by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
I’ve often suggested that our media functions as a powerful tool of mind-control, not too dissimilar from what might be found in the plotlines of classic science fiction. After spending weeks or months immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. For most individuals, the whisper in the back of their skulls overwhelms their logical reasoning, while their emotional reactions are turned on or off as if by a switch.
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A perfect example of this came in the infamous U.S.S. Liberty incident of 1967. While peacefully sailing in international waters, our naval vessel was attacked by the Israelis, whose air and sea forces killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, and only by chance failed in their effort to sink the ship with no survivors. This constituted America’s worst naval loss of life since the huge battles of World War II, and surely if any other nation in the world had been responsible, our swift and overwhelming military retaliation would have bombed its major cities to rubble and killed many thousands of its citizens, while perhaps also hunting down and executing all the enemy leaders who had ordered that unprovoked attack.
But instead our government completely covered up that incident at the time it occurred, and the only consequence was that the annual financial tribute we paid to the Jewish State steadily increased in size. Even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, any outrage was confined to just a small sliver of our population, while the majority who heard the story vaguely assumed that since the media told them “nothing to see here” they should move on and pay no attention. Something that under normal circumstances might have been expected to provoke a major punitive war merely produced a few uncomfortable shrugs.
Given its large size and advanced weaponry, America stood as a physical colossus on the world stage of the 1960s, with no other country able to directly challenge our might. But we were still helpless before the nation that had attacked use because the small pro-Israel Jewish minority deployed its tools of media mind-control to transform us into helpless marionettes, jerked about by invisible strings.
I discussed that strange historical episode several years ago.
- American Pravda: Remembering the Liberty
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 18, 2021 • 11,400 Words
More than a half-century has passed since that incident, and during most of those decades the power of such media mind-control over our population has remained enormous, even steadily growing more extreme.
Just a few weeks ago, the Israeli Mossad suddenly detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon, whose simultaneous explosions killed or severely maimed around 500 civilians including some children, while wounding many times that number. Not only was this an obvious war-crime but given the scale of the attack and the terrifying public impact of converting ordinary electronic devices into deadly bombs throughout an entire country, it probably constituted one of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the world, while setting extremely dangerous precedents for future strikes against other countries, certainly including our own. If our media had portrayed the incident one way, outraged Americans would surely have demanded that the terrorist state responsible be wiped from the face of the earth; but instead the media presented a different narrative, so our citizens either merely shrugged their shoulders or sometimes even cheered.
In a recent article, one of our contributors described the reaction he encountered at a dinner with some of his conservative Catholic friends, and I think his experiences are worth quoting at length:
Shortly after the now-infamous Israeli pager, radio and solar panel attacks in southern Lebanon, I met for dinner with a group of friends and acquaintances at the home of a local Catholic priest. After we had eaten and made the obligatory small talk, the conversation naturally turned towards politics and the expanding situation in the Middle East. Having already met with the group a handful of times during the past year, I was familiar with the position held by most of the men present concerning the issues of Israel/Palestine and international Jewish power. To a man they’re of the opinion that Israel is an indispensable ally of America and a defender of those hallowed ‘Judeo-Christian’ values in an otherwise uncivilized and bestial Middle East. (Perhaps, someday, a study will be conducted examining the reasons Christians so vehemently support the people who reject their Lord and Savior and have constructed an entire theological edifice based upon that rejection, even as they murder and maim their co-believers in the Middle East.)
On that last point, those Christians are probably unaware that traditional Judaism abominates their religion, with many Jewish leaders having sworn to eradicate Christianity from the Holyland, as was suggested in this short clip from Tucker Carlson’s long interview of a Christian pastor from Bethlehem earlier this year:
