Freedom of Thought

Hopeful | by Paul J. Norton

 

The world is a place that only gets curiouser and curiouser. An article appeared at Raw Story about a fringe GOP candidate who celebrated Hitler's birthday with Neo-Nazis. The GOP were quick to distance themselves from the republican candidate:

 

 

 

Alright, so the GOP mainstream claims that they don't like Nazis. The real question which remains then is why do Nazis quite obviously like the GOP?

 

 

Hopeful | by Paul J. Norton

 

 

 

 

 

Happy | by Paul J. Norton

 

Oh, well, to be sure, my case certainly seems like insanity to the casual observer. And the professionals, the shrinks, well, it's much easier for them to simply write me off as delusional per some diagnostic particulars than to want to bring my sorts of problems on themselves for having gotten involved in some government dark project. "Look. You hear voices, you're psychotic. The DSM says so." To me it doesn't seem terribly scientific anymore to rule out these documented maladies like psychotronic weapons just because it would be dangerous to consider them. In the mental health system people just get processed like so many cattle. There's no time for actually finding out why people are mentally ill. Patients are to take their meds and become manageable and warehoused somewhere, that's that. But the real problem is that the mind control people own the NSA and the NSA decides what passes for psychiatry, and they really don't want any of their victims discovered, let alone to seem credible. And so the system is fixed against the mentally ill. No conspiracies, no mind control, no gang stalking and no psychotronic weapons. Not until such things become part of some NSA dictated canon of belief.

 

Too cynical? Hey, they have shrinks deciding how to torture people in places like Gitmo don't they? If it were Nazi Germany they would probably have "euthenized" us all by now. And the NSA is undoubtedly run by the same Nazis as the CIA. Actually, one of the CIA's main tasks is to analyze the information gathered, however illegally, bythe NSA.

 

Let me say right here and now that it probably is neither that easy nor all that difficult to become involved with high level governmental intrigues. Sometimes they just need people to exploit, could happen to anyone. Sometimes they go after people of interest or persons that they just consider to be a pain in the neck. My case most likely simply evolved from one reason into the next.

 

Now, let's see. How does one address extremely high levels of strangeness and still remain credible? Oh yeah. Proof. But the stranger your case the more proof is needed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, as they say. Well, direct energy weapons and mind control are now both documented facts of life, believe it or not, and that's a good beginning. And while it's a no-brainer that UFO's as such exist, largely due to tons and tons of eyewitness reports and television, there seems to be no real way of identifying them and people argue every sort of possibility as to what UFO's are all about. Of course the responsibility for all of that is placed on the UFO's themselves, never mind that the government and the industrialists hate the idea of alien contact since alien technology could reshape life as we know it, leaving the industrialists and maybe even the government in the lurch, stuck with so many formerly very profitable technologies and secrets. Right. As if money wouldn't mean anything in all of this. Or as if a bunch of CIA spooks should be trusted with God knows what as if they walked on water or something just because they're CIA spooks. Uh huh. And I'll bet that ocean front property in Arizona sounds real attractive too. Don't mind me if I think the CIA is a pig in a poke that America can't afford to buy. That's my opinion, you know, as an American citizen. And I'm welcome to it. The law says so.

 

Now just in order to keep things in perspective here, I've been working on this case officially for over two decades, unofficially for quite some time prior to that. So really, I would have been quite the failure as an investigator if I hadn't worked my way up to high strangeness by now. Especially seeing as how all one has to do to get involved is tick off all of the right people. Announcing to the world that you intend to investigate them will do it. And that's just what I did. Now to be clear, as I said, my investigation began prior to my announcement. So I already knew the basic score when all of this stuff began in 1987, I just needed to work out all of the details. Essentially the people I would be investigating were guilty of capitol crimes and so my announcement was tantamount to a declaration of war. Now I'll admit that on the surface of it that just doesn't seem too bright on my part, and well, it might not have been. But I didn't do that without a great deal of thought, fact checking and alliance making. Look. I'm tired, it's 4 AM, and so I'm going to just cut to the chase. On the one side I have direct energy wielding spooks after my mind day and night via synthetic telepathy, and on the other side I have my old friends the aliens saying to them, "Not so fast." The rest has been mostly politics, I'm sorry to say. About what will people in power do to stay out of prison or to keep from being hung for treason and espionage? Not so surprisingly, they'll do just about anything.

