Don’t Let the ‘Wool be Pulled Over Your Eyes’ in This Election
Lies, prejudice, ignorance, insipid reporting, and an overly dominant focus on the economy are the hallmarks of this American presidential election. The desperate nature of this contest tells me that much more is as stake than meets the eye. It doesn’t pay to believe what you see on television and read in newspapers, for too many are owned by corporate giants with their own political agendas. Therefore knowledge needs to be gathered from a variety of sources and weighed carefully to find their grains of truth.
This is what I have been doing over the past two weeks and what I found woke me out of an ignorant slumber by shocking me to the core.
Knowledge is power. I loved teaching maths to arouse children’s curiosity to think and look around them. After pointing out the patterns within the number system, I invited them to find patterns within nature, within art and architecture, and even patterns within human relationships. By looking for patterns in their lives they could figure out why things went wrong and how to correct them. And since history is full of patterns that repeat over and over again, I now invite you to explore them – not only for the sake of peace, but to remove the fear that imprisons the minds of so many people today.
In Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, Aldous Huxley wrote:
It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free – to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think, feel and act.
The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.
Who or what controls you?
So close to deciding the fate of America, and indeed the possibility of peace in the world over the next four years, I invite thinking people everywhere to have a quick look inside Baa Baa Smart Sheep to see how a sheep pulls the wool over a turkey’s eyes and what happens when he falls for his tricks and lies when he is offered some “smarty pebbles” to eat.
To ‘pull the wool down’ over someone’s eyes is to conceal one’s true motives from others, especially by “elaborately feigning good intentions so as to gain an end.” It can also mean to “cause someone to believe an untruth.” And this has been blatantly obvious in this election, much to my deep concern.
The most important part of this presidential campaign is foreign policy rather than the economy that is so uppermost in people’s minds. And yes, I understand that too many people are still hurting after the 2007 economic slump, as we are still hurting in New Zealand right now after adopting the same “trickle-down” tax policies. But I am concerned more about foreign policy, because it is policy that leads countries into pre-emptive war.
The American people were not aware that George W. Bush had already planned a regime change in Iraq before coming to office in 2001. This policy was laid out in a document drawn up in September, 2000 for a group called The Project for the New American Century ( PNAC), whose members included Paul Wolferwitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, I. Lewis Libby, and Richard Perle, among others. As you may know, Cheney was Chief of Staff to Gerald Ford and Secretary of Defense to George H. W. Bush. Under George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary, Richard Perle was Policy Board chairman, Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy Defense Secretary, and Cheney was vice-president.
This document contained four main recommendations:
- to increase defence spending
- to challenge “regimes hostile to US interests and values”
- to promote political and economic freedom around the globe, and
- to “extend an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and values”.
It also says this:
Any serious effort at transformation must occur within the larger framework of U.S. national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets…
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
The hoped for ‘Pearl Harbor’ catastrophe, as we now know, conveniently came a year later in the form of the 9/11 attack, which then enabled these neo-cons to carry out their plan. In George W. Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address, he declared that the greatest danger to America lay where terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction intersected. There was an “axis of evil”, he said, consisting of Iran, North Korea and Iraq.
So new fears were implanted in American minds and added to an increasing list of fears of Russia and the spread of communism, terrorism, and now countries amassing weapons of mass destruction. This fear has been indelibly imprinted within minds by clever propaganda and brainwashing. The spin doctor behind the push to convince the American people, and indeed Congress, that there was evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was Karl Rove – now a Fox News political analyst. And he is backing a Romney win to further advance the ideals set out for the Project for A New American Century, which was reformed by him for this election as the PAC American Crossroads. Ben Dimiero, from Media Matters wrote that “Fox News has repeatedly failed to meet basic standards of disclosure this election cycle and has regularly helped promote the work of Rove’s Crossroads political groups.”
One commenter asked: How do you have a democracy when the GOP is suppressing the vote for specific sectors of our population? And I now ask, after seeing the misleading advertisement in question: How can a democracy exist amongst all the lies and deception? It seems a cruel sort of joke to me in New Zealand, to see how a country, whose people think is the greatest democracy in the world, become corrupted by capitalistic and corporate greed, and where more and more people are losing their right to vote and being pummeled day after day in the media by a barrage of lies and half-truths.
That’s a Karl Rove technique. You say the same thing over and over again with many different people until it becomes a part of your own mind and thinking, blocking out any ability to think for yourself. It is what happened under Hitler when he called the Jews “excrement, filth, epidemic-causing bacilli,” etc. which shut down any empathy Germans once felt for Jews. And this enabled the holocaust to take place without any resistance at all. Be aware, all this brainwashing is to advance the ideologies of a flawed foreign policy that you have been told nothing about.
