Fake news and mythology

  
What is the relationship between fake news and mythology?

Religious myths, conspiracy theories, and new gnosticisms.

                          First a definition, so we all start on the same page. A definition of fake news:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news

                          But what about myth? The term has acquired several, sometimes contradictory meanings. In the post-Enlightenment era (19th century and beyond), myth has come to mean a false - "primitive", "superstitious" or "pre-scientific" - description or narrative of the world. Traditionally though, stories that we today call myths - at least the Great Myths of religion - were taken as absolute truths in much the same way that a modern rationalist believes in the statement "two things plus two things gives four things".

               Myths in the traditional - religious - sense were critically  important parts of human psychic architecture. They situated the person in a universe full of sense, meaning and purpose. (In practice, the purposes of some of the hypothesized entities - spirits of the enemies one killed, nature spirits, offended divinities - could be quite malevolent.) The animistic universe of ancient hunter-gatherer peoples was a world full of life, purpose and intent. One placated angry gods, one offered sacrifices to obtain their favor in enterprises. We have forgotten how revolutionary the ancient Greek "philosophers of nature" were. Rather than seek the causes of events in the whims of gods and spirits, they sought to understand the unfolding phenomena and processes of the physical world in terms of material processes (which could be captured in the elegant intellectual forms of mathematics). 

 Pythagorean theorem: in a right triangle the length of longest side squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. Pythagoras flourished six centuries before Christ.

                One can draw several conclusions from an "evolutionary" perspective. The most obvious is that "Reason" - at least as the dominant mode of thinking - is a relative newcomer on the historical stage. Myth as a form of explanation of the world is vastly older! (In reality, it is an open question if Reason is the dominant mode of thought today.. We seem in some ways to have hit upon the worst of both worlds. We have, collectively, great powers for manipulating the physical world with technology but too often, alas, that manipulation is for idiotic or antihuman ends.)

                  In their highest manifestation, myths are "sacred stories" told to explain the world, why it is like it is, who "we" (the members of our tribe) are and what values we hold. Myths describe the Good Life (particularly the Good Life in a social context). Myths, as narrative, are an outgrowth - an extension and an elaboration - of the "primate politics" of our biological ancestors. They tell who did what to whom, what the outcome was and why that outcome is important to us living today. Myths are "hard-wired" into our human nervous systems: myths and stories are universal, wherever there are humans there is story telling and sacred narrative.

              But why are myths and narrative universal?  One can hazard, with some anthropological and psychological evidence supporting, that it is natural for humans to view the world through the lens of narrative. Because of hard-wired primate political thinking we naturally wonder who did what to whom and why. Our minds are simply hard-wired to think along narrative lines.

             From this perspective, the formal, mathematical abstractions of science are more recent evolutionary acquisitions. As such, "abstract thinking" lacks the compelling force of concrete narrative. Here we see one of the disadvantages that climate scientists and environmental activists have in dealing with the raw, more primitive, emotional narratives of GW "sceptics" and deniers. Quantum mechanical energy exchanges at the molecular levels are hard to grasp (abstract scientific thinking). Our primate political genes though, are programmed to identify and understand the following narrative-type: crooked university professors peddle the "climate change hoax" in order to make trillions of dollars on the carbon credit trading market. In other words, climate scientists are an enemy clique plotting to do "us" in dirty - this is pure primate politics!

A general listing of Authoritarian Personality traits (both leaders and followers)

authoritarian personality traits 

                In general, "classical" authoritarians see the world in black and white terms: "us" versus "them", "Good" versus "Evil". Their perceptions of social groups tends toward stereotypy: all wo/men (blacks, Jews, gays, Muslims..) share a common set of characters. The group one belongs to is more important than one's individuality. In addition, authoritarians demonize the excluded groups they hate: people belonging to out-groups are treated as subhuman, incarnate all evil, plot to enslave the world to their wicked ends.

                I mention the Authoritarian Personality here because it represents a particularly primitive (hence emotionally compelling and "natural") expression of primate politics that is activated in situations of threat and uncertainty. The paranoid narratives of Authoritarians flourish in critical periods of social transition such as the one we are living through today. "Fascistic" paranoid delusional narratives become prevalent - even dominant - myths at times of social breakdown and transformation.

                It is hard to describe how wacky the paranoid delusional worldview can become! To do justice, I can only copy verbatim from a "chemtrails, New World Order conspiracy" website. Hold on t'yer hats, folks, the wind she's goin' t'blow!

