"For example, on May 1, 2011
President Obama announced the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the
mythic mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to an apparently ecstatic nation.
Most conventional news outlets reported Obama’s announcement
unquestioningly because it fit the scheme of their overall erroneous
reportage on September 11th. When alternative news media and bloggers
almost immediately pointed to various contradictions in the story -- the
observations of eye witnesses to the raid, doctored photos of bin Laden’s
alleged corpse, and international press reports that Bin Laden died many
years prior -- corporate news outlets acted swiftly to repress the
well-reasoned critiques as “conspiracy theories” with a barrage of
swiftly-produced editorials and op-eds. Indeed, the announcement of Bin
Laden’s supposed demise came just four days after the Obama
administration released the president’s purportedly authentic long-form
birth certificate, an event at once uncannily amplified and repressed by
the proclamation of bin Laden’s fate; where the vocabulary of repression
produced another term, “deather”."
9/11 Truth, Inner
Consciousness and the "Public Mind"
by James Tracy
March 18, 2012
With few exceptions the news that will shape public discourse is
subject to a de facto censorial process of powerful government and
corporate elites beyond accountability to the public. It is here that
Sigmund Freud’s notion of repression is especially helpful for assessing
the decrepit state of media and public discourse in the United States. In
Freud’s view, one’s collective life experiences are registered in the
subconscious, with those particularly disturbing or socially
impermissible experiences being involuntarily suppressed, only later to
emerge as neuroses. Whereas suppression is conscious and voluntary,
repression takes place apart from individual volition.
With opinion polls indicating at least half of the public distrusting
the official account of September 11th, the foremost basis for the “war
on terror”, no public event has been more repressed in public
consciousness via the mass media than 9/11. The enduring usefulness of
Freud’s theory is suggested in repeated manifestations of the repressed
episode to haunt the public mind for which a surrogate reality has been
crafted.
Peter Dale Scott describes occasions such as the assassination of
President John Kennedy and September 11th as “deep events” because of
their historical complexity and linkages with the many facets of “deep
government” -- the country’s military and intelligence communities and
their undertakings. The failure to adequately explain and acknowledge
deep events and pursue their appropriate preventative remedies leads to
continued deceptions where unpleasant experiences are contained and a new
“reality” is imposed on the public mind. Together with the notion
of repression, the term is also applicable for considering how instances
of such historical import are dealt with in mass psychological terms, or,
more specifically, by ostensibly independent alternative news media
capable of recollecting the real.
For example, on May 1, 2011 President Obama announced the assassination
of Osama bin Laden, the mythic mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to an
apparently ecstatic nation. Most conventional news outlets reported
Obama’s announcement unquestioningly because it fit the scheme of their
overall erroneous reportage on September 11th. When alternative news
media and bloggers almost immediately pointed to various contradictions
in the story -- the observations of eye witnesses to the raid, doctored
photos of bin Laden’s alleged corpse, and international press reports
that Bin Laden died many years prior -- corporate news outlets acted
swiftly to repress the well-reasoned critiques as “conspiracy theories”
with a barrage of swiftly-produced editorials and op-eds. Indeed, the
announcement of Bin Laden’s supposed demise came just four days after the
Obama administration released the president’s purportedly authentic
long-form birth certificate, an event at once uncannily amplified and
repressed by the proclamation of bin Laden’s fate; where the vocabulary
of repression produced another term, “deather”.
Again, the life of a lie is predicated on the success of subsequent
deceit and the strength of the alternate experience created to stand in
for the truth. Nowhere is the repression and revision of the memory of
September 11th more acute than in progressive news media claiming to
offer an alternative to corporate-controlled journalism. Some of these
media themselves have multi-million dollar annual budgets and are
especially open to manipulation by elite interests, often through
self-censorship, via corporate underwriters and grants from powerful,
tax-exempt foundations.
The Democracy Now! news hour is a case in point. A markedly persuasive
program with a highly-educated and influential audience, Democracy Now!
has substantial credibility, much of which was earned through its
scrutiny of the George W. Bush administration and the US invasion and
occupation of Iraq. It is through the use of this credibility that
Goodman and Democracy Now! have consciously suppressed serious questions
pertaining to September 11th, thereby playing an important role in
dividing the 9/11 Truth movement from its antiwar counterpart and
cultivating the latter, with its inevitable confused detachment from
history.
The success of Democracy Now! in this regard lies in its adherents’
belief that it represents an authentically radical alternative to
mainstream newsa claim that has some validity given the program’s
willingness to address race and gender-related issues and its copious
attention to acts of social protest. In terms of analysis, however,
Democracy Now’s coverage is at best lacking and at worst outright
misleading, bearing more of a resemblance to its mainstream equivalents
than real alternative news outlets. This phenomenon has only increased
despite the Obama administration’s intensification of many policies begun
under its predecessor.
A working example is Democracy Now’s coverage of the so-called “Arab
spring” over the past several months. While reports from alternative and
international news outlets have pointed to the ties between the Libyan
and Syrian “opposition” and the intelligence and military apparatuses of
NATO’s leading countries -- Britain and the United States -- Democracy
Now! has fallen into lockstep with corporate news outlets that have
valorized such forces as fighting against the tyrannical Gaddafi and Saad
regimes. In the case of Syria there are conflicting reports on whether
the Saad regime or death squads run out of Turkey by NATO are in fact
responsible for the many deaths that have occurred over the past year.
The Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya networks along with allegedly independent
human rights groups have depicted the Saad regime as responsible for much
of the Syrian bloodshed. Democracy Now! parrots and reinforces such
reports without question, even though genuinely alternative media have
scrutinized these claims.
In November 2011 the independent journalist Webster Tarpley journeyed to
Syria to conduct a firsthand investigation of the Saad regime’s alleged
brutality. His findings utterly diverge with those many western audiences
had become used to. After interviewing Syrian officials and embarking on
unescorted tours of Syria over a two week period, where he spoke to
dozens of Syrian commoners, Tarpley reported that almost all of the
violence was chiefly attributable to the same forces involved in the
overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya. While innocent pedestrians have been
subject to bombings and being targeted by snipers and death
squadsrecognized techniques of US forces from El Salvador to Iraq to
provoke ethnic division and civil warthe Syrians Tarpley spoke to held
the Saad regime in high regard and wanted an increased Syrian army
presence to prevent such attacks.
Tarpley broadcast from Syria on his own weekly World Crisis Radio program
and proceeded to report his findings on alternative outlets, including
Russia Today, Iran’s Press TV, Alex Jones, and Jeff Rense. Despite the
notoriety Tarpley was absent from Democracy Now! and like avenues, in all
probability not just because of his unorthodox conclusions on the “Arab
spring”, but also an intellectual honesty that steered him toward, among
other endeavors, a rigorous and unadorned interrogation of September
11th, thus placing him beyond the pale of the Left’s permissible
discussion and dissent.
The repression and revised imposition of September 11th and
the attendant “war on terror” on the public mind have important
implications not only for the integrity of public discourse, but also for
the collective sanity of western culture and civilization. As crafted by
dominant news media 9/11 has become the cracked lens through which we
view and conceive of our own history, identity, and purpose. Each act of
subverting or evading factual accounts of actually existing events
manifests itself as a small fissure in the broader edifice of truth and
rationality. So does it also contribute to furthering the designs of
broader forces seeking to build a once seemingly pretend brave new
world.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29838
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