 

Did I mention synthetic telepathy? The government has it and that's a documented fact. The aliens have it too, that's just a big "Duh! Yeah, huh?" And quite unfortunately for me the big meeting place these days between these adversaries is in my head. I'll admit that on the surface of it that sounds as crazy as all get out but which is why I really try hard to make more sense than anyone else of such things. After all it's what Congress is supposed to be paying me for.  Just wait till they get my bill.  Over 20 years of $200 dollars a day plus expenses, plus cost of living increases, plus interest. And that's before we start thinking about liabilities in the case. I've lost two businesses, my family house, my marriage, my health and some portion of my sanity. Well, nobody said that it would be easy. Just necessary.

 

So before I went into this as a mind control volunteer to get the inside poop on something called MKULTRA, I informed US Military intelligence about the need for an investigation, that I had an alliance with my alien space brothers and sisters which could make it succeed, and that it was necessary because the country was being run by a bunch of damn Nazi foreign nationals and their friends and that no good could come of it. I'd just turned 18 at the time (1973) and it seemed better to me than having to go to Vietnam, a war I didn't believe in and was just about all over anyway. In fact it seemed to me that the military itself was in a situation where it needed to be freed from these Nazi intrigues. The woman I spoke to via synthetic telepathy seemed quite appreciative and said she would keep all of this on file somewhere. I decided that I needed to acquire as much information about matters as I could and from a wide variety of sources, and so via telepathy I spoke with all sorts of people including MI 5 and even the KGB, just to see who knew what about Nazis in America, and to let them know that something was afoot and not to be deceived about any of it. They were honest with me and I was honest with them. Everybody knew that the Nazis were running America, or trying to at the time, and this was the KGB's biggest concern about America. It wasn't ever capitalism that worried them, it was the damn Nazi industrialists all along. The CIA Nazis et al were just as concerned about Communists because they've always been enemies, and that's why the CIA started all of this McCarthyism stuff in the first place. So the whole upshot of the cold war was that it was Communists versus the Nazis, and the Soviet and American public simply became pawns in the game. Seen in this way the Communist nations and the Capitalist nations all suffer from the same recurrent disease which is fascism. The rest is politics. If they allow free speech in a foreign nation the CIA will send in their propagandists right away in order to overthrow an elected government so that they can establish a pro-Nazi government, all the while claiming to be establishing a pro-American, pro-democracy form of government. But the reality is much different from that. In the end those nations will just get a dictator that himself is dictated to by George Herbert Walker Bush and his Nazified CIA.

 

All of this is more important than what happens to yours truly, of course, so I don't go on and on about that too much. Besides, my reality is much stranger than fiction, and I can't expect people to accept it just on my say so. But what's it like to have your mind as a battle front against the most powerful people on the planet with a large dose of alien involvement thrown in, you may wonder.

 

Well, having escaped a murder attempt by a gang banger turned caregiver in '04, caregiver because I'd been diagnosed as psychotic for hearing voices and all, well, the war was on in a big way. They put their direct energy weapons and every other sort of illegal surveillance asset on my case, and turn about being fair play, my space brothers and sisters connected me to the two persons who were most responsible for overseeing the project to have my investigation and myself terminated, George Herbert Walker Bush and Dick Cheney. That's high level, I know, but they have the biggest secrets to keep and are in charge of everything. Dick simply works for George H. as a sort of firewall. So for the last three years I've had George H. in my left ear and Dick Cheney in my right ear most of the time and they have me in their ears. They hate the situation nearly as much as I do, but they refuse to get their crap out of my life and so it's become quite the never ending nightmare for all of us. I have to listen to them alternately threaten, attempt to deceive, cajole, plead, insult, demand and so forth. They have to listen to me go on and on about them and about the world it could be without them and about how they're going to hang. And I don't mind telling you that I can deliver a pretty good insulting harangue myself once in a while. Helps keep them subdued. That pretty much sums it up except that lately they've taken a big interest in this election. They don't like Obama one bit, they'd be happy with McCain or with Hillary.  

