ERIC ZUESSE -- How U.S. and its Allies Enforce Their Lies for Wars and Dictatorships

How U.S. and its Allies Enforce Their Lies for Wars and Dictatorships 

by Eric Zuesse

January 29, 2020

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

How many Americans know that even in Hindu India, Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani (whom Trump has assassinated) was recognized as having been perhaps the world’s leader of the fight against both ISIS and the Taliban — two fundamentalist-Sunni (that is, pro-jihadist) groups that especially threaten India. Why don’t Americans know this crucial fact? In whose benefit is it that they don’t know it? It is in the interests of the few people who actually control the U.S. regime and its press, and these people will be identified here.

Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their evil invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Syria since 2012 (trying to deliver Syria to the Saud family), and their bloody coup against Ukraine in 2014, and also their take-overs and attempted take-overs of other countries (such as Bolivia and Venezuela) that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands. All of these operations are part of the U.S. regime’s secret continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991. (The Cold War itself had started inside U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s head, as an immediate result of a deceptive statement that had been made to him by his top general, Dwight David Eisenhower, on 26 July 1945.)

And, so, all of these lies are still being pumped by the U.S. regime (which itself effectively took over the U.S. Government on that date, 26 July 1945), and remain fully enforced by suppression of the truth about each one of these (and many other) matters. It’s being done in all news-media except a few of the non-mainstream ones. This is a widespread white-out of history, and replacing that history by myths, in order to deceive their own masses into misinterpreting (so that the domestic public will support) U.S. foreign policies, which are in the regimes’ interests but not in the interests of the American people (nor of any other).

For example, as soon as Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, on 10 November 2019, offered Bolivia’s U.S.-trained generals to hold another election there and to again have the Bolivian people assert their will, the U.S.-trained generals refused his offer and ordered him to immediately resign; and, the very next day, Donald Trump said “The United States applauds the Bolivian people for demanding freedom and the Bolivian military for abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution.” The #29 Alexa-ranked in U.S. New York Times editorialized on November 11th that “when a leader resorts to brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care by the electorate, as President Evo Morales did in Bolivia, it is he who sheds his legitimacy, and forcing him out often becomes the only remaining option. That is what the Bolivians have done.” Then, the #81,090 Alexa-ranked in U.S. Antiwar.com headlined “Finally Got Him: The Bolivian Coup”, and their Ted Snider reported the truth that’s excluded from America’s mainstream ‘news’-media about this, including:

If it wasn’t a coup, why was Morales forced from office by the military? Why was he driven out of office in Bolivia and into asylum in Mexico for the sake of his safety, while a coup leader announced that the police and military were hunting Morales down and putting Bolivia into lockdown? Why, as he fled and sought asylum, was his house ransacked, his sister’s house set on fire, and the families of his cabinet ministers kidnapped and held hostage until the ministers resigned? Though reported in the mainstream media as abandoning Morales, Victor Borda resigned as president of the Bolivian congress and resigned his position as MP because his brother was kidnapped to force him to do so.

If it wasn’t a coup, why did the opposition assume power before the legislature voted on approving Morales’ resignation as the constitution demands? Why did Jeanine Añez declare herself interim president in the absence of the quorum that is legally required to make that decision after meeting with the military high command for over an hour? …

The often repeated claim that Morales went against the constitution is also a manipulation of the truth. The claim is based on a 2016 Bolivian referendum that decided in favor of term limits. That referendum, which passed by a count of 51%-49%, would have prevented Morales from running in the current election. But what the charge omits is that a year later, Bolivia’s highest court – whose decisions stand as the law of the land – ruled against the term limits that the referendum had so narrowly favored. So, Morales did not attempt, as Trump claimed, “to override the Bolivian constitution.”

