Afrasianet - Buthaina Aliq - The creation of the CIA in 1947 signalled a significant change in traditional paradigms of American politics. The concepts of "necessary lying" and "required denial" were introduced into the agency and transformed into adopted strategies.
It is not surprising that the United States of America is lying with premeditation and determination. The State Department's announcement that it has seen no evidence that "Israel is deliberately killing civilians" in Gaza is a lie of great caliber and will not fool anyone, but it is not an exception in American history full of big lies that are being launched to pave the way for war schemes and destruction projects that leave millions dead.
The American rope of lying is long and continuous, and most importantly, it is a systematic and organized process. It is an ideological choice built on an intellectual basis. Hannah Arendt spoke about this ideology in her famous essay "Truth and Politics." Lies have always been considered necessary and legitimate tools not for the craft of shrewd and demagogic politicians, but for the craft of those who present themselves as "leaders."
Arendt examines the attitude of Western philosophers on political lying. Hobbes, for example, argues that lying can "be useful in setting the conditions for the search for truth" and goes so far as to consider that a truth that deserves to be welcomed is "that which is not incompatible with any interest or with any human pleasure." The German thinker adds that many Western philosophers considered that "lying is a harmless tool in the arsenal of political action, and that power fights the battle within its own field when it falsifies facts." "Lying has become a regulated weapon today in the Western public sphere."
In fact, there are many facts that confirm Arendt's words. Organized lying in the West in general and in the United States in particular has a machine that included many theorists, implementers and promoters. Henry Kissinger, the famous foreign minister, who has just passed away, can be considered the most prominent of all. Kissinger played a major role in perpetuating lies and deception in politics as well as in the media.
The man founded a media school of lying. Her students are a group of journalists who worked to publish what he wanted without any scrutiny, and as soon as they received a phone call from him personally. This team promoted the imminent collapse of the Viet Cong and the victory of the United States in the Vietnam War. The most famous lies in this context were published in 1972.
At the end of that year, the United States bombed Hanoi with aircraft, an operation known as Operation Christmas Bombs. A member of the Kissinger Media Club, James Rostot, at the direction of his "mentor," wrote an article in the New York Times arguing that Kissinger opposed the operation and went so far as to argue that continued bombing would prompt the famous secretary of state to resign.
The article left a huge shock in the White House, it was Vixinger who proposed the idea of bombing Hanoi to US President Nixon, advised him to implement it, and convinced him of it. A similar shock to the world when it turned out that the war fought by the United States of America in Vietnam, during which it killed more than one and a half million Vietnamese, was based on a lie.
Documents released by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in 2005 revealed that the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, under which President Johnson's administration received congressional authorization on August 7, 1964, to use force in Vietnam, was fabricated and that there were no North Vietnamese naval vessels during the incident.
Before Kissinger and Vietnam, the American record was full of lies in more than one file and on more than one level.
The creation of the CIA in 1947 was an important sign of a significant change in traditional paradigms of American politics. He introduced the concepts of "necessary lying" and "required denial" to the agency, which were transformed into strategies adopted by a class of politicians and military willing to blackmail and abuse power.
George Conan, considered one of the CIA's fathers, architect of the Marshall Plan, and director of the State Department's policy planning group at the time, introduced the concept of "necessary lying" as an essential component of U.S. diplomacy after World War II, in a speech to War College in 1947. He clearly and unequivocally argued that fighting the Soviet Union could not be done with honesty but with the "brazen and intelligent" use of lies.
Indeed, this political philosophy has turned into psychological and media activities in support of the US policy against the Soviet Union. Programs and attempts developed and accumulated until the eighties of the last century, when the American press carried out the largest disinformation operation in the history of the United States of America.
At a time when all the signs of the collapse of the Soviet Union were gathered, the American press was lying and publishing information about the rise of Soviet power and their growing threat to Washington in order to justify spending on armaments.
The American rope of lying did not stop after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world once again found itself in front of a new version of the American feature film. The administration of US President George W. Bush has carried out an organized information campaign to mislead the American public and exaggerate the threats posed by the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the Americans claimed Iraq possessed.
There have been numerous reports confirming the US administration's lies and systematic disinformation on this matter. These reports showed that the U.S. Administration believed that there was no basis for saying that Iraq posed a threat to peace with its chemical or nuclear weapons, and knew full well that it had no nuclear program at all.
What is remarkable is that the performance of the American media has not changed and has continued to collude in order to promote lies, and has contributed very strongly to the creation of American public opinion in favor of waging war on Iraq.
This aspect is detailed in a book published in Britain a few years after the invasion of Iraq entitled "Tell Me the Lies". The book deals with the mechanisms of organized propaganda or propaganda, and the management of information by both America and Britain in the same way that military warfare is conducted in order to convince public opinion of their goals.
The chapters of the book reveal how the British and US governments manipulated the media that imagined to be free and fair, how media outlets that considered themselves ancient became a docile tool in the hands of their infernal military plan, unprecedented since World War II, targeting Iraq, and how the distance between conducting the military battle and the media battle disappeared.
The book asserts that Western media has gradually become propaganda and with the same methods and strategies that the West used to fault in the past on the Nazi German regime, while neutral coverage of news has become a propaganda tool that takes advantage of Nazi basic lessons in spreading lies and waging psychological warfare against the local public and world public opinion.
The book chronicles a number of lies that were propagated and then revealed to us after the war that information was devoid of truth. The most prominent of these lies is the so-called story of "Jessica", the white American soldier, who the American media worked to turn into a national hero by promoting the narrative of her being captured by Iraqi forces and liberated by her comrades in the US army, to show that all this is a fabrication and blatant forgery.
The book also reveals the long legacy of bias disguised under the guise of alleged neutrality in Britain's established media organizations. And about the history of disinformation activity practiced, especially by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which avoided everything that stamped the Zionist establishment while covering the Palestinian cause. Here's where the Persians are connected to covering Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the Israeli war that Israel is still waging against Gaza.
All this "heritage" of systematic lying is being employed today in Palestine. The Americans, along with the Israelis, are working to flood the world with a tsunami of lies, falsifications and misinformation. We are witnessing a process of selectively exhausting the historical memory of the public and taking the event out of context, deliberately ignoring all the killing, extermination, ethnic cleansing, capture, siege and destruction to which Palestinians have been subjected, with the aim of creating a kind of acceptance or "fabrication of acquiescence" as Chomsky calls it.
The last thing that the Western mind has taper in its systematic process of perpetuating lying as an effective weapon in politics is the concept of "post-truth", which was chosen by the Oxford Dictionary in 2016, to add it to the English lexicon in an indication of the continuing conflict between truth and politics in the world, especially the Western, since Plato until today, according to the balance of power that unfortunately tends to favor lying.
Are we witnessing a change, even a relative one, in these balances with the flood of Al-Aqsa? The answer needs more time to clarify the course of things, recognizing that the battle is difficult and complex.
The world today, with its political, media and humanitarian levels, is faced with the challenge of resolving this conflict between truth on the one hand, and Western politics and power on the other, or at least determining its course. Gaza today is the laboratory where this battle interacts.
If Arendt in her essay "Truth and Politics" quoted a Latin proverb modified to say "let the truth be proclaimed and the world perish" instead of "let justice come and the world perish", what we can say today is that resisting silence and complicity in what is happening in Gaza is a necessary condition for the liberation of land and man.