Sickness in the static

By John Kaminski – skylax@comcast.net January 18, 2006

You know of course that any time a news gathering organization veers into character assassination of rivals, that's a sure sign of someone deliberately providing disinformation, right? And then you observe that virtually all the news gathering organizations you know do exactly that! They scorch everyone who doesn't share their exact view of things. So what can you do but scratch your head and wonder what's really going on?

I have a rule about these spitting contests that I try to follow scrupulously. If you respond to unjust slander, you're conceding that the disinformation attempt has been a success. Of course you have to respond to legitimate criticism in a forthright way. That's how you grow.

But lately on prominent cybervenues I have been accused of being Naval Intelligence (apparently because I once served very inauspiciously as a clerk on a ship in the Navy), being anti-Semitic (because I don't accept preposterous media lies just because they have been codified into unjust laws prohibiting free speech), and especially of being "racist and xenophobic" by a shallow European radio host who fawned over me for months before turning on me, and now fancies himself the world leader of the 9/11 skeptics movement.

This last guy was a real piece of work. After I furnished him with numerous sources, other guests for his show, and I personally spent hours on his show repeating my one-trick pony routine (9/11 was a colossal deception engineered by the highest levels of the U.S. government and is the key to all the other murderous hoaxes that have followed), he suddenly turns on me and calls me "racist and xenophobic" for my constant pinpointing of Israel and the Jewish community as the prime reasons for the systematic eradication of genuine freedom in America and the world.

I meant to mention that to Cinque on WHCR The Voice of Harlem last Sunday. I'm a regular guest there, and also on Digital Underground, another all-black radio show based in New York City. Black political consciousness is so far advanced past white political consciousness in America, perhaps because African-Americans have had two centuries to analyze the hypocrisy and oppression that America spews out in real terms to those who don't share the inside track to an easy life.

As far as being xenophobic, he also could have caught my basic message — which I repeated on his show so many times — on Sahar TV in Teheran, twice recently. In both Harlem and Iran I bellowed the same consistent message as both reporters tried to inveigle me into the intricacies of U.S. Congressional politics and its endlessly convoluted scandals.

It doesn't matter who gets elected president or to Congress, I told them. Whomever that might be, America's foreign and domestic policies will not change one iota. We will not stop making wars out of nothing, because that's what we've always done.

Politics in America has become a cesspool of fiat currency fueling blackmail and bribery, and that's how the world runs, and that's how it has always run — but now, it's out of control, and threatening everything that lives.

In our desire for the good life, we have forfeited our right to any life at all. How's that for the shrewd trade recently made by the vaunted beacon of liberty American people.

You won't get back even part of what you thought you had without a serious revolution. And yet an appalling silence continues to grip America. Even as their pathological leaders in Washington, Tel Aviv and London set the sights of their nuclear warheads toward anyone who won't knuckle under to their bullying threats, Americans race on toward their self-deluded appointment with trying to ignore the complete destruction of the planet.

Which is just what I got from this European radio host: He threatened me. He said, "You have to get your stuff off Rense (the popular radio show and website) OR I'M GONNA TAKE YOU DOWN! We have to get these UFO nuts OUT of MY 9/11 movement!"

I respond to threats with permanent silence.

Several other radio wannabes have done basically the same thing to me. It really makes me mistrust all of them.

But sticking to my spitting contest rule, I let all these curiosities fly past me, because if you try to field them, you end up in an endless distraction, and accomplish nothing (as I learned in the past from both the peace movement and the 9/11 no-plane movement). And I believe in sticking to the more important things. I prefer tangible issues to flaky personalities.

And number one out of all this, in this staticky barrage of conspiracy shrillness, is to see the disconnect between people and the truth. The facts are there — why isn't the public responding to them?

Veteran 9/11 researcher Jake Stansbury offered one theory on the problem. His experience of burning 9/11 videos and handing them out to his friends resulted in people telling him they didn't believe the information he provided because they hadn't seen it confirmed on television. Jake wrote:

This phenomenon seems to reflect a disturbing reality that most people refuse to believe anything not "officially" reported! "Denial" really doesn't seem powerful enough in and of itself to be causing this, given that such a multitude of seemingly obvious facts belie the official stories.

Frustrated and a bit angry, I remembered a term that seems to explain this suicidal phenomenon. I also remembered your essay, "A Night At The Opera" where you say "We're lost in the music, and cannot hear the words".

Our greatest enemy at this point in time and history seems to be a psychological phenomenon known as "cognitive dissonance". Recognizing this, I now struggle to see some means of overcoming it, with great frustration and no real answers. Although I'm sure you are familiar with it, I offer you some information on this disease below.

The link Jake forwarded to me explained:

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them. Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current beliefs and "reality".

Beyond this benign if uncomfortable aspect, however, dissonance can go "over the top", leading to two interesting side-effects for learning:

1. If someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what they already think they know particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge they are likely to resist the new learning. Even Carl Rogers recognized this. Accommodation is more difficult than Assimilation, in Piaget's terms.

2. Counter-intuitively, perhaps if learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are less likely to concede that the content of what has been learned is useless, pointless or valueless. To do so would be to admit that one has been "had", or "conned".

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/dissonance.htm

So there is the reason the people of America won’t see what is staring them in the face. They’re simply too stupid to admit they’ve been duped, even though their survival depends on it.

I was reminded of the real cost — and the real danger — of this disease in conversations recently with two of the best reporters on the still-free Internet: Kurt Nimmo and Greg Szymanski.

Both expressed to me a deep frustration that so much valid information has been put forth into the public arena, and still no inroads toward justice have been made at all in the mainstream political sphere.

Each (Google them) spoke of threats they’d received from anonymous voices in the night, and of coercive attempts to frighten them into silence.

As David Ray Griffin noted last summer about 9/11, “Controlled demolition can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The lies that followed — anthrax, Afghanistan, Iraq, the levees — are all predicated on the government telling the truth about 9/11, which has not, so all those other explanations are necessarily also lies.

Yet the American public, surely shamed by its sick support for colossal crimes against humanity, remains silently glued to poisoned airwaves that offer only tempestuous titillation that cover up the sound we all try to ignore — the sound of people dying over lies we fail to challenge.

And that is the real sickness in the static.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida and whose Internet essays are seen on hundreds of websites around the world. His new collection of essays, “Recipe for Extinction,” will be for sale in late February. http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Last updated 22/01/2006