    Beyond the Seal of Approval

    by David Montoute

    "Today’s mass media... are the foundation of the totalitarian ‘gestalt’
    which the privileged impose on the mentality of the masses...a ‘seal of
    approval’ that authorizes the reality of events".

    Din Vantari

    Given the impact of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington
    five years ago, and the events that they helped to unleash  - the
    declaration of a war which "may not end in our lifetimes" and the
    acceleration of a global police-state agenda  - it is no easy task to
    discern or exploit positive countertrends. One such trend, however, may
    be emerging. With a reported 36% of the US population rejecting the
    official account of September 11th 2001, something unexpected appears to
    be taking place. The collapse in public confidence with respect to the
    official "War on Terror" narrative could illustrate the beginning of a
    wider breakdown in elite brainwashing and mass submission to the
    top-down dictation of reality. For this new process has affected not
    only the corporate media. It has opened up a huge breach between the
    comfortable ‘alternative’ media of the traditional US Left, and a new,
    more diverse community that pursues the harder task following where the
    evidence leads.

    With the new phenomenon of Internet publishing allowing for a surge of
    unregulated media, networking, responding instantly to events, and
    unconstrained by corporate censorship, independent researchers have, in
    the last five years especially, lifted the lid on the
    heretofore-suppress ed world of Deep Politics.

    Peter Dale Scott coined this term, defining it as "the constant,
    everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and
    forces of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of
    that government." (1) From the revolving door between Wall Street’s
    financial institutions and US intelligence agencies, to state
    sponsorship of private armies and death squads; to secret societies such
    as Skull & Bones and P2, to election rigging and the private looting of
    national treasuries, to government-protecte d drug trafficking networks
    recycling cash into the global banking system, this is the dark
    underbelly of our modern ‘rational’ world. But it is as integral to the
    global economic system as are the formal institutions that, in theory at
    least, are subject to public oversight.

    Over time, certain key events have provided a window onto this world,
    and these are precisely the events that are most thoroughly lied about,
    protected from exposure by the stigmatization of those that examine them
    as ‘conspiracy theorists’. If scrutiny of this netherworld is off limits
    to mainstream news, traditional ‘alternative’ media has been no less
    averse to dealing with it. To illustrate, an inestimable contribution to
    our early understanding of the events of 9/11/01 was made by Canadian
    economist Michel Chossudovsky in his exposés of CIA-ISI-Taliban
    collusion. M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky had previously written a
    forward to one of Chossudovsky’s books and yet "America ’s leading
    dissident" acted for months as if the findings of Chossudovsky and
    others simply didn’t exist. When finally asked point-blank about their
    implications, Chomsky deemed the idea of US complicity "hopelessly
    implausible" and not even worthy of discussion. Speaking of the US
    anti-war movement’s ongoing partisan support of the pro-war Democratic
    Party, activist Charles Shaw sees such positions as "part of a larger
    pattern of "regulated resistance", a system by which dissent is
    carefully managed and constrained by self, overt, or covert censorship;
    denial-based- psychology; fear of personal or professional criticism and
    reprisal; and pressure from powers above including elected officials and
    those establishment foundations which flood millions into the
    not-for-profit activist sector." (2)

    Though Chomsky is famed for his Propaganda Model of the mass media, a
    demonstration of how corporate ownership dramatically influences
    content, he is also a resolute anti-conspiracist. In Chomsky’s world,
    Lee Oswald alone murdered President Kennedy, Saddam Hussein
    ‘misunderstood’ the US position on Kuwait in 1990 and Osama bin Laden
    broke ties with his patrons following the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.
    Even as Hollywood stars speak openly on CNN about self-inflicted US
    terrorism, Chomsky and his colleagues have not deviated from their
    stance. For them, it is axiomatic of the current conflict that a) there
    is an entity known as ‘Al Qaeda’, international in scope and pursuing
    its own goals independent of US policy, b) said entity was responsible
    for the attacks of 9/11/01, and c) there exists a consequent ‘War on
    Terror’ which, whilst it may be exploited for ulterior motives, stems
    from legitimate security concerns. Exhaustive investigations, sometimes
    even by mainstream sources(3) have shown the complete emptiness of
    these propositions.