"Population "Control," New World Order Style
  
The Illuminati's idea of Population Control falls into two broad categories:
 
1. Limiting the size of human societies and monitoring/controlling the movement of individuals within that society, and

2. Intentionally reducing the bulk of the world's population through GENOCIDE via the introduction of orchestrated conflicts, intentionally inserted toxic substances into the air (chemtrails), environment (depleted uranium), water/food supply (GMOs), and bioengineered, weaponized disease organisms (AIDS, Ebola, Bird & Swine Flu, etc.) along with anti-fertility compounds introduced via vaccines and other means of external transmission.
....
In order to preserve the 'best' of humanity when the supposed 'self-destruction' of the earth takes place around the year 2,000, the JASON Society proposed that a vast network of underground cities be built in order to secure living quarters for the chosen Illuminati elite, high level cooperative politicians, and selected military elements. Underground cities are also co-habitated by extraterrestrial alien groups that the secret government has made treaties with for technology exchange and human-alien hybrid breeding programs. The idea of the earth 'self destructing' around the turn of the century due to overpopulation was perhaps an early cover story for the justification of the underground cities. In the 1950's and 60's, the American public was led to believe that the contiuance of government, in the event of worldwide nuclear war, was a logical reason for undeground facilities, but we now know that the entire Soviet/American cold war and MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) scenario was an orchestrated Illuminati deception to bleed both Russian and American citizens of their wealth in order to finance black budget operations, secret technology developments, underground city construction, genetic engineering projects, time & space travel research, and anti-gravity, flying saucer spacecraft development.
Based on 1989 information, it was claimed that there were at least 75 underground cities in existence below the soil of America interconnected by high speed, frictionless trains called Maglev trains (Magnetic Levitation). The former Atomic Energy Commission had also constructed  22 seperate underground cities for their own use...

....  recommendations for population "control". They included:

1. Birth control (birth prevention and abortion - 43.8 Million babies aborted yearly worldwide.)
2. Sterilization (today includes vaccines) and
3. The introduction of deadly microbes to reduce or otherwise slow the growth of the earth's population.

Bioengineered Diseases
 
AIDS, Ebola, Gulf War Illness (GWI), and many other "new" diseases were intentionally bioengineered in laboratories that are mostly found in the United States and include the Army's secretive facilities at Ft. Detrick Maryland (2.). Drs. Nancy and Garth Nicholson have done a great deal of  research and investigation into the cause and treatment of Gulf War Illness, since they and their daughter (who was a helicopter flight nurse in the 1991 Gulf War) ALL came down with GWI.  In 1996, the Nichols published a paper which states their deep suspicions that GWI is due to bioengineered pathogens and that a hidden population control agenda appears to be in place.
Some bioengineered pathogens were designed to target certain ethnic groups for elimination. These groups likely include blacks, hispanics, Black Africans, Native Americans, and homosexuals. The preferred Iluminati method to introduce disease is via vaccinations. Tthe HIV virus which causes AIDS was introduced and spread throughout the majority of black populations in Africa via the World Health Organization (WHO) during their mandatory smallpox vaccine campaigns of 1976-1980.

The pathogens which produced Gulf War Illness were introduced to a limited number of Gulf War troops via "special" vaccinations (not recorded on the troop's official vaccination records) for Anthrax and other supposed dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. It was a CIA test run to see how many Gulf troops would succumb to the disease and how quickly they might die off. The results have been somewhat disappointing for the CIA/Illuminati planners. They thought their new little bugs would wipe out a lot more people, a lot faster than it has.."

And so it goes, on and on and on..  Pretty wild, eh?

From http://educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwopopcontrol.shtml 

 Was the death of God a liberation for humanity? Or did it simply blow the doors off hell, liberating all its inhabitants.. Above, a modern degenerate myth, the Aryan Master Race (a degraded form of the Chosen People)

             Which brings us to the central theme of this article: are such degraded forms of mythology related in some way to the "death of God" announced a century and a half ago by the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche? (See note 1.) Nietzsche's view is contested from various perspectives but it is clear that he was, at the least, merely giving a name to a process of secularization in Western thought that goes back to the Renaissance. That secularization brought us the scientific and technical revolution, the modern concept of citizenry, democracy, the belief in human rights, feminism..The modern world of Progress. However a question remains unanswered for the unbiased observer. If Western thought is no longer guided by Christian theology, who gets to establish the new norms, the new values, the new definition of the Good Life, etc? 

