What Secrets Lurk

The audience here on the Far Side is split more or less 50-50, Eastern and Western hemispheres, with a slight bias to the West, since I write in English and deal a lot with the USA and how it is screwing up the world.

Because of the split, I get some interesting email in response to my posts.  Westerners (primarily US) challenge my assertions regarding the complete bollocks that the US is making of the world.  The Easterners tend to want me to defend or justify the US' actions, and for that, I am the wrong person to ask.

Here's the problem: Westerners are completely surrounded with a highly scientific, psychology-based propaganda machine that against which every other system in history pales in comparison.  I can say this because I have a degree in mass media and have worked in it most of my adult life.  I not only studied the theory behind it, but actively produced it until I awoke one day realizing what I had done.

On the other hand, we have the rest of the world, who are subject to their own countries' propaganda, but which is far less sophisticated (outside the BBC and ZRD), and for the most part provides a foil to the CNN/NBC/Disney narrative.

What happens is that the Western media (US) tells everyone how justified the US is in bombing the crap out of everyone, and the audience only sees those results they are allowed to see.  The rest of the world sees the truth, or at least a hell of a lot more of it.

Here's a good example:

Recently, the US media played non-stop propaganda concerning Holocaust Day.  Now before you switch off (as you are programmed to do), how come that day didn't acknowledge the Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Armenian, Serbian, German (not the Jews), Native American, Native Australian, nor Indian holocausts?  Why is Holocaust Day only for Jews?  Why don't we hear about all the others throughout history?

Muslim forces have slaughtered over 80 million Hindus over the past 500 years.  Stalin killed anywhere from 25 million to 50 million (no one knows for sure) Russians.  The British mowed down millions of aboriginals in Australia, and Spain, Portugal, the US and UK killed millions of American inhabitants across the Americas, in some cases wiping out entire civilizations.  Hundreds or thousands of German civilians died in Allied carpet bombing at the end of WW2 (see Dresden).  God only knows how many Semitic (not Jews) people have been wiped out in the past 1,000 years of Crusades and wars in the Middle East. Mao slaughtered untold millions during the Cultural Revolution - we won't even go into the Mongol hoarde at this time.

The reason you never hear of these is because it doesn't fit the narrative.  For the most part, history is a fairy tale built by the ruling elite to both promote ignorance and to install certain psychological hot buttons that can be pushed from time to time, when wars are needed.  For Americans, this is a particularly egregious problem.

Americans are surrounded on all sides with approved stories.Even when they think they have broken through, such as during the Trump selection, they have in fact only entered a boundary layer that prevents them from seeing the real world.

Americans barely speak English, much less any other languages, and when they travel, they only go to sanitized tourist spots, where they stay in Holiday Inns, eat at McDonald's and watch CNN International.  In other words, the American ideal vacation is moving their living room couch to someplace with a different view.

Europeans are only slightly less provincial, in that they can drive an hour or two and hear another language, but centuries of monarchy has ingrained servitude into their very genes.  The French and the Catalonians appear to be the only ones left with strong emotions about liberty and freedom.  We shall see what the outcomes of Catalonia's independence movement and France's elections will be.

I focus on the West, because that is my native culture, but here in Indonesia, no one ever talks about, much less learns about the East Timor genocide.  The Chinese rarely acknowledge Mao's purges.  There's a movement in Russia to finally bury Lenin, since no one wants to be reminded of that era in their history.

The fact of the matter is the Holocaust Day has been usurped by Israel as a means to install guilt in as many people as possible as a means of control.  Yet, Israel claims the Bible is its title and deed to the land, conveniently glossing over pages and pages of wholesale slaughter in the same book.

Every single (surviving) culture on Earth, except maybe the Icelanders (though they are Norse descendants), is guilty of genocide.  This is a problem endemic to the human race against itself, not of some privileged group who gets to claim sole right to be a victim.

The holocaust of World War 2 is neither the most recent, nor the most savage.  In the scheme of things, it rates probably in the middle somewhere, along side Pol Pot's 3 million victims, or the US' 8 million and counting.

Here's a radical idea: instead of singling out one group of victims from all the others, why don't we use Holocaust Day to look at humanity and what part of ourselves causes such horrors?

It's not so much the Hitlers, Pol Pots and Stalins of the world we need to worry about, nor their victims, but why so many of us follow such people down the path of Darkness.  These people could not have murdered millions without We the People aiding and abetting their crimes.

What is it about the human condition that convinces so many people that mass murder is an acceptable solution to any problem?  Why is it the Social Justice Warriors think attacking and beating people who don't agree is acceptable?  Why do the NeoCons think it is just fine to wipe out entire countries?  And why do these groups find followers to do the dirty work?

The point of Holocaust Day is not the victims.  We are all victims in some way or another of mass murder.  Instead, why did the Milgram experiment show that people so willingly follow authority?  That is what we need to change.

Celebrating victimhood perpetuates victimhood.  Let's use this opportunity to question authority and find within ourselves that part of our psyche that surrenders to immoral leaders.

We, as individuals, are not absolved from guilt because everyone else does it. or because we are ordered to do it.  No victim is more special than another, and no perpetrator is less guilty.

Oh, and Jews don't get a free pass to slaughter Palestinians just because their ancestors suffered.