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One of the ironic rhetorical events of President Trump’s presidency was how the term ‘Big Lie’ entered the popular lexicon. Deployed against Trump in December 2020 for his claim that the November election was stolen, the term belies its actual use against the American people. The fact that the Dems were now using language used by conspiracy theorists suggests, by way of projection, that Big Lies really do occur, Trump’s example only a clumsy attempt. There are numerous Big Lies that we live with in our political history. But we live with them silently, a taboo topic, induced by propaganda and mis and dis information, leading to cognitive dissonance. The nature of living with a lie is to be silent about it.
Fran Shur’s long essay, “Why do good people go silent – or worse – about 9/11?” explores the range of psychological reactions and responses an individual and a group go through in the face of a horrible event that is covered up with a false narrative. Shur explores why most of us slip into silence as a way to cope and avoid the crisis of consciousness, the pain of having to face the possibility of a harsh and uncomfortable truth. Her analysis focuses on the 9/11 events but applies equally to earlier crimes done in the 1960’s as well as the more recent Big Lie of the Federal Covid response.
Getting out in front of the Big Lies should be the goal of any sincere liberation movement; liberation must confront the problem of lies and deception perpetrated by the deep state, and make accountability for these crimes the fulcrum point against which we lever to transform society.
By appealing to indignation at Federal complicity in state crimes, and engaging in basic truth telling, showing the evidence, speaking to concrete facts, we can dispel the false narratives and conceivably mobilize a sufficient mass of the population to compel change. By shining the light of political truth, based on considerations of motive, benefit, we can show by a preponderance of evidence, even beyond a doubt, that state crimes have been and are being committed, that they are covered up with a false narrative, which becomes a crime on top of a crimes. The time has come to say enough is enough and justice be done.
We in the truth movement are naturally skeptical of government reports and resist Big Lies, but those who are trusting of the government are quickly caught up in the official narrative. When challenged to consider the lie, if they weren’t suspicious in the first place, most fall into the spell of cognitive dissonance. For example, when presented with evidence that deep state operators committed a crime, a common response is: “my government would never do that…” This is a familiar refrain that reflects cognitive dissonance. To which one may reply: “well, your government didn’t do that, but the deep state did, and government agencies enabled the cover up.”
Cognitive Dissonance Defined:
“Humans resort to denial to avoid the anxiety that accompanies cognitive dissonance — that uncomfortable, sometimes disturbing feeling of losing our emotional equilibrium when we are faced with new information that challenges our worldview or when we hold beliefs that contradict known facts. The discomfort motivates us to change our behavior, change our cognition, and/or justify our behavior by acquiring a secondary cognition. This dynamic is common to us all”. By Frantz Fanon
To us political truthers, we sensed, or smelled a rat, in the 9/11 events, and in Covid 19, and some old enough to remember, doubted the explanations for the 1960’s assassinations.
The purpose of a Big Lie is to cover up an actual crime whether caused by deep state or corporate actors. For example, the Warren Commission Report on JFK assassination is a Big Lie, as is the 9/11 Commission report. Lies were told by corporations about tobacco and Federal authorities lied about cannabis hemp to get it outlawed in 1938, and more recently lies have been told about the safety of chemicals. The list of lies is quite long. And most damaging, the Big Lies that covered up the 1960’s assassinations, in effect, robbed society of the historical possibilities each murdered leader would have provided were they to live a full life.
Origin of Big Lie
The idea of a “Big Lie” is traceable to Hitler and the chief military leaders in the German NAZI Party who bragged about being able to manipulate the masses by telling a Big Lie. The sheer preposterousness of the lie would dispel any consideration that it is a lie at all. Be sure to read Fran Shur’s chapter in its entirety as she provides a review of the story behind the Big Lie. By accepting the official narrative even though a lie, it enables one to avoid facing the horrible truth. The lie is advanced to conceal, but then is accepted by the victims as a way to avoid the reality that society was lied to.