               Religion and culture, claim some anthropologists are social mechanisms which regulate, control and direct human drives and behavior into socially acceptable channels. Religion and culture replace much of the instinctive (genetically programmed) behavior patterns observed in non-human animals. In culture and religion, the human has partially escaped the determinisms of instinct. To some degree, we humans are self-defining, self-determining, self-creating animals. We have, to some degree, escaped the strictures of Darwinian evolution and determine some of the conditions of our own future evolution.

               But what happens when "God" -the dominant cultural and religious system - "dies"-, bcomes inoperant, no longer credible to a growing (and eventually critical) number of people? Certainly, God's death means the end of certainty. It means an interregnum, a period of cultural, spiritual and political anarchy till a new "God" and a new "tables of the Law" rise and once again provide wo/men with meaning, sense, direction.

                In this perspective, the current spate of Conspiracy theories and fake news is the symptom - and the embodiment - of the current state of philosophical, moral and cultural anarchy. These degenerate myths constitute a "regression", in the Freudian sense, to an earlier state of behavioral adaptation. Such states imply that an ecosystem, a society, an organism is experiencing an "existential threat", a life or health threatening situation requiring some sort of creative response (note 2).

                An interesting synchronicity. Just as I was finishing this piece, I received a notice concerning the first article of John Michael Greer's new blog Ecosophia. It treats the same themes I have in pretty much the same way I have above. Such a convergence says something about the zeitgeist - The Spirit of the Age - we inhabit..

 http://www.ecosophia.net/the-twilight-of-anthropolatry/

 
 notes:

1- http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/friedrich_nietzsche_quotes.html

".. Nietzsche is concerned about.. relating.. that God is dead in the hearts and minds of his own generation of modern men - killed by an indifference that was itself directly related to a pronounced cultural shift away from faith and towards rationalism and science...

Nietzsche had been raised in an intensely devout and pietistic family atmosphere that he saw as having been unduly restrictive..
 
As an atheist who saw aspects of the influence of the traditions of christianity within which he grew up as having been regrettable Friedrich Nietzsche tended to welcome what he saw as The Death of God!

For Nietzsche a recognition that God is Dead to his own generation of men and women ought to come as a Joyous Wisdom allowing individuals to lead less guilt-ridden lives in a world that was no longer to be seen as being inherently sinful. He considered that earthly lives could become more joyful, meaningful and "healthy" when not lived within narrow limits set by faith-related concerns for the state of an individual's eternal soul.

Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that the acceptance that God is dead will also involve the ending of long-established standards of morality and of purpose.. the possible emergence of a nihilistic situation where people's lives are not.. constrained by faith-based considerations of morality or.. guided by any faith-related sense of purpose.

What are we now to do?

Given what he saw as the "unbelievability" of the "God-hypothesis" Nietzsche himself seemed to favour the creation of a new set of values "faithful to the earth." This view perhaps being associa[ted] with the possibility of the "Overman" or "Superman."

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment..."

Friedrich Nietzsche ~ Thus spoke Zarathustra"

2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_%28psychology%29

"Regression: a defense mechanism leading to the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable impulses in a more [adaptive] way. The defense mechanism of regression, in psychoanalytic theory, occurs when an individual's personality reverts to an earlier stage of development, adopting more childish mannerisms. Psychiatrist Joel Gold suggests that careful use of "ARISE" (Adaptive Regression in the service of the Ego) can sometimes yield creative benefits. To the extent that one is handling thoughts and impulses less like an adult, ARISE involves play, appreciation and primitive pleasures, and imagination."

 


 

Book Review: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, America, the Cold War and the roots of terror (Pantheon Books, NY, 2004), 260 pages, extensive chapter notes, index, lacks bibliography (references are given in chapter notes which hampers research).

  

               Prof Mamdani's book is a chilling indictment of the foreign policy of Imperial America with some reference to the negative impact of that policy on American democracy at home. His major thesis is that during the waning years of the Cold War, American democracy became perverted, internally colonized by imperialistic institutions and mindsets. Successive administrations, Democratic or Neoconservative Republican, have actively suppressed nationalist and autonomist movements in the Third World.

              Whatever their motives, the U.S. has, particularly in recent decades, attempted to subvert the rule of International law and arrogantly assumed the mantle of world policeman (or de facto sovereign).

