The Advancement of Knowledge

It has been an incredible and taxing week, or month, depending on how much scope you want to look at.

Personally, and I think many others had a similar experience, the events beginning around the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013 was my latest mind flip.  I had just begun a survey of conspiracy theories around 911, but this quickly led to learning about a long series of such theories around wacko, Oklahoma bombing, the shoe bomb, the underwear bomb, child prostitution rings leading right to the White House, Sandy Hook, and Benghazi.  I am sure I am missing some because the literature spans a range that gradually extends beyond one’s limit of even potential credulity.  But humans are born to imagine and to seek to understand, and a great deal has been left to the imagination for several decades.

I draw a limit at Israel controlling everything, and the supposed technology transfer from outer space aliens.  The former is tied in with way too many ideological currents that are very imperfectly understood and often aggressively misconstrued and passed off as propaganda posing as truth.  Increasingly, everything to do with the Middle East has been so lied about and distorted that the truth will take decades to emerge.  Regarding UFO technology, and amazingly advanced secret military technology, there is some interesting testimony but a dearth of facts and concrete evidence.

Aside from some notable excesses, a careful examination of recent extraordinary events gives rise to very real question that have not been remotely answered.  There is a clear policy of evasion, misdirection and disinformation.  Now, each new incidence seems to involve an increasing degree of brazenness, challenging credulity, but affirming that something is amiss to a previously unfathomable degree.  The extremely unsettling circumstances surrounding Sandy Hook and Boston Marathon lend credibility to all the other questions being raised about earlier extreme events.

Here is a bit about how I probe into a conspiracy that has been suggested online.  I was utterly puzzled by the controversy over Benghazi.  From the outset, the hullabaloo from the right seemed contrived, but who knows?  I am not like minded and have to struggle to see logic in their words at the best of times.

An article on infowars provided a shocking background to that evening in Benghazi.  In effect, the Benghazi “consulate” was a CIA outpost for funneling Libyan weapons a d/or personnel from the jihadists, essentially Al Qaeda affiliates, to Syria.  An ongoing relationship of this nature shocks but explains a lot.  It is, regrettably, not at all incredible and casts in stark relief the unalloyed cynicism of US foreign policy.  Prior to the Boston event, and all the time I have spent digging into the facts of various conspiracy theories, I resisted contemplating that idea.  In spite of all the evidence of America’s imperial intentions in the Middle East, that was a turning point.  I wanted to believe in Obama, I wanted Hillary to succeed.  It has been disorienting – and frightening – to learn that these two, along with nearly the entire US government have regard only for power and corporate objectives without any regard for democracy or the interests of the people.  Democracy in the US has been thoroughly usurped.

I have realized how much farther down the road to fascist state the US has gone than I believed.  By nature, I cling to the principles of democratic government that I grew up with, and I have difficulty accepting the Machiavellian approach to government that are in fashion today.  It takes a hard shock, what I call a mental flip, to see things in a bigger context which explains a much larger scope of the known facts.  This Knowledge advances in leaps and bounds as like Kuhn’s paradigm of scientific explanation on steroids.

The war of words over Benghazi has waged in Washington this past week.  At one point during the week I did try to penetrate the conversation, much ado about a memo that was amended 12 times.  I eventually gave up.  Nothing was coming clear, and I have seen no reflection in these debates or in the mainstream media that the crisis in Benghazi involves a CIA post working with Al Queda to funnel arms or jihadists to Syria.  

Such is the bizarre state of public discussion today.  After all the vehement public debate, coming down to a 12 times changed memo, I left the matter at a draw as far as I could determine, and that precisely the role of Washington (and other countries’) politics: make real issues disappear down the memory hole through inane, incomprehensible  argument about random facts.

The denouement to this tale is of a type I am incurring more and more frequently.  Today I read an article in Counterpoint which matter-of-factly acknowledge that the Benghazi station was precisely as had been reported by infowars.  This does not clinch the matter, by any means, but a second, somewhat more credible source gives credence to an *explanation* that fits very well the facts of US involvement in the Middle East.  The war on terror is obviously bogus.  It is a phony pretext for invading other countries in quest of total worldwide dominance, and for population control at home.  All of the US activities in the Middle East further a toxic, illegal policy.  As usual, this is a “theory” I have heard many times in the past decades, but it did not come real to me until the events of the Arab Spring were cast into context by a disastrous  aftermath, and then the cynical moves of the United States, and the falsehoods of US leaders like Obama and Clinton become all too obvious.

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The enormity of the crimes and cover-ups being now routinely committed  indicate that the power of the US government is about to be wielded ever more robustly against its own people and those of the Middle East, all in the name of the nefarious ends of world domination and control of the oil supply.  The sense of panic and desperation which these events give rise to is reflected in the lucidly argued articles and discussions in the alternative media such as this poignant appeal to action by Chris Hedges.

Although underfunded, we now routinely see progressive issues being debated passionately and fruitfully in a flourishing alternative mdedia.  This is a refreshing and much needed development where the press is reviving and issues are addressed civilly, usefully leading to better understanding of the many progressive issues facing us.  An example is the Greenwald-Maher dustup over Benghazi and Islam (see also my post The Great Debate below.. This ferment is one of the great engines of dissidence in the world today.  In free speech, we have the beginnings of a coherent and organized opposition.  How long will it be before this historic democratic freedom comes under official attack?