April 14 2005
Parallel universes
In this world, lies are lucrative, but the truth doesn’t pay much
By John Kaminski
They say life is for learning. Here's what I've learned.
If you lie, you get rich. If you tell the truth, you stay poor.
Take a look around and smell the sewage. Do you dare disagree?
Which kind of world do you want? And if you think this one is so great, have you considered where your money has gone?
During the past twenty years, trillions of dollars have been illegally vacuumed out of that magnificent cash cow known as the American economy. The Bush family engineered Savings & Loan fire sale, the Bush family engineered 9/11 deception, the Bush family engineered Iraq war. In each case, and so many others, so much money has simply disappeared into the black hole of subterranean financial shenanigans that it's a wonder America is still afloat (if it actually is as you read this).
I don’t want to blame the Bushes for everything; they just happened to have been involved in all the great financial crimes of the 20th century, from Samuel Walker in World War I to Prescott Bush in WW II and on down to the present crop of crooks. And it’s important to remember the Clintons, among many others, are members of the Bush crime family. But anyway, even with their billions, the Bushes only work for the people with the real money.
Really, America is so rich that for almost one hundred years, bankers have skimmed the cream off the labor of every single American and deposited it in the pockets of those who participated in these clever schemes, and a majority of Americans barely noticed. Yet, our government officials don’t protect us from this predation; they profit from it.
The planet is truly profaned by this predator species we call human that not only murders anyone it pleases and takes what it wants, but also turns on its friends and families for the same reason — a cannibal species with no compunction about committing any kind of crime if the potential profit is attractive enough. And the worst of it is committed by those who most loquaciously insist they are our protectors, our preachers and politicians. This is a unique and profound kind of lie so typical of human behavior, unadorned and unsweetened by the consensual hoax of social politeness.
The really big money is in the scams you never read about until years later. Offshore accounts. Paid Congressional coverups. Obscenely inflated government contracts. Profits from poison products (like nuclear power and fluoride). Huge tax cuts for the rich that contain increased taxes for the poor in the very fine print that are never mentioned by lying media until it's too late to do anything about them. World wars.
This has all been accomplished by powerful liars, who have grown richer and bolder with each successful deception. As George H. W. Bush mentioned in his famous unpublished quote to Sarah McLendon more than a decade ago: "[I]f the American people ever knew the whole story about Iran Contra, we Bushes would be chased down in the streets and lynched." [Editor's note: Excellent suggestion.]
So there I was the other day, skidding into a genuinely infantile rant: Why doesn’t everyone in the world believe what I believe? This is a common complaint of children, and I chided myself for it, as I glanced into the mirror to assess the current progress of my gray hair turning to white.
It struck me that almost nothing of what from years of careful and sophisticated study I believed to be true was ever uttered by our electronic mass media.
I believe that the most significant event in American history was the mass murder frameup known as 9/11, in which the highest levels of the multinational financial elite contracted a series of deep cover operatives to stage a mind-boggling event in order to change the character of the U.S. from a nominally corrupt democracy to a tightly regimented police state, a caper that turned out to be spectacularly successful in terms of ill-gotten profits from subsequent wars that, of course, were all based on nothing but more lies of the same caliber that killed all those people in New York City.
But I don’t hear a whisper of that opinion on television, in major newspapers, or from the lips of most Americans, no matter how they classify themselves politically. It’s all still mysterious Arabs to a majority, who have not bothered to notice there was no evidence presented, that the investigation into that tragic day was never conducted, and that the people who profited from this demonic charade are exactly the ones who claim to be its principal victims.
Nor do I hear a whisper that the suspicious pre-9/11 investors, who made millions off their apparent foreknowledge of the attacks, were mostly Israelis, whom the FBI has now conveniently cleared of any wrongdoing.
Most Americans have also failed to notice that among the thousands of Muslims who were detained after the 9/11 disasters, not even one has even been convincingly charged of having anything to do with 9/11, yet two wars against the Islamic world have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people — including thousands of Americans — without a shred of verifiable evidence that any of these aggressive acts were ever necessary.
Osama bin Laden could still not be convicted in a legitimate court of law.