"The U.S. has renounced treaties controlling nuclear weapons and their proliferation, voted against the protocol enabling enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention, rejected the treaty banning land mines, endeavored to prevent its creation and since to cripple the International Criminal Court, and frustrated the Convention on the Child and the prohibition against using children in war. The U.S. has opposed virtually every other international effort to control and limit war, protect the environment, reduce  poverty and protect health." Ramsey Clark (quoted on page 208 see note 1)

             A disturbing parallel presents itself here. On the international scene, the U.S. acts like the trigger-happy American cops who shoot young black men on flimsy (or no) pretenses. Both at home and abroad, the US cop acts as cop, prosecutor, judge, jury and legislator, effectively acting above, or outside, the law. It is not an exaggeration to classify the U.S. today as a rogue state.

"Its reluctance to be held accountable internationally does not distinguish the Bush administration from other great powers, historically. What does distinguish it is the reckless determination to dispense with any project that would integrate others - whether rivals, dissidents, junior partners, or dependents - in a rule-based international order. Anatol Lieven, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, reminds us that the plan for "unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority" has been "consistently advocated and worked on by the group of intellectuals close to Dick Cheney and Richard Perle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s." Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, considered the in-house dove in the Bush administration, shares this basic goal with the rest of the security establishment. As early as 1992, when he was chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell declared that the United States requires sufficient power "to deter any challenger of ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage."..What distinguishes Powell from the hawks in the administration is not this basic goal but their commitment to preemptive war, now official American doctrine. Americans need to be aware of the logic of preemptive war. It is not accidental that most genocides have been carried out in times of war. The population is told: if you do not kill, you will be killed. You kill because you fear they may do to you what you are about to do to them. Preemptive war is the logic for genocide." (page 210)

         Ironically, this agenda of unipolar world domination is undertaken under the cover of "exporting democracy" to benighted third world countries. Thus President GW Bush justified overthrowing the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein by claiming that he was "democratizing" the country which would, through chain reaction, provoke democratic "regime change" throughout the region.

        "They are being civilized"! So claimed 19th century British and French imperialists to justify their colonial adventures. Earlier, coercive conversion to Christianity (to save the souls of benighted savages from eternal damnation) was used to justify and rationalize the conquest of the New World. Christopher Columbus (late 15th century) saw colonial expansion (and the slave trade) as a means of acquiring the capital necessary to convert the world to Roman Catholicism. The scam of "helping" the people one is shafting is ancient.. (note 2)

              Another theme treated by Prof Mamdani deserves mention: the common form of political obscurantism he labels "Culture Talk". Its most virulent expression is found in President Donald Trump's "Islam hates us" speech. (I could not find the original, more vigorous, speech so this interview will have to do.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Zj0tfZY6o  

             In Culture Talk, peoples' history (recent colonial political history in particular) is ignored. Cultures become - as philosophers would say - "Essences", the deep nature of collectivities (overriding our common human nature). The state of a culture at any given time explains all there is to know about a people, race or religion. In Trump's categorization of Islam's hatefulness, its (purported) hatred of the West, America and Christianity defines Islam. Islam is this hatred. 

           A (superficially) more sophisticated variant of Culture Talk discerns two Muslim types: Good Muslims and Bad Muslims. Good Muslims are those who have, in effect, westernized. They have accepted Enlightenment values such as the criticism of Traditional Authority and Scripture. They embrace the Rights of Wo/man. Bad Muslims are essentially backwards, premodern. They have not experienced the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation (otherwise they would think like us and be Good Muslims).

           The result of Culture Talk is a radical simplification and dumbing down of the world of political discourse. Critical examination of the West's interactions with Muslims (and other non-Western societies) is suspended. This is especially dangerous since U.S. foreign policy is in desperate need of critical (re-)examination..

          The authoritarian streak in Trump and his entourage is interesting in this context. Among the defining traits of the Authoritarian Personality discovered by social psychologists:

- Manichean dichotomization of the world into warring Forces of Good and Evil (with all Good being on our side),

- "stereotypy": all individuals belonging to excluded and scapegoated groups are assimilated to a common "type" or "essence". Individual differences are ignored.

- demonization of the Enemy (those belonging to excluded or scapegoated groups). They can do no good. Even (apparently) generous acts are subterfuges to win influence for nefarious ends.

              Culture Talk would appear ready made for authoritarian (populist) discourse and demagogy.

