the most disturbing websites are the ones that tell the truth >> by john shirley >> *spark-online issue eleven

Maybe I’m a crank. I’ll tell you a story about me, and you decide if I’m a crank. I was in Blockbuster Video, and...

You know what Blockbuster is like. The franchise is notorious for its idiotically categorized videos. It lumps stories like Moby Dick, High Noon, and even The Killing Fields (yes! I’ve seen it there!) under the moronically vague ACTION. Riiiiight: Moby Dick is "action". The managers at Blockbusters are usually really young, and doubtless underpaid, and they’re also astoundingly ignorant about movies--so they glance at the cover of Moby Dick, see a guy throwing a weapon, and it becomes "action". It’s a drama, kids. But I’ve got news for you--some of them are even stupider than that.

There I was, browsing through the action section, when I found two documentaries under action. Non-fiction. Docs. You know? And what were they about? THE HOLOCAUST. Two documentaries about The Holocaust were filed under ACTION along with movies like Commando and Mortal Kombat and the Jackie Chan films. You look at the covers of the documentaries about the holocaust, they have pictures of guys with guns in their hands; they seem to be about war. They must be ACTION MOVIES, right? These kids don’t other even bother to read the text on the videos (which was, you know, rankly sensationalistic, like it was going to be cool mayhem one could watch for fun), which would make it clear it’s nonfiction. So I showed them to the girl in charge at the counter. I explained. I said they were mis-filed. Trying to be helpful. Also, it bothered me that documentaries about the Holocaust, the real-life murder of six million Jews and many others, would be lumped in with the Schwarzanegger flicks. Embarrassing for us all--especially in light of recent efforts by Holocaust Revisionists to try to pretend it didn’t happen.

The girl looked at me blankly. I explained again and she said, "They should probably be under Special Interest if they’re documentaries." I said right, but also--it is of course offensive to many people to lump in the Holocaust with Action...

She didn’t get that. Just stared at me. Offensive? Holocaust?

I left the videos with her to re-file. Went back ten days later--they were back under Action. This time there was a large, very large, kid with a flattop haircut watching MTV Raps on a store TV. He looked at me like a coyote caught in the headlights. I said these are in the wrong section and explained why. He said, "They’re war movies. War movies go into Action."

"No, war movies are fiction. These are not fiction. They’re documentaries. Besides...it’s offensive. You know--lumping in the Holocaust with action entertainment. Like, ‘See Six Million Jews get smoked! Action at its best.’ That’s offensive."

Blank look. I asked him if he knew what the Holocaust was. He didn’t. He was a high school graduate, a legal adult. But he didn’t know and moreover, he said, he didn’t care. "I don’t care about any of that stuff...history and shit."

"But...but all those children, gassed, murdered, it really happened...It wasn’t a war movie..."

"I don’t care."

Now, here’s my question--am I a crank for caring about this? Maybe I am. It’s just videotape filing in a video store. But were a Jew to see these documentaries on the Holocaust under Action-- a Jew, especially, who lost family in the Holocaust--I am pretty sure they’d be offended. And I too lost six million people of my race in the Holocaust--the Human Race. I’m offended.

So, like the crank I might be, I wrote a letter to Blockbuster. They never replied.

All this is intro, you know, to the following: Ignorance Rules--and the dark secrets of history will repeat themselves in the shadow of that monumental ignorance.

But those of us who think we know what history is--are often wrong. It happens that most of us are pretty much like that kid in the video store when it comes to the real picture. It’s not entirely our fault--people have been lying to us. Systematically, sometimes.

To find out who’s been lying to you, keeping us all in darkness, you can go to a group of websites that I feel are among the most disturbing, unsettling, important sites on the Internet...

These sites call the liars on their lies; they report on the real conspiracies--not the bullshit you get at the "Sightings" sites, not UFO horse-shit, not even Trilateral Commission New World Order hysteria--but the nitty-gritty, substantively documented facts. These people were the first to say what the CIA recently admitted: that there was a definite, wildly irresponsible connection between the Cocaine Cartels and the CIA as part of supporting the Contras and other CIA black projects. That the CIA deliberately turned a blind eye on the people who were behind the wave of crack cocaine usage that sickened the country (two million Americans regularly use either cocaine or methedrine, by the way).

