One question that I find often gets asked, is the notion that breaking away from any system of propaganda requires rigorous effort in terms of researching news resources, hours spent in front of a computer screen analysing and parsing various data, opinions and analyses in a quixotic effort to find truth. This is just not the case- breaking away from propaganda systems is more a question of mentality. This is illustrated quite vividly by what I would call “uncommon common sense”- the idea that although there are some distortions that require a bit of digging to uncover, there are also many huge and obvious untruths that exist unquestioned in our society, right in front of our eyes. More important than doing the digging, initially, is to be of a mindset that questions the unquestioned, because when the larger elements of social and political propaganda are unmasked, then the more subtle untruths melt away more easily in front of one’s own eyes.

This is the first part of a 4 part series detailing 8 questionable unquestionables- social paradigms that pass without question in mainstream discourse, but which are so utterly false that it only requires an inch of extra perspective to notice this. This is what I would call “uncommon common sense”.

1. Soldiers in war do not die for their country- they die for their government

Though I do not for one moment question the honesty with which soldiers join the armed services, which is usually done at least in part with a notion of “serving one’s country”, the facts about a soldier’s real mission, will never be directly to perform service to his country, and will always be to perform service to his government. The only occasions when a soldier will serve his country, is when the interests of his government and his country happen to coincide, which is very rare, since governments rarely have the primacy of their country’s interests at heart.

This is such an ignored concept in our society. Any war memorial, such as the Armistice Day that just passed, will honour the dead soldiers for having died for their country, died defending peace, died so we could live the lives and enjoy the freedoms we enjoy today. But no one ever stops and asks themselves, “How is this the case? How did soldiers being butchered on the western front serve the interests of the country? How did it enhance or protect the lives of the people of the UK?” A more drastic example comes with the current wars being waged. Day after day we are being inculcated with the idea that the troops, who are risking their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan, are sacrificing themselves for the British people. How is this so? Why do I or anyone else in this country need protection from the Taliban? Why do I need protection from the Mahdi Army? I have never done anything to them, and they have no desire to do anything to me. So why are we over there killing them? How does this serve the interests of the country?

The answer is very simple, for people who understand “country” to mean the inhabitants of the country, rather than the ruling elite of the country. Of course it makes absolutely zero sense for soldiers, who are undoubtedly brave and honest intentioned, to go to a foreign country thousands of miles away and engage in a bloody war against rag tags who just want us out of their country, for “our protection”. It’s such a ludicrous notion that it cannot be taken seriously. But this is such an unquestioned paradigm that you would be hard pressed to find many people who are aware of its absurdity. The fact is very simple- soldiers die for their governments, not for their people. It is not in your or my interest to invade oil or gas rich countries, overthrow their regimes and install people who the governments of our allies happen to favour. This is laughably absurd. However, it is clearly in our government’s interest to send young working class men to act as imperial spear throwers, and secure natural resources and geo-political favours and prestige for the ruling classes. This is important for governments. And then, when time comes to commemorate the wars, it is simply a question of telling the nation “Don’t forget- these people died for you!” and such a sensitive myth will pass unquestioned into the public consciousness. A more transparent lie was never told.

This was painfully evident in the US elections, where it was okay to suggest that Barack Obama was a Muslim Terrorist/anti-Christ, but questioning John McCain’s service to his country (which, it was implied, had been earned through his military service and his being tortured) was not allowed. Thus, the notion was happily spread that by bombing civilian concentrations of a 3rd World country miles away from the US that posed no conceivable threat to any member of the USA, McCain was somehow protecting the American people. For which he then suffered, the story continues, by being tortured. No one stopped to ask themselves, how is he protecting people? What are the mechanics of this, were those peasant Vietnamese villagers engaged in a plan to invade and conquer the USA? It’s such an evident nonsense, and a perfect reflection on mainstream discourse that it is incapable of discerning such a nonsense.