               The major part of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim traces the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in the late Cold War, post-Soviet era. The author argues that the Cold War provided a simplifying framework fo U.S. (and Soviet) foreign policy makers: thwart the enemy's attempts to achieve global hegemony. During the late Cold War the internal contradictions of Soviet domestic economic and political policy increasingly weakened one pole of the stable bipolar political universe which emerged after World War II. The post-war  anti-colonial struggles in the third world colonies only muddied the waters further. In the late Cold War era, U.S. policy makers found third world nationalist movements particularly problematical: they did not fit on the bipolar Communist versus Free World map. These movements were wild cards and potential disruptors. Successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, attempted to undermine these popular movements. One can speculate on the role that multinational corporations, often centered in the U.S. while exploiting third world resources (minerals, oil) and cash crops (rubber, coffee, palm oil..) played in the development of U.S. foreign policy. Such speculation, though, is not essential to the argument Prof Mamdani develops and can be left our of an initial description and appraisal of those policies. The goal of U.S. foreign policy became the establishment of compliant "puppet states", open to globalized U.S. and multinational "Free Market" trade. Also important was the minimization of regulatory legislation, social safety nets and social service networks in third world client states in order to reduce the costs to multinational corporations. A stable, predictable world controlled by American military might and profitable for (U.S.) multinationals.

           One of the author's surprising claims (for non-cynical readers anyway):

" Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, terrorism is best understood as a modern construction. Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project." (emphasis added)

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/sj6/mamdanigoodmuslimbadmuslim.pdf

 

          The paranoid Reagan administration (Republican, 1980 - 1988), in particular, interpreted the Post WW II anti-colonial struggles as deliberate Soviet attempts to undermine U.S. / Western values and world hegemony. Applying the old rationalization of the "end justifies the means", the U.S. began supporting reactionary forces employing terrorism to suppress popular anti-colonial, nationalist movements. This was a major moral failure for a nation which was forged in the fire of an anti-colonial revolution (the American Revolution, 1765 - 1783).  American anti-liberation policy reinforced imperialist / racist tendencies in American thinking and thus degraded American democracy at home and abroad.

          Over time, the anti-nationalist, anti-liberation, anti-liberal forces supported by the U.S. became increasingly vicious and degenerate. Programs to fund these forces became increasingly covert, "off the books", creating - in effect - an imperialistic, anti-democratic "shadow government" within the U.S. federal government. 

"If one advantage of proxy war was that its conduct could be hidden from public scrutiny, the disadvantage was that it was not easy to finance from public funds. This explains why covert wars have often tended to go hand in hand with illicit trade, usually in drugs. There has been a long-established link between the drug trade - whether licit or illicit - and the financing of colonial wars. In the early nineteenth century, the British empire set up an official monopoly for the cultivation of opium seed in its Indian colony and exported the harvest to China. When the Chinese emperor objected, the British claimed he was in violation of freedom of trade. To defend the freedom to trade opium, the empire sent gunboats up the Yangtze River and fought the ignoble Opium War. Similarly, in neighboring Indochina, the French used officially sanctioned opium revenues to pay the cost of their colonial occupation.
       In a monumental historical study of the link between the drug trade and counterinsurgency, The Politics of Heroin, University of Wisconsin scholar Alfred McCoy has traced the global expansion of drug-production centers - in Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Colombia, and Afghanistan - to the political cover provided by CIA-sponsored covert wars. At the heart of the global drug trade after the Second World War has been trade in opium, the raw material base for the industrial manufacture of high-grade heroin. When the CIA began its alliance with drug lords, the global opium trade was "at its lowest ebb in nearly two centuries." The war disrupted international shipping, and tight security had blocked heroin smuggling into the United States. The CIA entered into two sets of alliances it consider key to waging the Cold War, both of which boosted the drug trade far beyond prewar levels. The first was with the Mafia in Italy and France, the second was with anti-Communist Chinese forces along the Burma-China border. From 1948 to 1950, the CIA allied "with the Corsican underworld in its struggle against the French Communist Party for control over the strategic Mediterranean port of Marseille." The Corsicans triumphed and "used their control over the Marseille waterfront to dominate the export of heroin to the U.S. Market" for "the next quarter century." At the same time, "the CIA ran a series of covert operations along the China border that were instrumental in the creation of the Golden Triangle heroin complex." Beginning in 1950, these operations were aimed at creating an anti-Communist Chinese force to mount an invasion of mainland China. The invasion never happened, but the anti-Communist Chinese (KMT) "succeeded in monopolizing and expanding the Shan states' opium trade." The CIA retained these forces along the Burma-China border, hoping they would function as an advance warning system against an anticipated Chinese invasion of Southeast Asia. Instead, this anti-Communist army "transformed Burma's Shan states into the world's largest opium producer" over the next decade." (page 66-67, emphasis added. See note 3)

             Religion has been press ganged into serving the anti-national liberation movement as well. The instrumentalization of religion to serve this parallel government is well documented in Jeff Sharlet's excellent investigation, The Family.

 http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2016/12/book-review-jeff-sharlet-family.html

 Soviet helicopter brought down by Afghan rebels. Stinger missles provided by the U.S. were often used.