And the third strike against Trump’s claim is that Morales did not override the will of the people. The people overwhelmingly re-elected him. Morales won 47.1% of the vote, while the next closest candidate, Carlos Mesa, managed to attract only 36.5% of the voters. The Bolivian constitution allows a president to be elected in the first round without a runoff if he or she wins at least 40% of the vote and defeats the person who came in second place by at least 10%. So, Morales clearly got reelected to the presidency in the first round. …

The second reason [why the coup was done] was economically motivated. If Venezuela has oil, Bolivia has lithium: lots of lithium. In fact, Bolivia may have 70% of the world’s lithium reserves. And lithium is the new oil. As oil is essential for gas powered cars, so lithium is essential for electric cars. Morales, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, is a nationalist who sought a new relationship between his land’s people and his land’s resources: he didn’t want all the wealth from Bolivia’s natural resources slipping through the fingers of the Bolivian people and into the hands of the huge international corporations. And as that approach to oil put Chavez in the sights of the American coup planners, so Morales’ approach to lithium put him in their sights.

Morales was willing to allow foreign companies into Bolivia, but he stipulated that any lithium mining had to be carried out in equal partnership with Bolivia’s national mining company and Bolivia’s national lithium company. That made Morales a problem to the big transnational mining companies. A problem that had to go.

In 2018, Germany’s ACI Systems had come to an agreement with Bolivia. Listening to the protest of the people of the region, Morales canceled that deal on November 4, 2019. A few days later, Morales was gone.

The third reason was politically motivated. After Chavez pushed the Latin American political pendulum to the left, a series of coups, elections and American meddling have pushed that pendulum back to the right. But the pendulum has a domestic mind of its own, and it has begun swinging back to the left, including in large, important countries like Mexico and Argentina. The Bolivian election may have offered America an opportunity to put its hand back on the pendulum.

The leaked coup conversations clearly identify American senators Marco Rubio, Bob Menéndez and Ted Cruz as being committed to aiding the coup. Marco Rubio’s tweets, before the vote count was even finished, set the stage early for the coup.

And that may not be the only supporting role America played. It was the Bolivian military that provided the push that triggered the coup. The chief commander of the Bolivian armed forces, Williams Kaliman, put the final and decisive pressure on Morales to resign. On November 10, Kaliman announced that the military “suggest[s] the President of the State renounce his presidential mandate.”

But Kaliman has deep ties to the US military. Though not mentioned in the mainstream media, it was reported early on in the Latin American media that Kaliman had served for several years as Bolivia’s military attaché to Washington. …

If America’s 607 billionaires had funded (via their corporations’ ads etc.) sites such as antiwar dot com as much as they fund sites such as nytimes dot com, then maybe the truth would become known as much as the lies that inundate Americans are, but the billionaires stand behind coups and rigged ‘elections’, not behind democracy anywhere; so, they don’t do any such thing.

Consequently, this is actually about a Western version of samizdat — it’s the West’s equivalent to the former Soviet Union’s systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not. (The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be “good,” even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically cravenous aristocracy — in this case, America’s billionaires, who control the country’s international corporations. After all: each American party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no American party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of having been a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution, such as they all allege. Part of the Obama Administration’s plan for its takeover of Ukraine was to steal Russia’s Crimean naval base and to transform it into a U.S. naval base. But that portion of Obama’s coup-plan wasn’t able to be successfully executed (because Putin blocked his takeover of Crimea). On such important matters, all  of those media lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the regime’s other political lies are heavily partisan — telling different things to Democrats than to Republicans. Merely having multiple political parties doesn’t necessarily mean that the country isn’t a dictatorship. The multi-party trick is crucial to America’s fascism; and, in fact, America’s Founders, who wrote the Constitution, were hoping to establish a one-party democratic government; but no mainstream U.S. medium draws attention to that uncomfortable-for-today’s-billionaires historical fact. Unprofitable truths get hidden, instead of reported.)

