Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel lecture (in Literature) strips bare the body of lies, put forth explicitly in the name of "the American people," that masquerades as our shared narrative (and was featured in my diary of May 6: Reading the label on the cushion that is suffocating our intellects). Jon Stewart, in the Wednesday, May 5, 2010 segment "American Apparently", suggests we do away with that myth-making phrase.

Art, Truth, and Politics by Harold Pinter December 7, 2005

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

[...]

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US. [Emphasis added.]

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Scarecrow’s post, Why BP’s Oil Disaster Scenario Wasn’t Considered During Environmental Review, examines in-depth how the legal mechanisms for ensuring such entirely foreseeable disasters don’t occur in the first place, were rigged by our MOTU. How? I’d say, by a very well known trick that’s older even than books.

What a great read, Scarecrow, much obliged.

So when pro-industry, anti-environmental politicians tell us that the BP oil disaster met all the environmental reviews, and what happened was just an "act of God," just remember that industry laywers (sic) have been working for decades to make sure government agencies think that way and have even less information before them to see it any other way.

Depends on what your definition of "god" is, eh? By playing both roles: the Creators of the Known Universe, movers, shakers, and makers of laws oh my!; and then, in turn, the mere creature of that god (just like the rest of us mere mortals, won’t you have pity on our poor MOTU?), they’ve defined themselves into unaccountability. In Max Keiser’s apt phrase, "Innocence by institutionalized solipsism."

Classic myth-jacking. It’s a very well known trick (among comparative mythologists, at least) even older than books. It’s Rove’s MO ("he calls himself Grendel, Moby Dick, and Lord Voldemort"). It’s the MO of our Perkinsian economic hit men. It’s been the US modus operandi since DoD knows when. Or maybe our NSA-types took Campbell’s decades of lectures and weaponized them.

However it happened, the similarities across applications are too perfect to ignore. Remember, we’ve been subjected to deliberate domestic disinformation campaigns for going on 60 years. Last year, the Pentagon had 27,000 "influence operators" and a $4.7 billion budget to manufacture our sovereign will against itself.

Colossal efforts have been made, to manufacture our consent, and they’ve proved alarmingly effective. It’s bloody effing obvious to this poet: The power of myth is powering our strategy.

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Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it. [Emphasis added. Source: Harold Pinter Nobel Lecture: Literature December 7, 2005.]

The parallels, from war to finance to industry, are unmistakable. This is a perfect case study in US policy since WWII. Pinter is talking about Central America, of course, but who doesn’t hear echoes of today in his words?

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US. [Emphasis added. Source: Harold Pinter Nobel Lecture: Literature December 7, 2005.]

The kinds of questions I’m interested in have to do with understanding the whence and whither of that "scintillating stratagem." If there’s a label on that intellect-suffocating pillow, whose name is on it, where was it made, of what materials, and for what purposes, etc.? Just like the SERE program, isn’t it almost certain that the same thing, reverse-engineering, was done with propaganda/brain-washing/psy-ops, too?

We keep repeating the same stories, with different words, players, and costumes, to the very same effect: jacking electorates great and small to hell and back, sticking us with the bill in every way.

Want to change the system, save the planet? I have a suggestion: let’s examine and rectify the myths with which we’re creating this "human, all too human" world.

Thanks again Scarecrow, you really got me going. IBIYVD.