            As  they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. In the later Cold War period, 1975 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, U.S. foreign policy planners decided not merely to "contain the Communist menace" but to "roll back Communism". Although the roll back doctrine has come to be associated with the neoconservative Republican Reagan administration (1981 - 1989), it actually began a bit earlier under the Democratic Carter administration which began funding the Afghan mujahideen - those who wage jihad ("struggle" or, at the limit, "Holy War"). The objective was to weaken the pro-Soviet government in Kabul and force the Soviets into an expensive, possibly humiliating, foreign war against irregular (guerilla) forces, further weakening Soviet world power and influence: "roll back" in other words. The Soviets took the bait. The Soviet-Afghan war lasted from 1979 to 1989, cost the lives of about 15,000 Soviets, 55,000 wounded and a massive loss of helicopters (brought down by hand-held U.S. provided Stinger missles). This humilating costly conflict has been described as the Soviet Union's Viet Nam and is listed as a contributing factor in the weakening and final break up of the Soviet Union.

                          Afghan mujahideen fighters

                          Mujahideen with portable stinger missle

             However, actions - especially political ones - produce unintended consequences: blow-back. Once the mujahideen were in power in Kabul, they could not hold onto it. Factionalized, they ended up fighting among themselves. One of their number, an Osama bin Laden, ended up turning to bite the hand that fed. Bin Laden, be it not forgotten, was the mastermind of the September 11, 201 attack on the Twin Towers, New York City which left 3,000 Americans dead. In a sense, the U.S. was reaping what it had sown. It decided to fight the dirty war, so now the dirty war was coming home..

            The reasons for bin Laden's turning are not important in this article, only the fact that, in choosing to use terrorism to roll back Communist and thwart nationalist movements in the third world, the U.S. had let loose a Frankenstein's monster on itself. After the September 11 attack on American territory, bin Laden went to ground in Afghanistan, sheltered by a mujahideen faction called the Taliban which provided a reason for President GW Bush to invade that country. Thus the wheel of Karma ("causality") turned full circle. Dirty covert war by proxy against Communists and third world liberation movements employing terror against civilian targets led directly to the New Normal we are living, post 9-11: terrorist attacks (often homegrown) in Paris, Nice, New York, Orlando, Ottawa, Manchester..

            As the Good Book puts it:

For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap - Galatians, 6:7
notes:

1- Ramsey Clark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey_Clark

2- Evolutionary psychologists claim that human nature has a hypocritical streak for a reason: we are lousy liars. If, however, we manage to convince ourselves that our BS is true, we will make a much more convincing case before a potential audience. It pays, then, not to scrutinize our motives or rationale too closely! I recall a grandmother who called the CBC talk show, Cross Country Check Up, to say that her grandson had joined the army to "bring education to girls in Afghanistan", an argument used by the government to justify Canadian participation in the war. Yet, before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, few Canadians could find Afghanistan on the globe or could state whether girls had access to education there or not. Making people feel good about doing lousy things (wars, slavery, oppression of women, tax holidays for the rich..) is extremely useful to ruling elites since most people prefer to see themselves virtuous and meritorious amongst their peers.

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2015/02/book-review-dogs-are-eating-them-now.html 
  
3-  Note that it is these very same neoconservative inspired governments who pushed a punitive "war against drugs" at home and abroad. The questions that need to be addressed here are:

- Who payed for the drugs? R: the American taxpayer through covert proxy wars. 

- Who payed for the war on drugs? R: the American taxpayer. 

- Who benefited from the war on drugs? R: the privatized prison and police system - subsidized by the taxpayers - installed by "Free Market" neoconservative ideologues. Also the bloody thugs in third world countries receiving funding to carry out America's proxy wars.

- Who suffers the most from the drug traffic supported by covert wars? R: American drug addicts, particularly from marginalized groups like blacks who received heavier sentences.