From Eric Arnow, our BumbleBuddist from the CWG (China Writer’s Group)

Table of Contents

Historical Denial and Nihilistic Thinking
You Can Learn a Lot by Talking with People and Listening to What They Say
Willful Avoidance of Reality
Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter Speaks
Conspiracy Theory As Rationalization
Nihilistic Thinking As a Psychological Defense Against Objective Facts and Truth
The Cure for Historical Denial and Nihilistic Thinking—Truth and Reconciliation
Do the United States and the European Colonial States Have the Courage to Look in the Mirror?

Billions of People. Just Living Out Their Lives. Oblivious.

You Can Learn a Lot by Talking with People and Listening to What They Say

Willful Avoidance of Reality

I was staying at a resort in 2022, and had a short discussion with an Israeli, regarding pursuit of truth. He said, that he preferred ignorance, because he wants to be happy, and truth is painful. Two years later, after experiencing ethnic cleansing, constant attacks, blockading food and other essential supplies. Palestinian militants broke out of what has been called ‘the world’s largest open air prison’—Gaza.

It attacked Israeli military bases, and settlements that are both civilian and military, and about 1200 people were killed. And several hundred hostages taken. The Palestinians demanded that they be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinians, many of whom are minors, who’ve been in prison for many years.

We also learn through investigative journalist at the Grayzone, that the Israeli military itself attacked its own people in its confusion, or even worse, to prevent them being taken as hostages.

The Israelis say the attack was unprovoked and unjustified. However, international law says that an occupied people have the right to resist their oppressors. One way to determine reality is to go back to original sources. See below for who said is the source of the problem.

Israeli society is deeply fragmented, many soldiers have been killed, maimed and traumatized out of guilt for their own behavior. And of course, it’s even worse for the Palestinians.

All these consequences result because 90% of Israelis refuse to face the painful truth about the founding of Israel. But the truth has been spelled out quite clearly in Einstein’s 1948 Letter to the New York Times, cosigned by 28 prominent Jews. And yet, Zionists insist that they speak for all Jews. Another lie.

This is willful not just avoidance, but rejection of both historical and present day reality.

“Of relevance to recent developments in Israel, we bring to the attention of our readers the following letter by Albert Einstein, et al, to the NYT published on December 4, 1948.

It is of utmost significance to reflect upon a historical process initiated at very outset of the State of Israel.

What is outlined in this letter depicting the atrocities committed against the people of Palestine in 1948 in the Village of Deir Yassin vividly describe what is currently ongoing, more than 75 years later in the State of Israel.”

Albert Einstein’s 1948 Letter to the NYT Warning Of Zionist Fascism In Israel

Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter Speaks

Here are two quotes from his iconic acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize:

….the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

And here, Pinter points directly at the problem of historical denial, about US foreign policy:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Conspiracy Theory As Rationalization

Another example of this avoidance is the notion of Conspiracy Theory. One of the biggest functions of mass media in Manufacturing Consent, is the use of a government concocted narrative foisted on the public as ‘What Really Happened’.

The problem that The-Powers-That-Be face, is that some of their pesky citizens question the narrative. They notice anomalies and contradictions to the official story. One of the most famous is the “Magic Bullet Theory” which took the life of President John F. Kennedy. This bullet took various turns in trajectory. Along with it was the narrative of ‘The Lone Gunman’. A conspiracy implies more than one person involved in a crime. Subsequent investigation proved that 8 bullets were fired. From different directions.

So, when the Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination was carefully examined, and it became obvious that it was a coverup, the idea appeared that those who questioned ‘the official narrative’ were engaged in ‘Conspiracy Theories’. Ahh….but who came up with the idea, the term, “Conspiracy Theory”?

It was none other than the CIA, who has been deeply implicated in JFK’s death!

Indeed, Allan Dulles, CIA director, was fired by Kennedy for the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco. And yet, who did the Warren Commission put in charge of vetting evidence? Allen Dulles! It’s like asking a bank robber to investigate a robbery.

And it’s the CIA who tells you not to consider an obvious conflict of interest in the investigation, right in front of your nose. “It’s all a Conspiracy Theory”.

“In 2013 Professor Lance Dehaven-Smith in a peer-reviewed book published by the University of Texas Press showed that the term “conspiracy theory” was developed by the CIA as a means of undercutting critics of the Warren Commission’s report that President Kennedy was killed by Oswald. The use of this term was heavily promoted in the media by the CIA. https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Theory-America-Discovering/dp/0292757697/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1471971025&sr=1-1&keywords=Conspiracy+Theory+in+America

It is ironic that the American[FAKE__Ed.] left is a major enforcer of the CIA’s strategy to shut up skeptics by branding them conspiracy theorists.”

The reason why the majority of people believe some form of ‘the official story’ is because it has been a long term project of Manufacturing Consent.

Nihilistic Thinking As a Psychological Defense Against Objective Facts and Truth

So, how do people manage to ‘keep their sanity’, which is in fact insanity posing as ‘normal’?

The people who maintain narrative control use cynical methods to prevent people from facing REALITY.

For example, President Obama, when faced with former crimes committed by the United States, said something to the effect, that ‘well, what’s past is past, let’s just forget it and move on.”

Imagine a convicted killer saying to the judge, sure I killed them, but let’s move on.