 

Did I mention that George H. and Dick C. are psychopaths? Apart from that finding it would be difficult to understand why they think precisely as they do. Somehow they've gotten it into their pointy little heads that I could help them if I only would. They're beyond help in any event, and helping them after all I've been through, after having come to know so much about them, well, would be as anathema to me as anything is to anyone on the planet. To say that I hate these buggers is to put it very mildly. Does that make me a "hater" (said in that smirky pantywaist George W. sort of way)? Well, according to the Bible there are things which even God himself is known to hate. And all of this ritual abuse and child sacrifice stuff, one might imagine, would be somewhere at the top of that list. Beside, never a day goes by that they don't give me more reason to hate them in their efforts to "break" me towards whatever it is that they want from me. I may be crazy, but I'm not nearly as crazy as these two mind controlled Nazi goons. Besides, there are too many cats out of too many bags, and well, have you ever tried herding cats? Who can un-ring a bell? But they don't have to make sense. They're nuts. Go ahead. Give 'em a polygraph and ask them if they hear voices.

 

Now and then I talk to other people via telepathy, some friends, some foes. My life has been tragic in some ways, but I can't say it hasn't been interesting. Or that I haven't learned anything. Because I have.

 

Does the reader have to believe any of this? Well, no, not exactly, although I think that as much as the facts can be checked out they'll check out just fine. The rest may have to wait for awhile and so at the very least I'm staking out my claim of having known a bunch of stuff when nobody else did. Either that or I'll eventually prove to be just the nutcase my enemies would have everyone believe me to be. Either way the near constant voices in my head are disabling whether or not they're natural in origin. Most days I remain fairly high functioning, but then nobody requires a whole lot from people like me. Until Congress pays my bill that's a good thing. Meanwhile, my space friends have the goods on these people if only they could find some way to get a hearing. But, well, you know, the felons go all terrorist whenever they get upset. And having aliens around that know all about them and could prove it upsets them to no end. You know, it would be very hard for the major figures of our times to explain videos of them dressed in Nazi costumes and carving up babies on a church alter in France. (Speaking of which, you JFK assassination conspiracy buffs might take note of the mysterious mention of a guy called "Frenchy" who would be George Herbert Walker Bush.  Just compare all of that with what's known about the Skull and Bones frat at Yale and the ceremony called "The Killing of the King". Basically, it means that anyone who can kill the king becomes the king. George stole Camelot right out from under us, and nothing has been the same ever since. The Skull and Bones means that those who are willing to kill will rule.)

 

Well, I keep getting the feeling that it's time for me to wrap up this case one way or another but that not much will get done about it while George H.'s friends occupy the White House. McCain and Hillary are both sell outs, in my estimation. They've either been bought or are too afraid of George H. to take him on. The same could be said of much of Congress, really. But you know, my friends from other worlds are prepared to help anyone who's prepared to take back this country and this world before it expires from global warming. "All the time in the world" simply doesn't amount to much when the world is out of time.

 

 

 

 

Hopeful | by Paul J. Norton

People who experience problems with direct energy weapons are sometimes known as "wavies" within the mind control community in order to differentiate between them and other sorts of mind control victims. The term, of course, is a reference to the electromagnetic waves and the microwaves used in combination in order to gain control of a victims mind via remote technologies.

 

Over the past three and a half years I've experienced a very intense campaign by the government to gain control of my mind using a rather extensive variety of methods. What one has to understand is that money is no object to persons who pull down $50 billion dollar budgets. One may find oneself bombarded with direct energy warfare for any number of reasons. Maybe the victim was a political opponent or a whistle blower, maybe the government just needed communities to experiment with, maybe it's because the people in charge of such programs are psychopathological, sociopathological, obsessed with dominating other persons for reasons only they would know, it just doesn't matter. The fact is there are thousands of victims online who are routinely dismissed as nut cases mostly due to the propagandists who spread disinformation about such things, propagandists who work for the very same people in charge of the direct energy weapons.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It's hard for most people to imagine what these sorts of weapons do or how they can be harmful. After all, they're referred to as "non lethal" weapons because they don't kill, right? Think again. Via synthetic telepathy and illegal surveillance they can make otherwise harmless individuals into people suffering forms of temporary insanity. They can place voices, images, thoughts, emotions and even physical sensations right into any individual that they choose to target. Part of it is microwave technology, part of it is electromagnetic, but essentially they manage to tap into the central nervous system and manipulate it's impulses. So they can be threatening you and your family, telling you what your spouse has been doing and with whom in exquisite detail, or what they've caught you doing lately. They can make you violently angry, they can make you morbidly depressed. The thing is that they won't just do it to you. They'll do it to your family, your friends, your community, your co-workers, anyone they want. Just to get to you. And maybe they just want to get to you in order to get to someone else. How would you know?

