The sound of silence on Iraq
But who cares, right? Leave it to the historians; maybe they will.
I care, of course. But then, who am I? Just an evil neocon.
[ADDENDUM: There’s bad news, as well. But this sort of thing will continue to occur for some time, and does not negate the widespread progress. It just reminds us of the nature of this particular enemy.]
shame… they cant report that an election happened, and the people voted, and got their way… isnt that what the soviets and communists promise to give us?
and the historians will erase this from history since they are stalinist (revisionists), attempting to use the remolded past to create the future.
habit of changing the past to suit himself and his ideology, coupled with the complete disappearance of Stalin’s former colleagues from state photographs, formed the basis of Winston Smith’s job at the ministry of information. My wife is Russian, and I have often mentioned to her that studying history in the USSR is the only time when it was really fun to be a historian, because if the facts didn’t conform to your hypothesis or ideology, there was no need to change your opinion. If you were high enough in the Party, you could just change the past instead.
Stalin’s control of the borders and literature, his employment of children to spy on their ideologically impure parents, and his complete state control of the media, formed additional elements of the world of 1984. Also derived from observations of Russia are the universal unsmiling, humorless, ash-gray look of the people, and the ubiquitous outdated technology.
Stalin, however, was never strong on salesmanship and psychology. Rather than convincing people of his positions, he preferred killing them if they disagreed. But they were never really persuaded. They just learned to shut up. Russians didn’t have a completely accurate picture of the world because the state controlled their information, but they have been a cynical and intellectual people throughout their cultural history, and have always been distrustful of their leadership. Their artists and writers had the same problems before Communism. Let’s face it, they got the gist of what was going on in their country. Pretty much every educated Russian knew that the whole system was bullshit; they just couldn’t do anything about it. Rather than a Russia-like country where jaded people secretly laugh at their government, Orwell wanted a more sinister, insidious state presence for his future world. He wanted a society where the populace actually believed the official state bullshit. He had to turn, therefore, to the recently defeated empire of Nazi Germany to provide the spirit of his propaganda machine. The contribution of Nazi Germany to the Orwell vision was that Goebbels actually got people to believe his lies through a systematic program starting with children’s education and moving into patriotic public rallies, always keeping the people inspired to fight against real or imaginary threats, always allowing people to blame internal and external bugbears for the fact that conditions were not better. http://www.scoopy.com/1984.htm
so this inconvenient thing that shows they were wrong will just disappear..
go here and you can see the process as it REALLY was done!!!
Falsification of history
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html
of course now with photoshop, one can not only remove people, but one can add people, and even make birth certs appear when conveniently needed.
they show how images are manipulated in the AMERICAN press… using oj simpson.. comparing the time magazine cover with newsweeks (do note that time has been a communist shill since its earliest days. mao, stalin, hitler, putin, obama, were all men of the year)
by the way… nikolai yezhov, who is removed in one of the pics, looks exactly like obama.
images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/10/31/128699344183421821.jpg
i have argued over photos, being a photographer and and artist, i can tell when shadows are wrong… and when fine things are out of place (drawing makes you compare your mind model with reality, and so you see more reality if you learn to draw).
the fact that the news is not covering it, is already erasing it from history.. just as in 20 years we go back and read old articles to construct history texts!!
here is a fun(?) slide show as to how powerful these people become after there are no limits imposed by the people any more. of course this uses stalin, but rather than miss the point, try to look at the time spans… when the bad started… dont assume it was day one… take a look how history and such was constantly being rewritten..
then talk to a lefty in the US today… talk about winter soldier… a false history… winter soldier ii, another false history… mccarthyism being created by an accused later confirmed spy named lattimore, is false history. arafat as a leader for freedom and not a kgb man is false history. if we dont include mitroken in our discussions, we are discussing a false history!!!!
my dads job when i was growing up was to retouch slides by hand to make them show other things.
and do not think those times are over!!! that is a fatal mistake… take a look at the names of the people who are still in power in the other countries, they were young men in the middle of these regimes and running them… some of them close to stalin. the chinese too… when did they ever change their life long leaders? they still force sterilize, have gulags, and use death as a means of controlling people. what changed other than OUR perception of the same thing?
which is the whole point… to change our perception to change the actions we choose to take, the sides we choose to be on, and the decisions we choose in politics and life.
Gee, guys and gals, I sure saw some coverage that Saturday on NBC and Fox. Happy, smiling faces, purple(or were they blue? My TV’s color is fading) fingers once again, how peaceful it all was, etc.
It was brief, mid-show blurb coverage, not the stimulus bill headliners, but it was out there if anyone was looking.
The Iraq War served its purpose: a vehicle for agitation against George Bush. Now with the Messiah (not so firmly) esconced in the White House, Iraq is a page 17 story.
I said it before, I’ll say it again: We won, and we won big! “In your face!” to those shameful cowards who opposed the war just because it was something to hit the former president on. Then again, maybe I should change my attitude to match their’s – the facts, however interesting, are irrelevant.
I hope the Iraqis appreciate the cost to us for what we gave them. We now have a socialist president that skated into office based on a meaningless vote against their liberation and repeated (albeit disingenuous) attempts to sell them into nearly certain genocide in his two years pretending to be a US Senator.
The war was the wedge used by Democrats to grab all of the governmental power they needed to destroy our own liberty in the name of a faux economic stimulus bill. “We’re all socialists now,” Newsweek proudly claims. Yes, and we’re all wage-slaves to the new Obama/Pelosi/Reid World Order.
Really, I am happy for the Iraqis, but I do hope they recognize the price that we paid for their freedom.
Thomas Ricks on the current situation in Iraq:
Amazon.com: And so we get back to the first part of your first answer. As impressive and necessary as the surge may have been, where has it brought us? Have the unreconciled sides merely marshaled their forces for a later conflict? When the Sadrists so suddenly went to ground, what moment do you think they were waiting for? Has their hand been strengthened or weakened in the meantime?
Ricks: I think the message of my book Fiasco was that Iraq 2006 was worse than you think, while the message of The Gamble is that Iraq 2009 isn’t as good as you think.
The surge has brought us to an uncertain place. No one knows if there will be full-blown civil war in Iraq. Indeed, no one even knows the real strength of the Sadrists at this point. Or whether the Baghdad government indeed will keep its promises to bring into the fold the former Sunni insurgents who have been on the American payroll for the last 18 months. In fact, none, not one, of the major political questions that faced Iraq before the surge have been resolved–and the purpose of the surge, we were told, was to create the space to solve them.
My real worry is that all those tensions still exist, but all sides in Iraq are militarily stronger than they were a couple of years ago, because we have trained and armed a Shiite-dominated Iraqi army, but also helped organize the Sunni insurgents now known as the “Sons of Iraq.”
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/02/tom-ricks-on-the-gamble-in-iraq.html