But that’s not what you hear on television. These crass courtesans are constantly proclaiming the great strides being made in the War on Terror. From my perspective, the only strides being made involve the systematic elimination of freedom throughout the world, and the astonishing profits being accumulated by the corporate criminals on the basis of their lies and their prearranged terror provocations.
I could go on about the differences between my perspective and what you hear on TV, but I will only mention just one more item at this time.
Once you fully realize the implications of a nation’s own leaders deliberately sacrificing the lives of their own citizens for purely financial purposes, you can apply that template back through time and read history in a completely different way, in a way that will break your heart and blow your mind.
I mean no slight to the brave souls who thought they were defending their country, but the rich men who arranged all these wars were more interested in fortunes than they were in freedom, and that is even more obvious today.
Once you have internalized this shocking realization, and accepted its reality, your life will change forever. You will find it very difficult to lie in pursuit of profit ever again.
Along these same lines of what would be viewed by so-called sophisticated society as a somewhat infantile rant is a riddle that has coursed through my brain for the past few years. It is the difference between what we tell our children and what we say to each other as adults.
We raise our children to be honest in all situations, to show compassion for the less fortunate and not judge people on the basis of how they look or dress. Or, if we’re decent parents, that’s what we do.
So what is it that happens when we become adults? Everything changes. We sell out. Those nasty reality phrases come to the fore. Go along to get along. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (that’s the one that has always angered me more than any other, the phrase that is responsible for more carnage in the world than any other).
Must we accept there are things we cannot change? Isn’t that what permits them to happen in the first place?
Now it seems, with the lack of protests by parents about the deaths of their children whom they sent to a war that they knew (or should have known) was based on lies, what kind of people have we become? Certainly not a people who believe in freedom and dignity for all mankind.
What kind of senseless biorobots have we become, to sit in front of our TVs and listen to sadistic corporate brainwashing we know is damaging us.
Even as our loved ones are cut down, their bodies concealed in the night (and sometimes used to ship drugs back to the States), their memories deliberately ignored by the patrician partisans who simply send more of our kids to die every day in order to maintain the flow of corporate profits ... even as our loved ones are cut down, we cower in the illusory safety of our own mortgaged future and hope against hope it won’t happen to us.
Even as with each passing day, the signs get clearer and clearer — dead microbiologists prevented from revealing the true nature of deadly diseases about to descend on us all; a rising incidence of autism destroying thousands of children’s lives and new laws limiting the amount of corporate liability the manufacturers who caused this epidemic will have to pay distraught parents; depleted uranium spread all over the planet guaranteeing a carcinogenic future — people continue to watch trivial televised circuses without bothering to understand what and who they are, and what is being done to them.
This is the kind of courage most Americans show today. That is to say, none at all, plus a shameful willingness to gun down innocent foreign civilians for no reason other than the orders of their superiors. Remember, that was an unacceptable defense at Nuremberg, after which many Nazis were executed for saying that exact same thing.
No wonder certain elements call us cattle, or sheep. We go off to the slaughter without a bleat.
The people who tell these big lies that lead us there make millions. Bill O’Reilly, spouting hateful venom every night, tells you nothing about the chasm we are headed for. Tom Brokaw, who once said with a straight face only 40 people were killed in our invasion of Panama (subsequent reports put the figure at 4,000) now basks in his financial golden parachute.
In preparation for writing this piece, I reviewed all the essays I’ve written during these past three years on the Internet.
My first essay was “No One Is Safe From America’s Killer President,” and every word written in 2002 remains relevant and timely today.
I have warned you that your vote would not matter because the elections were rigged, as we have proven once again. I told you that many medicines are meant to kill you, that under new laws you are guilty until proven innocent, about how our schools create passive automatons, about how we are responsible for the evil that enslaves us, about how Planet X was a hoax, about how merely replacing one candidate with another was futile because it is the corrupt system that must be replaced, about how all those government terror alerts were fake, about how (in “The Dead Zone Scenario”) what we have to do to stop this madness, about how we can’t have one set of standards for Americans and another set for everybody else, and about how the invasion of Iraq would be the start of a new world war.
I told you about how 9/11 was a hoax, about how al-Qaeda was really the invention of the CIA and Mossad, and how all the terror incidents throughout the world were almost exclusively deliberate provocations of the corporate war machine, about truth had been replaced by spin in American society and how seemingly progressive journalists were paid under the table by the CIA.