The first of these sites to check out are www.disinfo.com - a.k.a. DISINFORMATION--an unnerving and fascinating site indeed and www.consortiumnews.com

If you go to http://www.consortiumnews.com you’ll find a great deal of alternate reporting; reporting on stuff that has been suppressed. A lot of it can be found crystallized in a book you can order there, called Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press and Project Truth. Robert Parry, author of Lost History, provides evidence, for example, that: "Sometimes the contras and other US Allies doubled as international drug traffickers exploiting their cozy relationships with the American government to smuggle cocaine into the United States..." Evidence that, not only were countless civilians slaughtered by US backed and trained forces in Latin America (200,000 in Guatemala, 70,000 in El Salvador, mostly unarmed men, women and children--children were often beaten to death and set on fire), but there’s plenty of evidence that stories about our complicities in these atrocities were suppressed at Newsweek and other publications by cronies of the CIA and right-wing hard-liners.

One of the most unnerving conclusions you have to come to after sifting through their evidence, is that the CIA and the military industrial complex puppets a great many American journalists--and many American journals. Some of it occurred ironically through a secret CIA plan called Project Truth; a project designed to manipulate public opinion to support right wing causes.

In Unreliable Sources by Martin A. Lee and Norman
Solomon (A Lyle Stuart Book, New York, 1990), journalists themselves tell you why their hands are tied:

Journalists on a beat are loath to alienate powerful sources, who might retaliate by freezing them out. Summing up the hazards of "aggressive challenges to the official version of things," Tom Wicker of the New York Times listed "lost access, complaints to editors and publishers, social penalties, leaks to competitors, a variety of responses no one wants." In order to get responses they want, reporters often cater to public officials. "Especially useful sources...are rewarded with occasional 'beat sweeteners,'" wrote Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. [...] "It is a bitter irony of source journalism," [Walter] Karp [of Harpers] wrote, "that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the 'best' sources."

For the skinny on where you’re being lied to in the press, check out the web site for FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), a public interest media watchdog group:

http://www.fair.org/

Go to http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/collections.htm and find out which journalist was murdered (and you’ll be amazed by the people who admit it’s so) by military intelligence to stop him from reporting on a software program they stole from a company that was then forced into bankruptcy...

And check out the links at these sites. They’ll take you to places like http://www.parascope.com/mx/luther1.htm. where you can get some really sound background on the likelihood that J Edgar Hoover arranged for Martin Luther King to be assassinated.

These sites update often--it’s not just old news. For example, FAIR recently reported: "Early coverage of the upcoming protests at the Republican and Democratic national conventions has followed a familiar pattern: Mainstream media are stoking fears about the potential for violence in Philadelphia and Los Angeles by rewriting the actual history of police brutality at last year's anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. In its place, media are developing a mythology of dangerous protesters who, for unspecified reasons, violently overpowered police...."

And sometimes there’s new news about old news: "On at least two occasions after Clinton's victory in 1992, Iranian emissaries told Clinton insiders that Iran was willing to turn over evidence about secret Republican contacts with Islamic radicals close to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, according to sources involved in those overtures.

But on both occasions--once as early as the Clinton transition period in late 1992 and again in 1994--Clinton spurned the offers, the sources said. He apparently feared the contacts could open him to charges of playing politics."

That’s a reference to the October Surprise conspiracy to prevent the release of the US Embassy hostages in Iran, during the Carter administration, so that Carter would lose his bid for re-election. The evidence is strong that Reagan-Bush committed treason by secretly arranging with U.S. enemies, the Iranians, to keep U.S. citizens imprisoned.

It gets scarier. Just go look. Check out the sites, read the books--and you won’t have to stare dumbly back, like a deer in the headlights, when someone tells you an uncomfortable truth...

(Note: another site with condensed info on many of these issues is www.darkecho.com/johnshirley -- click on NONFICTION, and read the piece there, for example on "political and corporate censorship".)