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