Right now, Julian Assange is rotting to death inside Britain’s equivalent to the U.S. regime’s Guanatanamo Bay prison, which is Belmarsh Prison, in London. As the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia’s article on Belmarsh Prison retrospectively admits, “Between 2001 and 2002, Belmarsh Prison was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under the provisions of the Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, leading it to be called the ‘British version of Guantanamo Bay’.” However, only because of the case of Julian Assange is it now publicly known that this characterization of that prison is — at least for him — equally true today; he is being tortured there. And Assange is, indeed, being held in that hell-hole “indefinitely without charge or trial,” even after his having previously been held in various other forms of confinement, ever since at least 12 April 2012, when — being then ‘temporarily’ under house-arrest in Norfolk England, while awaiting trial on a manufactured rape-charge against him which was reluctantly abandoned by the Government only when the alleged victim refused to testify against him — Assange broadcast an interview for RT, Russian Television, an interview of the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. The U.S.-and-allied regimes’ billionaires-owned-and-controlled ‘news’-media condemned Assange for this interview, because it enabled whomever still had an open mind, amongst the Western public, to hear from one of those billionares’ destruction-targets (Nasrallah), and they criticized Assange for doing this on the international TV-news network of the main country that America’s billionaires are especially trying to conquer, which is (and since 26 July 1945 has consistently been) Russia. (Of course, regime-fronts such as PBS, CNN and BBC, wouldn’t have telecast any interview of Nasrallah, but U.S.-and-allied billionaires want no news-operation to do so.) The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, “Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it.” How true that was, and unfortunately still is, in this dictatorship! And Assange himself is the best example of the regime’s hypocrisies. Greenwald wrote:

Let’s examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it’s perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government (Kaplan/The Washington Post), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it’s an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from?

Then, after ‘temporary’ house-arrest there, Assange was allowed asylum by Ecuador’s progressive President Rafael Correa on 20 June 2012, to stay in London’s Ecuadoran Embassy, so as not to be seized by the UK regime to be sent to prison and probable death-without-trial in the U.S. To Correa’s shock, it turned out that Correa’s successor, Vice President Lenin Moreno, behaved actually as a U.S. agent, promptly forcing Assange out of the Embassy, into Belmarsh prison, to die there or else become extradited to die in a U.S. prison, also without trial.

So: for what is Assange being imprisoned, and perhaps murdered? He divulged government secrets that should never even have been secrets! His ‘crime’ was to reveal truths. He raised the blanket of lies, which covers over these actually dictatorial clandestine international actions. He exposed these evil imperialistic operations, which are hidden behind (and under) the blanket of imperialists’ lies. For this, he is being martyred — he martyrs for democracy, in countries where there is no actual democracy (but only those lies).

Here is an example of the lies for which his Wikileaks places itself on the block even now:

On December 29th, I headlined “Further Proof: U.S., UK, & France Committed War-Crime on 14 April 2018” and reported highlights of the latest Wikileaks document-dumps regarding a U.S.-UK-French operation to cover-up (via their control over the OPCW) these three regimes having committed an international war-crime when they had fired 105 missiles against Syria on 14 April 2018, which was done allegedly to punish Syria for having perpetrated a gas-attack in Douma seven days before — except that there hadn’t been any such gas-attack, but the OPCW simply lied and said that there might have been one, and that the Syrian Government might have done it, even though the management had been informed by their own technical staff that all of this was false! That’s playing the public for suckers, and it’s what the OPCW now does.

Back on 3 November 2019, Fox News bannered “Fox News Poll: Bipartisan majorities want some U.S. troops to stay in Syria” and reported that when citing ISIS as America’s enemy that must be defeated, 69% of U.S. respondents wanted U.S. troops to stay in Syria. But when did ISIS ever constitute a threat to U.S. national security? And under what international law is any U.S. soldier, who is inside Syria, anything other than an invader there? The answer, to both of these questions, is obviously “never” and “none.” Syria has repeatedly ordered all uninvited foreigners out and declared them to be alien invaders. (Russian troops, by contrast, were invited in and actually started the operation against ISIS in Syria, which embarrassed the U.S. then to join in on that, even while the U.S. assisted ISIS forces in Iraq to escape into Syria (so as to help overthrow its secular Government) — supreme hypocrisy.) But if you are an investor in Lockheed Martin, don’t you want the American people to be suckers about both? And, so, they are. People such as Julian Assange don’t want the public anywhere to be lied-to. Anyone who is in the propaganda-business — serving companies such as Lockheed Martin — wants the public to be suckers. (How else will U.S. taxpayers willingly support their constantly funding the world’s most corrupt military?)