I instinctively knew something was wrong when I saw that same desperate action for a GOP win that was present during the 2000 elections. In the 2004 elections the same accusations arose of voter corruption and suppression tactics in Ohio. In the Republican States in this election, photo IDs are required before you can vote. In New Mexico, poll watchers were told to request identification from voters, even though the law in New Mexico does not require voter ID. Various newspapers report that voting machines are not operating properly and people are being tricked in numerous ways, affecting their ability to cast their vote. Does this really sound like a true democracy in a country that purports to be the greatest democracy in the world?
Telling lies to induce fear creates confusion and leaves people ripe for brainwashing. When people have the wool pulled over their eyes they are bamboozled, and this creates more fear. Lies can hide an underlying agenda that can later be rolled out gradually for all to see. And what can we expect that people will see should Romney become president? Does Romney’s stated desire for peace hide a lie?
Remember the patterns? Let’s look back in history for a moment to a date that is indelibly imprinted on the American mind, and indeed the minds of people around the world: 9/11. Only this time the year is 1941. The following speech is by Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, informing the people of the United States that their country is in danger of being drawn into the Second World War, when Roosevelt had promised them peace.
Do you remember the third presidential debate where it seemed like Mitt Romney mostly agreed with President Obama on foreign policy? Romney wanted to add an extra $2 trillion to the military budget. Obama questioned him on this because the Pentagon had not asked for such an amount and reminded Romney that the military budget is driven by strategy, not politics. He added that neither is it “driven by members of Congress and what they would like to see. It’s driven by what are we going to need to keep the American people safe?” The “politics” Obama was referring to was the PNAC policies adopted by the neo-cons in the George W. Bush administration. It is why Karl Rove is so anxious to see a Romney win to further the PNAC dream for America as a superpower. And Dick Cheney, one of PNAC’s founding members, was seen attending a fundraiser for Romney in Dallas with his son, Josh Romney.
Let’s see what former president, Dwight Eisenhower, has to say regarding a possible Romney $2 trillion budget for the military, and about the military–industrial complex in his Chance for Peace Speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?
If Romney can be believed after all the 180 degree turns and flip flips he has made in this election, can people really believe him when he says that he wants “peace”? And what does he mean by saying that he wants to “maintain America as the hope of the earth”?
The “hypothetical question” as Romney called it during the third presidential debate – that Israel could make a pre-emptive strike on Iran out of fear of nuclear armament – could become a distinct reality. Is Romney preparing for this “hypothetical question” by wanting to inject more funds into the military out of fear that Iran is “four years closer to nuclear arms”? Or is it to advance another cause?
Are the American people going to be fooled into war again by Karl Rove, the spin doctor who masterminded most of the advertisements against Obama, and tricked the American people into believing the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Will the lie be that America has to go to war to have “peace”? And how could this make America the “hope of the world” when, after endless wars to impose so-called ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’ from the outside, America is seen as the “scourge of the world” instead?
In August of 2002, Richard Perle heard a policy briefing in which, according to the Washington Post and The Nation, the final slide of this presentation described “Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot, and Egypt as the prize” in a war that would purportedly be about ridding the world of Saddam Hussein’s weapons. Now, after America’s withdrawal from Iraq, Romney has made it clear that Iran is now in America’s sights.
While Romney is not Bush, he is being groomed and promoted by a similar team that groomed Bush – Karl Rove among them, a man who has been described as George W. Bush’s “ruthless political operative”. America will get change all right if Romney becomes president, but it will be change back to a revamped Bush foreign policy driven by neo-cons who have embraced the policies originally set out in Project for a New American Century. And Romney will go along with this because, as he has shown, he knows little about foreign policy, and even less about the intricate political enmeshment in the Middle East, where pre-emptive action could set off a domino effect.
Michael Ledeen, a leading neo-conservative, wrote in his book, The War Against the Terror of Masters:
Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
To counter this momentum, perhaps it is time to act on Dwight Eisenhower’s grave warning during his Military-Industrial Complex Speech in 1961:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
What business is this of mine? After all, I do not even live in America. What I want is world peace. And an America at war, rather than an America who leads the world by example of what a democracy really is and how well it works, will in the end, adversely affect us all. Right now we are not seeing a great democratic process at all. This election is a shambles and, can in no way or form can it be called democratic.
Never has there been a more urgent time to develop your knowledge – independently of media influence – to make an intelligent choice when you vote. In this way you will avoid having the wool pulled down over your eyes – or worse: be tricked into eating “smarty tablets.”
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