    The Chomskyite Left’s connivance in the corporate media’s whitewash of
    problematic events, and worse, its unremitting hostility to alternative
    interpretations, led researcher Bob Feldman to investigate the sources
    of ‘alternative’ media’s funding. His discoveries revealed a complex
    financial trail originating with huge establishment foundations. The
    Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Trilateral
    Commission, George Soros and many others, were found to be generously
    sustaining allegedly ‘alternative’ media in the US.(4) When aspects of
    independent 9/11 research threatened to penetrate mainstream awareness
    in 2002, these media cliques signed on to a savage attack of key figures
    in the 9/11 Truth Movement.(5) But this gatekeeper Left was not able to
    suffocate 9/11 questions except by amputating a part of their erstwhile
    collaborators and alienating much of its audience. Whereas those outside
    of its fold (for example Mike Ruppert) could be subjected to
    interminable ad hominem attacks, Professor Chossudovsky’s work would
    simply be ignored. Further confirmation of the gatekeepers’ entrenched
    interests is the fact that increasing public awareness and acceptance of
    a 9/11 ‘inside job’ has not influenced the gatekeepers’ coverage in the
    slightest. From recent firings at (Rockefeller-funded) Pacifica Radio,
    to Counterpunch’s excommunication of ‘conspiracy nut’ Kurt Nimmo, the
    line has been clearly drawn: ‘responsible’ critique on one side,
    ‘conspiracy theory’ on the other.

    Slipping under the radar at Counterpunch, Anis Shivani(6) ascribed a
    more benign motive to the Left’s rejection of ‘conspiracy’ findings,
    seeing it as an effort to preserve its rationalist credentials. But
    since this meant giving a pass for the enabling event of the current
    war, it was, Shivani observed, a losing move. The gatekeepers’ response
    to the Truth Movement’s has been to emphasize a flawed "structural
    analysis" of society, one that would diminish the importance of
    individual conspiracies. The value of structural analysis, as applied to
    the media, is that it allows us to identify news corporations as part of
    the overall edifice of power, rather than merely another social actor.
    Ironically, when structural analysis is applied to Establishment Left
    media, the latter are revealed to be scarcely less compromised than The
    New York Times or CNN. But ultimately, any analysis that ignores the
    truly determinative structures in today’s world - i.e. the powerful
    financial dynasties that unleash wars and destabilization, make or break
    governments at will - is of little use.

    It goes without saying that all of the limits to dialogue with the Left
    gatekeepers are multiplied many times over when dealing with the
    corporate media. Here self-interest is a bigger factor, since a career
    in mass media is at once more lucrative and provides a much higher
    personal profile in the world. The mass media is additionally insulated
    from ‘Deep Politics’ by decades of depoliticisation and marginalization
    of non-mainstream ideas. Ideas that are plausible to independent
    researchers frequently sound like delirious ravings to mainstream
    journalists.

    Robert Fisk is exemplary in this regard. The UK Independent’s fearless
    correspondent has justifiably earned a widespread respect and admiration
    for his on-the-spot, critical coverage of today’s most terrible
    conflicts. Fisk, however, has poured scorn on the ‘childish conspiracy
    theories’ of remote-controlled aircraft, endorsed by many Arabs. Of
    course, our correspondent doesn’t share his own theories, so we do not
    learn exactly how amateur pilots could steer planes wildly off-course
    and, on visual inspection alone, find individual target buildings in
    cities they had never flown to, cutting through a web of civilian air
    traffic, whose flight paths they could not possibly have known, only to
    enter the world’s most exclusive no-fly zones without opposition and
    without incident. But since this is how an Administration of proven
    liars describes the events in question, what else remains but to believe
    it? And yet, it must be remembered that Fisk represents the outer limits
    of tolerable dissent in the corporate media.

    From the true origins of the Gulf War to the pre-planned dismemberment
    of Yugoslavia and Iraq, from Wall Street money laundering to the murder
    of David Kelly, from depleted uranium to ‘false flag’ terrorism, there
    is now an open-ended list of taboo subjects that the mainstream media
    and the foundation-funded ‘alternatives’ cannot address. The limits of
    Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model are clear. The most serious
    distortions of today’s world lie not in the ‘spin’ given to events, but
    in the very ‘reality’ of those events. The startling proliferation in
    ‘black ops’ does not permit us the luxury of innocence when assessing a
    "people’s revolution" (coup d’etat) such as that orchestrated in Tbilisi
    in 2003. Nor can assassinations, such as that of Rafik Hariri, be
    automatically assigned to the "obvious" culprit.

    As the disconnect between popular perceptions and ‘responsible’
    criticism grows, the surge in unregulated media could pose a fundamental
    challenge to the hierarchical organization of society, since it allows
    each and every person to bypass the established channels of discourse
    and trespass on the hallowed grounds of Truth. Meanwhile, the
    stultifying discourse of foundation-funded ‘alternative’ media will
    ultimately be sidelined as its ineffectualness is laid bare in the
    intensifying crisis. Awareness that we have entered a new historical
    phase has mandated the emergence of a new generation of activists.
    Finger wagging and moral point-scoring are not the required tools for
    understanding our current predicament. As with Thomas Hardy’s dictum
    that a full inventory of the worst must be made in order to clear a path
    to the better, so the lid must now be lifted on the most sordid aspects
    of our agonizing world.

    Whilst false flag operations are not new (see Operation Gladio) the
    exigencies of continuous warfare in the Eurasian energy basin have led
    to a rapid acceleration in their use. From Bali to Madrid to London,
    nowhere now escapes the dead hand of intelligence operatives. And
    despite the trends previously discussed, progress in understanding is
    still slow. Isolated, random outrages may be of infinitely more use to
    the promoters of the ‘War on Terror’ than they are to putative Muslim
    radicals, but many residents of Madrid and London who understand the
    9/11 montage will nevertheless vehemently deny that their home town has
    experienced the same. It is never explained why something that worked so
    well in the US would not be repeated elsewhere. Here, the essentially
    a-national character of the world’s elites must be understood, because a
    police state in the US cannot function in isolation. The rapidly
    accelerating trends toward convergence in ‘national security’ go beyond
    politics in the usual sense. In the 1970s, urban planner Paul Virilio
    examined this convergence, and identified its consequence as an
    impending transition to global military jurisdiction.(7)

    At a time when global elites scramble for diminishing hydrocarbon
    reserves, terrorise their populations into submission, and unleash ever
    more catastrophic wars, the essential challenge to consensus reality is
    more important than ever. Whether global oil production is peaking right
    now or does so in 15 or 20 years is not the point. The global capitalist
    class and its population-cull-promoters are responding to it now (8).
    Whether ‘overshoot’ is an objective reality or just another Malthusian
    fantasy, the owners of the world will act upon the idea regardless.

    From Baghdad to Caracas , the Empire is in retreat. And yet this makes
    the recourse to extreme ‘solutions’ more, not less likely. According to
    Michael Ruppert, the emerging American-led global police state is not
    merely about private control over the legal system, but is rather "a
    crisis-induced transition from a deeply compromised legal system to a
    society where force and surveillance completely supplant that system."(9)

    The seriousness of current developments cannot be underestimated. But as
    the disjuncture between events and their representation widens further,
    it impels the broader population to reorder their mental maps, thus
    opening new possibilities for radical alternatives. To exploit and
    reinforce this development, the evidence-based community must avoid turf
    wars and internal disputes. Now more than ever, it is necessary to share
    everything we know with everyone we know. Practical alternatives cannot
    emerge whilst the great mass of people remain somnambulant, which is why
    systematic deconstruction and demythologization of events is the
    precondition for liberating and reconstructing our world.

    When the mask finally falls, reality can be what we make it.

    The author can be reached at gnaoua22@yahoo. co.uk

    Notes:

    1. Quoted in:
       http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/061704_conspiracy_union.html

    2. "The Gatekeepers of the So-Called Left" Charles Shaw, Newtopia
       Magazine, May 16th, 2005

    3. See Adam Curtis’s "The Power of Nightmares" The Rise of the Politics
       of Fear BBC Television 2004

    4. http://www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html

    5. http://www.insteadofwar.org/site/news_more.php?id=A667_0_2_0_M

    6. "Progressive Irrelevance" Anis Shivani
       http://www.counterpunch.org/shivani0829.html

    7. Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles and Speed and
       Politic, Semiotext(e) 1990, 1986

    8. http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=626
       http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/malthsay.htm

       "...There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion
       people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down
       more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other
       way. There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go
       up. ...In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and
       decisively. Famine and disease are nature's ancient checks on population
       growth, and neither one has disappeared from the scene. ...To put it
       simply: Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to
       the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the
       developing world." --Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979

    9. Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon (pg.15) New Society
       Publishers, 2004