Whereas Russian media openly state that Qasem Soleimani was the world’s most effective general against ISIS, no U.S. media do, but some of them provide buried in a report facts which support the conclusion, such as here and here and here, and some news-media of other nations (even of India) also are more public about the fact. (Even in anti-Muslim India, General Suleimani is recognized as having been a global leader in the battles against both ISIS and the Taliban — both of which fundamentalist-Sunni groups threaten India.) So, on January 3rd, Trump assassinated the world’s most effective general who led the elimination of ISIS. And the U.S. Government calls Soleimani a ‘terrorist’, because America’s billionaires want to grab Iran back.

Sometimes, however, political partisanship in America does make public, to the supporters of one Party, the lies that are being told by a representative of another Party, such as happened, for example, on January 4th when the Democratic Party propaganda-organ Huffington Post headlined “Mike Pence Slammed After Falsely Linking Qassem Soleimani To 9/11: Neither Iran nor Soleimani were linked to the terror attack in the 9/11 Commission report. Pence didn’t even get the number of hijackers right.” However, even when that happens, the public aren’t being informed that the problem is all of America’s billionaires — of both Parties — and not merely  the billionaires who finance the careers of the public officials in ‘the opposite’ Party.

This is the way the free market actually works. It works by lying, and in such a country the Government serves the people who have the money, and not the people who don’t. The people who don’t have the money are instead supposed to be lied-to (such as to buy whatever the billionaires’ firms sell). And, so, they are. But this is not democracy. Democracy, in fact, is impossible if the public are predominantly deceived. If the public are predominantly deceived, then the people who do the deceiving will be the dictators there. And, if a country has dictators, then it’s no democracy. In a totally free market, only the people with the most money will have any freedom at all; most of the public will be merely their suckers, who are fooled by the professionals at doing that — lying. Who, ultimately, will be paying by far the vast majority of those professionals? Of course, the owners of the U.S.-based international corporations will be.

The super-rich enforce their smears, and their other lies, by hiring professionals to do this.

When Barack Obama said that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation” — so that each other nation is “dispensable” — he was merely exemplifying the view that only the most powerful is indispensable, and that therefore everyone else is dispensable. Of course, this is the way that he, and Donald Trump, both have governed in the U.S. And Americans overwhelmingly endorse this viewpoint. They’re fooled by both parties, because both parties serve only their respective billionaires — and because billionaires are above the law; they are the law, in America and its allied regimes. That’s the way it is.

This is the American gospel, and it’s called “capitalism.” That’s any kind of capitalism, not only democratic, but even facsist — i.e., dictatorial capitalism. Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest — über-imperialism (now called in America “neoconservatism,” but it’s just ordinary fascist imperialism, indistinguishable from the Axis powers of WW II) — and the American public didn’t even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That’s today’s American gospel. It’s a certain type of capitalism — a very ugly type. This is fascism. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today’s Amerika.

And, as far as whistleblowers — such as Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, and other champions of honesty and of democracy — are concerned: Americans agree with the billionaires, who detest and destroy such whistleblowers. Champions of democracy are shunned here, where PR reigns, and real journalism is almost non-existent (except at a few of the small independent online news sites including this, but most even most of the small online sites parrot one or the other of the U.S. political Party’s viewpoints, against all the other Parties, in order to pretend to be ‘anti-Establishment’ — which isn’t the same thing as being truly independent).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.