Another technique is to introduce a number of conflicting ‘conspiracy theories’ which confuse and exhaust people’s ability to think critically. So before the first Iraq War, a PR firm got a young woman to testify ‘Saddam’s soldiers threw babies out of incubators, to let them die on the cold floor. Or Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, which turned out didn’t exist.

This is an example of the highly successful Big Lie of the CIA director, Bill Casey, who said

But the more pernicious approach that people take—and I see many people, when faced with uncomfortable facts that contradict their delusion—is to negate the existence of objective truth.

This phenomenon was first pointed out by the Indian philosopher, Nagarjuna. He pointed out that it is easy to negate a particular proposition logically, but then people go on to negate objective fact. With this type of thinking, people are susceptible to believing that 2 + 2 may sometime equal 5, not 4.

It’s easy to simply disregard everything as unknowable. I run into people all the time with this attitude. Still, try walking across a street in traffic, not looking both ways.

“It’s all a matter of opinion”

“We will never really know because it’s in the past, and people simply have different perspectives.”

“It’s all too complicated”.

This is a lazy, insincere attitude to avoid taking responsibility. Most Americans don’t give a second thought to the genocide against the Native Americans, or slavery and racist attitudes towards African peoples. They don’t notice that the same casual attitude towards those outrages manifests in the millions of victims of US wars of conquest in Hawaii, the Philippines in the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries. “Oh, it was so long ago, and we’re not like that anymore”.

It allows them to overlook the mass deaths of civilians in Dresden Germany, the Tokyo Firebombings, the two atomic bombs in Japan in WWII, or the 2 million deaths at Stalingrad. The justification for actual war crimes allowed the perpetrators to rationalize their crimes. “Oh, but that happened so long ago”

The same is true of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and all the post September 11th, 2001 wars, all based on lies. Justifying mass murder….”Oh, it was all a mistake”, “Nothing to be done about it now”. Or worse, “They deserved it”. And the, if I may say so, craziest, cruelest formulation, “It was God’s will”.

“The American people are good people”—George Bush. Well, it’s largely true but they’re gullible. In a recent Facebook comment, someone naively asked, ‘so why did Russia invade Ukraine’? Where has she been for the last 10 years, indeed, the last 30 years of United States’ broken treaties and promises given Russia? Or the incessant shelling by a coup government installed by Joe Biden in 2014, of citizens of their own country, who had the silly idea that the new regime was illegal, and bent on their destruction based on their ethnicity?

The problem in all this is that, while it looks like nobody has been or will be held accountable, eventually, ‘The chickens come home………to roost’.

Thus, this nihilistic attitude is a psychological defense.

The Cure for Historical Denial and Nihilistic Thinking—Truth and Reconciliation

Following the decades long struggle by Africans to free themselves from racist, settler colonialism in South Africa, a Truth and Reconciliation commission sought to hold those accountable. And to acknowledge and apologize for past crimes. The way to do that is to go back and look at the historical record.

Do the United States and the European Colonial States Have the Courage to Look in the Mirror?

As this article is being written, there are two horrific wars going on. Both based on lies and exploitation.

The British are notorious for cooking up lies and accusations in order to justify to themselves as well as to others, the attacks on various countries. “Russia is a great threat to England”. They repeat this again and again. So how real is this threat?

How many times in history has Russia invaded or attacked England? Answer: Zero.

How many times have the British attacked Russia? 3 times:

The Crimean War of 1853-56

After the 1917 Russian Socialist Revolution, 14 countries invaded Russia to ‘strange Socialism in its crib’.

Currently British missiles are hitting Russian targets, launched from Ukraine. And the UK’s role in fomenting the current war is self evident: In April 2022, Russia went in to Ukraine, worked on a negotiated settlement in Istanbul. But Boris Johnson insisted that Ukraine keep fighting. So did the US, as Senator Lindsay Graham insist that Ukraine fight Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian.” The Ukrainian official, Ermak, inconveniently admitted Johnson’s sabotaging peace.

British accusations appear to be more psychological projection of their own obsessive hatred of Russia. I’ll bet that if Russia ever retaliates, the hapless public will say, gee, why did they do that to us?

The question is, when people’s psyches are so heavily defended that they either deny the truth, or become openly hostile to the question, how can we face the past, face current reality?

Worse yet, as the saying goes, “if you can convince people that absurdities are true, you can convince them to commit atrocities”. Instead consider this story.

The people of Kalama asked the Buddha who to believe out of all the ascetics, sages, venerables, and holy ones who, like himself, passed through their town. They complained that they were confused by the many contradictions they discovered in what they heard. The Kalama Sutta is the Buddha’s reply.

– Do not believe anything on mere hearsay.
– Do not believe in traditions merely because they are old and have been handed down for many generations and in many places.
– Do not believe anything on account of rumors or because people talk a a great deal about it.
– Do not believe anything because you are shown the written testimony of some ancient sage.
– Do not believe in what you have fancied, thinking that, because it is extraordinary, it must have been inspired by a god or other wonderful being.
– Do not believe anything merely because presumption is in its favor, or because the custom of many years inclines you to take it as true.
– Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and priests.
– But, whatever, after thorough investigation and reflection, you find to agree with reason and experience, as conducive to the good and benefit of one and all and of the world at large, accept only that as true, and shape your life in accordance with it.

The same text, said the Buddha, must be applied to his own teachings.
– Do not accept any doctrine from reverence, but first try it as gold is tried by fire.

So don’t take my word for it…test it for yourself. Question Everything.