I informed you about how the 9/11 murderers were Americans and Israelis and likely wouldn’t be caught, about how the elections were stolen and freedom made illegal, about the danger of exploiting the fascism of religion to create a totalitarian government, about how Americans prosper from the exploitation of others, about how religions pander to selfishness and ignore the misery of others, about how the real Axis of Evil is really the U.S., Britain and Israel, about how America is turning the world into a giant prison, about how Democrats are really the same as Republicans and how certain folks appear to be 9/11 skeptics and social critics but are really clever and deceptive apologists for the corporate establishment.
I told you that you can’t lie to God, but noted that people who do just that, flaunting their lucrative evangelical empires and proof of their piety, become very rich.
I have tried to tell you that religions actually obscure your view of how to behave decently and live an honorable life, and perhaps as a result I am very poor.
I think the most important thing in life is learning how to discern what is the truth and what is a lie, and you can’t make your decision until you run it past someone else (first rule of editing).
Thus, this.
Once again I find myself at a crossroads, one which will determine if I shall continue to write these sporadic commentaries on events in our world. There is no sense talking if nobody’s listening.
I have spent the past three years constantly monitoring the web for the truth behind all these awful stories that affect us all. The reason I write is to try to make sense of them. The net results has been two collections of essays, all previously seen on the web, and one booklet recapping the 9/11 lies.
As I write this I have a new collection of essays ready for publication, but due to the anemic sales of the second collection, I harbor real doubts about whether I should publish them. In any case I have no book contract nor the money to publish them.
I’m also working on another booklet, but this is about the mind-control aspects of religion, and I’m sure a lot of true believers would just as soon not see it published, lest their worldviews be further obliterated.
So lately I’m feeling like I live in a parallel universe, far away from the one where everybody else exists, where the truth is something to be suppressed by those who are rich, and lies are where the big money really is.
I’m not ever going to be a part of that one.
Whether I am going to continue to write these occasional commentaries, or publish any more books, at this point depends entirely upon you, dear reader.
I don’t like charging for what I write — and won’t — and I don’t like asking for your financial support — but must. If you think what I send you is worth it, buy a book, send a contribution, break your piggie bank — it all helps.
I don’t try to hide what I believe and tell you things I know not to be true, which is something many writers — especially some of the rich ones — simply cannot say.
A lot of people think I'm crazy. I want to change human nature. Impossible, say some. Can't be done, others insist, chortling with annoyed derision.
I say, if we don't change human nature, humanity will not survive. Can I describe it any clearer than that? And can you argue that if we don't, we will? No. You can't.
In my parallel universe, people don’t lie to each other, because they know lying to someone else is really lying to yourself. In my universe, people realize they’re all part of the same organism, or series of organisms, really: family, neighborhood, village, region, nation, planet, solar system, galaxy, universe, playing a potentially important part in the development of each one.
People don’t steal from each other because they know that stealing does more damage to the mental outlook of the thief than it does to the victim. And they certainly don’t kill each other because it’s so obvious killing someone else is actually killing a little part of yourself which you can never get back, not to mention killing a member of own family, a part of your own organism that cannot but diminish the wealth and contentment of your own existence.
In my parallel universe, the default impulse is much the same as it is in the ugly one we know too well — thou shalt not kill — although in my parallel universe, people actually practice what they preach.
If you wish to live in the universe I do (many of you already do), in which humans could be the most important organisms on the planet instead of the most lethal and least necessary, and wish to hear more of how good I think things can be and how bad I think things are now, please show your support now. My address is on my website.
And to all those who have supported my quest in the past, and allowed me the opportunity to learn so much about the world and then convey it, thank you more than words can say for the greatest honor of my life.
I feel like a musician in the subway. If I perform to your liking, toss a few coins into my violin case.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He is the author of two collections of essays, America's Autopsy Report and The Perfect Enemy, many of which have been published individually on hundreds of websites around the world. In addition, he has written The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001, a 48-page booklet aimed at those who still believe the government’s highly questionable version of events. A second booklet, 9/11: The Manipulation of Reality, will be published before the end of 2004. For more information on John or to purchase these books, go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/
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