 

 

 

 These magnets have been very helpful when placed in the ears.

 

 

 

The physical sensations range from annoying itches, crawling skin, pin pricks, aches and sometimes even severe pain. Why is anybody's guess. Maybe they weren't getting anywhere with the verbal voice to skull threats, maybe they just wanted to distract you from something that you were thinking or doing. Maybe they needed you to call in sick that day. Look, in the end it's sort of like expecting a victim to tell you why somebody mugged them, beat them or raped them. God knows why. It's really a very stupid and ignorant prejudice that blamesthe victim just because we ourselves haven't been victims, as if we are too smart or good and the people who do must have been asking for it somehow, or simply because we can't understand why the perps do what they do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One should understand from the outset that these mind controllers have a lot of assets, satellites, planes, connections into the media and law enforcement, they're everywhere. It's like the invasion of the body snatchers. One day everybody is normal, and the next day you're living things which couldn't have been imagined by the writers of horror novels. Auditory signals can be produced over large areas subliminally where they can barely if ever be heard. If you're aware of them, aware that it's not you who would be thinking such things, you can barely hear them now and again when just the right conditions are present. Subliminal advertising worked in movie theatres for selling popcorn, and apparently the same planes that are dumping pharmaceutical psychotropic chemicals on us do so in order to make us even more suggestible as a population. In fact it may well be that the same planes who are spraying the chemtrails are also outfitted with direct energy weapon (SOLO) technologies.

 

 

 

 

 

Sound paranoid? Well it's not. It's not being paranoid if someone is really out to get you. Knowing what we now know, MKULTRA was/is very real, illegal surveillance is very real, direct energy weapons and chemtrails are very real. In light of such things, how does one reasonably conclude that the government isn't out to get us? Like most people I pretty much took the ostrich approach until that simply wasn't working for me anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

One doesn't go through something day and night for three and a half years without learning a thing or two. I could have graduated with a PHD in strange by now. So I decided to share a little bit of what I've picked up along the way for whomever is interested. Awareness is the key thing. If they sneak up on you and you have no clue what is going on or why you could end up going off the deep end in a big way and play right into their hands. But forewarned is forearmed and the public has to be made aware of the threat that it faces so that people will be that less likely to snap or panic if and when it happens to them. For the government's part, we need them to stop these covert criminal programs immediately, and we need them to stop pretending that it isn't happening. They know damn well that it is.

 

 

 

 

 

About the author: As a private investigator, Paul J. Norton (that's me) has been investigating MKULTRA for Congress and for the U.S. Military, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), since 1987.

 

 

 

 

Tags: Nazi, MKULTRA, Mind Control, Direct Energy Weapons, Electronic Harassment, V2K, SDI, NASA, CIA, NSA, Civil Rights, Human Rights

Hopeful | by Paul J. Norton

Frustrated | by Paul J. Norton

Maybe you thought that Charles Manson, the crazed cult leader psychopath of a few decades ago had a swastika tattooed on his forehead because he just happened to fall in with the wrong sorts of people while in prison. Maybe you thought that, well, there is no explaining someone as crazy as Manson or why he does the things that he does. Analytical persons like myself with a background in psychology never stop wondering about such things because we regard them as somehow symptomatic and telling of some greater human condition.

 

If you don't remember Manson, in 1969 he and his followers, "The Family", murdered actress and wife of Polish director Roman Polanski,  Sharon Tate, and several of their friends in one of the nation's most gruesome and high profile murder cases. An unborn baby was cut from a mothers womb, bizarre messages were written on the walls in the victims blood. When I first heard the news reports and saw film and photos of Charles Manson I knew that the Hippy movement would be forever changed by the event. Charles Manson had long hair, took LSD and wore fashionable buckskins while living in a hippy type commune, also popular back in those times of counterculture when the nation was experiencing a wholesale rejection of the establishment and all that had been before.

