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Word! Nice job of myth-busting. Putting the risible myths of Kondracke et ilk up against the Nuremberg Principles, hallowed by the hanging of its exemplars, jolts me, it rings me like a bell.
There's a method to the madness of myth-making. This right here is the most exciting potential of this new medium: busting their perverse myths even as they deploy them.
Kristol MethBy Scott Horton
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004151
William Kristol gives thousands of Americans hope. He shows us that a mediocrity can find a home as a columnist at The New York Times. His latest column, discussing—well, what exactly is it discussing? It’s hard to make any sense of it. It starts as a justification of Israeli operations in Gaza and quickly transforms itself into a call for war against Iran. The Gaza operation is, after all, just a warm-up. I just came across Joe Klein’s dissection of Kristol’s column in Time:
Kristol is a cagey guy. He benefits from the delusion of Iranian potency. The more menacing and evil Iran seems, the stronger the arguments for the war that Kristol and many other Jewish neoconservatives really want: a U.S. attack on Iran to make the world safe for Israel (as if such a war could or would accomplish that). He comes very close to endorsing that in his last paragraph…In the end, Kristol’s saber-rattling is the death rattle of a simplistic, extremist ideology that has caused the U.S. great damage. A more sensible, centrist approach to international affairs won’t have the bang or melodrama of military kinetics. It will take time to work, if it works. But it also won’t have the bloodshed and torture that have stained our nation’s history these past eight years.
There are two weeks left. The Neocons may yet get their cherished war—not this silly skirmish in Gaza, but the real war they’ve always wanted, the one with Iran. Emphasis added.]
So we are having some effect on the ability of the Right to jack us around.
The recent history of US myth-jacking, as I've been saying, has something to do with Joseph Campbell's lectures at the Foreign Service Institute, beginning in 1956. It has something to do with Milton Friedman's Frankenstein's lab at University of Chicago.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened in Chile.NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think Democracy Now! viewers and listeners know this chapter in history, which was that after Salvador Allende was elected, a democratic socialist was elected, in 1970, there was a plot to overthrow him. Nixon famously said, “Make the economy scream.” And the plot had many elements, an embargo and so on, and finally the support for Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973. And we often hear about the Chicago Boys in Chile, but we don’t hear that many details about who they actually were.
And so, what I do in the book is I retell this chapter of history, but, for me, the economic agenda of the Pinochet government is much more front and center, because I think we do know the human rights abuses, we know about Pinochet rounding up people, taking them to stadiums, the summary executions, the torture. We know a little bit less about the economic program that he pushed in in the window of opportunity that opened up after the shock of that coup. And this is where it fits into the shock doctrine thesis. http://www.democracynow.org/2007/9/17/the_shock_doctrine_naomi_klein_on
NAOMI KLEIN"And so, the Chicago Boys were born. And it was considered a success, and the Ford Foundation got in on the funding. And hundreds and hundreds of Latin American students, on full scholarships, came to the University of Chicago in the 1950s and '60s to study here to try to engage in what Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile's foreign minister after the dictatorship finally ended, described as a project of deliberate ideological transfer, taking these extreme-right ideas, that were seen as marginal even in the United States, and transplanting them to Latin America. That was his phrase--that is his phrase." http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein
I'm tellin' ya, people! Jacking whole nations--or single voting blocs--with myths, not just lies, and sticking them with the bill, is the state of the art in manufacturing consent.