2. The War on Terror is not about terrorism

Last year, up to 125 people in the US died from food allergies. Over 10,000 people died from gun homicides. Zero people died from terrorism (or “terror” for that matter). Yet the US engaged in the seventh year of its war on terrorism, a war one element of which, the war in Iraq, has been estimated by Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, to have cost $3 trillion up to this now. $3 trillion! That’s a lot to spend on a war against a “foe” who has killed a grand total of zero people in the last 6 years, no? Of course the obvious fact of the matter is that the war on terror is not about fighting terrorism at all. The US has little motivation to fight terrorism, since, relatively speaking, its population is so unthreatened by it, and it costs an extortionate amount to do, especially when compared to the costs of fighting more significant causes of preventable death, such as violent crime. For $3 trillion over 5 years, the US could have paid for 20 million extra policemen salaries (over 5 years). It could have taken major steps to reducing poverty, the prime motivating factor in crime, and thus caused the violent crime rate to plummet. But the problem with these options is that they do not serve geo-political interests, they do not grow the empire, and they do not fatten large US corporations. An excuse for militarism and expansionism takes care of this perfectly, and in the absence of the “Commie threat” as an excuse allowing for military adventurism, the “Muslim threat” fits the bill very nicely in its place.

One of the cornerstones of neo-conservative theory, formulated by Leo Strauss and propounded initially by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz – disenchanted liberals- post-Vietnam, was that liberalism has its dangers. In allowing people complete liberty of thought and action, the interests of the nation’s rulers could be compromised. So the solution is simply to still allow this liberty of thought and action, but within strictly defined parameters that would not allow for overarching geo-political goals to be interfered with. This would avoid what the neo conservatives felt to be the catastrophe of Vietnam, and the civil unrest that was so prevalent in the 1960’s. The best way of doing this, would be to unite the nation under one common goal. The most uniting form of a common goal was a common threat, since this a threat is highly compelling. If the nation as a whole could be brought upon to agree that it was faced by a massive external threat, then individuals could have the liberty they wanted, because they would be loath to jeopardise the nation’s perceived security by interfering with this threat. And thus elites would be free to pursue whatever geo-political goals they wanted, immune from the threat of interference from a placated public. The first concocted threat came from Communism, in the 70’s a non existent threat that was hyped up by the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary under Gerald Ford (1974-76) and Dick Cheney, Ford’s Chief of Staff. These same figures were to resurface under George W. Bush, and, with the knowledge of their previous experiences firmly in hand, they set about to do exactly the same thing. This time, there was no Communist threat, so the Islamic threat sufficed. This was outlined very clearly in one of the main neo-conservative policy documents, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (2000), where the primacy of a long term strategy giving the US carte blanche to project itself militarily in order to secure strategic resources was stressed by Cheney and Rumsfeld as well as Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Armitage, Scooter Libby, and other now notorious neo-cons.

The US indeed grants asylum to some of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, currently residing under diplomatic protection in Florida, engaged in countless acts of terror against the people of Latin America during the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, much of which was as part of the US’s Operation Condor plan which supported right wing military dictatorships throughout the hemisphere. One such act was indeed the bombing, in 1976 of a Cuban Airlines plane, killing all 73 civilians on board. Both were schooled at the notorious “School of the Americas”, a terrorist hothouse in Georgia, where Latin Americans receive training by the US in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tactics, including terrorism, in order that they may, upon graduation, do the US’s bidding in the hemisphere. So the US has a pretty ugly record of housing, protecting and training terrorists, such that the notion that it could be fighting a war on terror is not one that can be taken seriously.

Finally, it is essential, and another piece of uncommon common sense, that war is terror. In invading Iraq, the US has catalysed 9/11 hundreds of times over on the Iraqi people. It has caused similar catastrophe in Afghanistan. The defence may be that they are going after the “bad guys”- a term which can be easily debated- but the inevitable truth is that for every bad guy you kill, you will kill 20 innocents- these are the irrefutable facts of modern warfare. Thus in going into war you are going to kill many, many innocent people indiscriminately to attain your political/ideological goals- the textbook definition of terrorism. War is terror, and when a military machine with the might of the US army engages in a war, then terrorism gets inflicted upon people on a scale which no terrorists could ever hope to achieve.

This is common sense, and the sooner it is accepted into public consciousness in this country, the better it will be for people, no less innocent, or with no less right to peaceful lives than us, in strategically important countries for our government, who will be murdered by US/UK government terrorism in the name of a “war on terror”.