 

The counter culture was essentially saying, "anything but this same old crap", as if America woke up one day from an evil spell concocted of lies and deceptions and just wandered off in search of anything new. The appearance of Charles Manson rocked the counter culture's world because here was a hippy who had somehow become a monster. But as an analyst one is always reconstructing scenarios in terms of the effect is why something happened, then the remaining question is how it happened, and who wanted this to happen. In this case we need only follow the political capital. It makes sense as a conservative mind control plot. It makes sense that Charles Manson was CIA, sent to infiltrate the underground, and that he was programmed by MKULTRA to become just such a monster for political purposes. Manson even introduced us to  a demonization of rock and roll, music in the late sixties which had become decidedly political and liberal. The song, "Helter Skelter" by one of the world's most popular peace loving bands, The Beatles, was about an upcoming "race war", Manson said. In reality the song is talking more about something along the lines of game theory, and history repeating itself. The effect of Manson's appearance in society is that the Now Generation turned into the Me generation, idealist hippies turned into pragmatic yuppies, and in a few years the utterly meaningless disco music would be born.

 

 

 

Charles Manson of "The Family"

 

Having spent decades now studying all sorts of social phenomena, including criminology, it's always surprising to me that in retrospect the past seems so obvious, no doubt the information age has made a lot of criminals much more careful, particularly those who are adept at information warfare. Criminologists understand the term "family" to be employed generically for their own criminal network. The term is used frequently by the Italian Mafia, the Mexican Mafia and just about every gang or other criminal enterprise in the world. There are a number of reasons that the term is employed. There are familial like loyalties to be found in organized crime, "family" secrets, and a subtle threat that invokes consequences for families whenever someone is caught, or whenever someone blows the whistle. Industries of various types that commit crimes, such as using illegal labor, and even cops who have secrets have taken up similar usages of the term as part of the means of silencing people, to their own network in such ways that they can't be as easily proven if caught on microphone, since, well, they were "just talking about family". "My sister is 22" could mean that you have a .22 caliber weapon in your possession, just right for gangland assassinations.  Thus in court a prosecuting attorney might say, "Do you have a sister who is 22 years of age? Do you even have a sister? If the answer is no, what were you really saying? Do you recognize the .22 caliber weapon that I am holding? Have you ever hear the term gang land slang? Did you know that 'family' is slang for a criminal organization?"

 

 

 

With regard to organized crime of one sort or another, the question quickly becomes to which family are they referring? That's something that insiders would know, and outsiders simply shouldn't know as far as the criminals themselves are concerned. Their "family" shouldn't become known, shouldn't attract attention to itself, it has to remain underground because it's a criminal enterprise. All of this makes the details in this story from The Nation called "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate"  (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/ehrenreich), quoted here, to be greatly disturbing in their implications (emphasis mine):

 

 

 

At the heart of The Family's American branch is a collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Rick Santorum. They get to use The Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, The Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by The Family's young women's group. And, at The Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already powerful.

Clinton fell in with The Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, The Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

 

 Bill Clinton bows to Bush at Tulane University in New Orleans

Let's see if we can add this all up. At the end of WWII the question was what to do with the Nazi's defeated brain pool, what scientific discoveries were they on to, what sort's of espionage assets might remain and how did they go about things anyway? What had been the secret of Nazi success? The government wanted not only to know, the government wanted to exploit Nazi knowledge, even if it had arrived via death camp atrocities. The Prescott Bush's industrialists were particularly curious and not without enough political clout to talk the government into Operation Paperclip, bringing known Nazi spies, scientists and terrorists into our own intelligence community. The problem that followed, evidently, was that our intelligence community didn't want them. So they had to create another one ostensibly to simultaneously exploit and control the Paperclip Nazis for their rocket science, their medical science (gained by human experimentation on victims), and their espionage assets, which included the science of mind control. Not just individual mind control, but the ability to control the minds of the public. To fascists, there is no greater goal than to control political opinion because if they can manage that you can get away with murder. Not long after the end of WWII, the Nazi loving CIA is born.

 

 

 

For most rational people, realities create perceptions. For fascists, perceptions create realities and so they very carefully orchestrate the perceptions which will create their realities. They're political sociopaths. On the downside they'll succeed in fooling the people some of the time. On the upside they can't fool everybody all of the time. And primarily that will be because they'll end up believing their own press and end up too far from reality. An old friend of mine was always asking, "But what is reality?" The answer is simple. It's whatever ultimately wins the contest of persistence. No, I don't mean within a decade or a century, I'm talking about timeless realities. Identify those and one comes up with something truly remarkable. It's what we call "wisdom". Always go for the bigger argument, I say. Never get bogged down in the details. Why be petty when one can be "grandiose"?

