Generals, other criminals in New York and Israel. Some of these changes were adopted before this phony attack: We don’t like flying anyway so we have not and will not fly on any airplane ever again in our lifetimes, the last being to return from my Father’s funeral in about 1986. About 25 years ago I dropped our TV into a dumpster. We never turn on any car radio to listen to anything but pre recorded music or tapes. I read very selectively and with a grain of salt various comments posted on the internet. None are accepted at face value but only later if confirmed by reasonable sources, but always subject to further rejection if found to be false no matter the source. Never attend any public presentation by any University President or Professor or any city or county administrator because nothing they utter can be believed. If stopped by any law enforcement officer say as little as possible but do not lie. Do not voluntarily comply with obviously illegal demands of any law enforcement officer even under the penalty of jail. These comments should illustrate our limited defensive reaction to tyranny against our persons by a totalitarian dictatorship illegally imposed on us by our outlaw governments in the United States of Israel today and aided and abetted by whores in Congress who are doing the bidding of a foreign power instead of their legal duties. Shame, shame, shame on America today. The end is not predictable but could come without warning at any instant. Winfield J. Abbe, Ph.D., Physics
https://ehpg.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/israel_did_911.pdf
Get better! And yes, we’ll keep it in the archives. Definitely worth a read—one of the best pieces on controlled opposition you’re likely to come across.
Too much for this early in the morning. I’m loaded with OTC cough relief while trying to budget for a FFWN server donation. I’m going to bookmark it for after this cold. Please keep it in the archives, it seems to be comprehensive.
Keep fighting.
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