 

In my own estimation this Washington version of Familia is a product of George Herbert Walker Bush and his fellow Nazis. Bush has NASA, MKULTRA, SDI, Chemtrails, the NSA, the CIA, the GOP, Big Oil, the War Industry and any number of spies, moles and cells operating everywhere else. At that point a lot of otherwise more reasonable persons would be tempted to simply just give in and say that the Nazis have won, that there's only keeping up the current facade until the Nazi leaders decide to just be done with it at which time there will likely come something like Armageddon. The rest has been post 9/11 apocalyptic history. It wouldn't surprise me all that much if these people declare G.W. to be Jesus, and G.W.H.B. to be god on earth. Already his direct energy weapons and illegal surveillance have the ability to possess people's minds.  

 

Theology is my other obsession. Political analyses and conspiracy theory are just what I do in self defense.

  

 

Tags: Nazi, Bush, Cheney, Conspiracy, The Family, NWO, CIA, NSA, NASA, SDI, Exotic Weapons, Direct Energy Weapons, Mind Control, MKULTRA, Civil Rights, Human Rights, UN, Interpol, Impeach, Clinton

Frustrated | by Paul J. Norton

Recently I signed an online petition to have George W. Bush and Dick Cheney impeached, and today, March 20th, I received a response from Senator Dianne Feinstein to which I sent a reply. AOL then informed me that Senator Feinstein's e-mail address is unknown and so my reply could not be delivered. So I thought that I would post them here on the blog.

 

From senator@feinstein.senate.gov :

 

           Thank you for your letter concerning impeachment proceedings against President Bush. I appreciate the time you took to write and welcome the opportunity to respond.

          In our recent elections, the American people expressed clear disapproval with the path this country was on. They are tired of partisan politics and of an Administration that pays little heed to the wishes of the American people. They want-and deserve-a Congress that holds the Administration accountable and fulfills its Constitutional responsibility to check and balance the Executive. I share this sentiment and am determined to work hard and across party lines in the United States Senate to promote issues that are of real concern to most Americans, including the situation in <?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security, global warming, and lobbying and election reform.

At this time, however, I believe that impeachment proceedings against President Bush will only divide the country even further, frustrating our hopes for a meaningful change in direction, while having little chance of success.

          I have been deeply disappointed by many of this Administration's actions and have been outspoken in those instances. Nevertheless, given the challenges our country faces I believe that we need to focus on constructive and cooperative steps that would lead us in the right direction.

Again, thank you for your continued correspondence. If you have any further questions or comments, please contact my office in Washington, D.C. at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.

                                                        Sincerely yours,

     Dianne Feinstein
        United States Senator

Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/. You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ENewsletterSignup.Signup.

 

 

 

 

Hopeful | by Paul J. Norton

 

Stop. Stop acting as though anything in recent years has been normal, or that the American public has been told the truth about matters from the press. Stop thinking in terms of republican double talk, all of that republican"newspeak" about framing debates is called propaganda, plain and simple. The American public has just always assumed that propagandists were very small operators and very obvious, but that isn't the case and never has been when it comes to the US government. Like it or not, an enormous part of that US government is devoted to maintaining a post 9/11 increase in propagandized misunderstandings which are only for the benefit of neo cons and their bedfellows, the neo liberals.

 

The answer to propaganda isn't counter propaganda, it's anti propaganda. Counter propaganda simply involves itself in propaganda meant to turn political opinion in the opposite direction from someone else's propaganda. Anti propaganda turns itself against propaganda by exposing the phenomena and how it works. Like propaganda, counter-propaganda is to lie or spin issues towards a given agenda. Anti propaganda remains separate in that it simply relies on the truth, that is it relies on the facts of the matter and upon reason itself. You can't beat it. As one of the founding fathers said, God himself would have to nod his head to reason.

 

The world is such that people have always had to fight for their freedoms, and it's no less so that people have to fight for freedom of thought, not only in being able to express one's thoughts, that's freedom of speech, freedom of expression. What is more important is that people remain free to think, and this means that we have not only to fight propagandists without, but we have to fight being propagandized from within. We have to educate ourselves about the facts, about critical thinking, and about the many ways other persons will try to steal both of those right out from under us.

 

Having spent a fair amount of time studying theology I can tell you that various kinds of apologists apply every propagandist trick in the book, just as do governments and institutions of every kind who have some vested interest in doing so. And when religious and government propagandists get together they cook up a real witches brew of the patently absurd and manage to sell it to the masses before they even know there's a sales pitch going on. It makes me very angry to note how little critical thinking challenges some of the most obvious lies and distortions of  our times.

 

There are no such things as "Islamists" any more than there are "Christianists", or "Hinduists", an "ism" implies that there is one best approach to everything, the "ism" the glasses through which one views the entire world and what to do about it. None of these, Islam, Christianity or Hinduism ascribe to "isms" of any sort in the immediate sense. Buddhism is an ism because the Buddha had a "Middle Way" which was a well defined ism in and of itself. Same thing for Methodism, it says that methodology is the most important thing, and hence is an ism in general terms. Same thing for Taoism, "Tao" means "The Way", and thus makes for a fine all inclusive ism. For the most part isms aren't exactly mutually exclusive, Taoists and Buddhists get along together just fine as a general rule, and probably so do Methodists, for that matter. Isms in religion don't really represent competition, they just represent a favorite means of understanding the phenomenal world. Politics are something else altogether.

 

Fundamentalism is a political cult and decidedly competitive. It really transcends any specific religion in that it's simply a regressive political movement, one in which religionists resent all that they view as encroaching upon their power and influence in the world. They wish for everyone to rely on belief more than anything provable, but there be madness, my friends. Why kill off critical thinking and believe the words of men who are admittedly not very good at being reasonable? There may be fundamentalist Islamics just as there are fundamentalist Christians, but the point here is that in reality such religionists have placed politics before their religion. Religion then becomes a convenient excuse for whatever they decide to do since everything is based on things which nobody can prove to be true. In short, politicians hijack religions, not the other way around.

 

There may be fascist Muslims, but there is no such thing as "Islamofascism". Islam itself teaches that people should not be forced to believe. It actually says that people shouldn't be compelled to convert, but I'm not dismissive of the fact that the ancient Muslim Empire gave persons a 10% tax break for converting to Islam, which I suppose some people found to be a compelling reason to wax Islamic. So I take it that what was meant was that they may not be forced. Now, propagandists could find examples of fundamentalist Muslims to tout, but that is also true of fundamentalist Christians- you know, Jim Jones, snake handlers, abortion clinic murderers and the like but they're hardly representative of those religions. One wonders if the idea that there are "Islamofascists" was invented to support the notion that other fascists will be required to beat them, or whether it's simply a case of fascists pointing their collective finger elsewhere. "Fascism? LOOK! Over there!" According to neo conservatives and their ilk there are "Jihadists", which would literally mean "struggle-ists", people whose way it is to struggle. Although Christians admit to struggling, they're never accused of such. And only an idiot would coin such a term as "strugglists".

 

Terms like "Islamist" and "Islamofascism" have gained political traction in America simply because the lies and distortions have been told often enough and loudly enough and for no other reason whatsoever. Likewise they've managed to make it seem as though liberals themselves are extremists by calling them "liberalists" as if reason escapes liberals altogether. Notice that there are no "conservatists" about, that's because they wish to be seen in a more favorable light, even if they do admit to conservatism as their one true love. Conservatism itself is full of other isms such as capitalism, nationalism, religionism and so forth, but accuse a liberal of any sort of ism and they melt away as if you just declared them to be mad. That's because liberals don't really have an ism of their very own nor do they want to have one ever, isms are anathema to liberals who acquire their thinking from things like, oh, education, sociology, economics, you know, science... as opposed to acquiring ideas from things that go bump in the night. 

 

Stop all of this framing nonsense. It's no more right to frame a debate or an issue than it is to frame someone for a crime. It's absurd. Facts speak for themselves, and when you have all of the facts about an issue the thing speaks for itself. Bad arguments are like bad paintings, they only look slightly better when well framed. All of this is well known. It's just mostly gone unspoken in this age of timidity. As if none of the people wanted to be responsible for setting off another 9/11, causing a thermonuclear holocaust, an anthrax attack, or spending time being tortured in a secret dungeon somewhere for having spoken truth to power. Though, honestly, to me, it seemed more as if for years now no one dare not speak reason to the criminally insane. It became like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Because of NASA, SDI, the NSA and the CIA, we were all left to say, "Please don't wish me to the corn field, George!" But if you want to be free you have to be bold. When the conservatives start to complain say, "What are you going to do, kill us all?" Remember always that rights are like muscles, if you don't use them you lose them. This is the land of the free (formerly) only because it was the home of the brave (formerly). I would rather die free than to live as a slave under a bunch of heartless industrialists. How long would it be before they simply harvest us like cattle?

 

Now is always the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country.