When national leaders advance a Big Lie they in effect force a false narrative onto popular consciousness. Through a media blitz, wherein the deep state ‘floods the zone,’ the people are pressed into accepting mis and dis-information that they then navigate by going into cognitive dissonance; or they wade in on ‘group think’ where we go along to get along, and other forms of ‘manufactured consent’ conditioning that enable us to live with the lie.
Skeptics and the gullible alike must navigate the shoals of cognitive dissonance, which means among family and friends who accept the official narratives, we must decide to co-exist in silence or challenge the lie with truth.
Challenging cognitive dissonance
When a Big Lie is brought up for discussion / debate, it is common for those with cognitive dissonance to put up their hands, or roll their eye balls, and say we will never know the truth; the evidence doesn’t prove anything, they might say, or that the truth is too complicated, too disputed, there is no certainty about what happened, so forget about it. The crime and the Big Lie are water under the bridge, so don’t discuss the matter; it is a waste of time. These arguments against exploring the truth about Big Lies belie the anxiety and discomfort that is cognitive dissonance.
To counteract the lies, as many are doing, we must educate, speak out, normalize debate about the Big Lies. We must advance a justice movement that criticizes state crimes explicitly, and demand that key bad actors be held to account. By showing how fundamentally corrupt our system is, we make the case that the leaders within our ‘duopolistic’ two party system have lost the right to govern on account of not doing the duty of Congress to “protect the general welfare”. We are impelled to withdraw our consent to be governed, and by mass mobilization we can force change, theoretically.
Breaking the mental shackles of Big Lies is the business of the political truth movement. Understanding patterns of deception is central to the work of Daniel Broudy at Propaganda in Focus.
Aside from understanding how our collective mind is captured by propagandists, Green Liberty invites a liberation coalition as one of the next steps we the people can take to advance freedom against the emerging techno-totalitarianism. But first we must free our mind of cognitive dissonance.
September 11, 2001 Big Lie
The events of 9/11 were traumatic to the nation and the world. At 8:15am on the west coast, I watched on TV the North and South Towers collapse after an airplane hit each one.
The country was in a state of shock. Immediately, a false narrative to explain the inexplicable acted as an additional psychic trauma to what our common senses told us was going on: that we were being misled.
Fran Shur explains the trauma syndrome that conditions our thinking. Being forced to accept Big Lies is a form of violence. To face a lie, what Thomas Merton called the ‘unspeakable,’ is hard and it is understandable that one would go into cognitive dissonance as a natural protection against the reality of a horrible truth.
We the people are abused into accepting an explanation that violates common sense. Dare present an alternative narrative, and you are tarred with being a ‘conspiracy theorist’, or called another slur. So speaking truth to power, as it were, does require nerve, but it is a healthy response to a lie.
The initial reaction to the Towers’ collapse based on first hand accounts, and what one could see with one’s own eyes from the television images, was that the buildings imploded and collapsed into the building footprint. The complete implosion was triggered by initial successive explosions that initiated collapse of each tower into its footprint.
Against logic and common sense, the official reports on the Towers’ and Building 7 collapse denied first hand accounts of explosions, and evidence of thermite / thermate explosives was covered up, showing how a state crime is done. The official narrative holds that fire heated the steel girders and weakened the holdings and then the buildings collapsed; “pancaked,” said Dick Cheney and others. Right away, the official narrative emerged: hijackers crashed the planes and then the buildings “pancaked,” reported a parade of media lies that played out over the next 24 hours; Osama Bin Laden was quickly identified as master mind in the media, a team of Saudi Arabian hijackers were identified and printed on front page news. However, Bin Laden was never listed on the FBI most wanted list.
The 9/11 Commission, and the National Institute for Structure and Technology, provided an explanation for what happened, but it has been debunked as a false report beyond a doubt. There was not an actual criminal / forensic investigation of the Towers and Building 7. An engineering team from the University of Fairbanks Alaska determined after a 4 year study that fires did not cause the Building 7 collapse, finding the NIST report erroneous.
The Commission was precluded from considering events prior to 9/11, or many other pieces of evidence. The official reports do not consider explosions to explain the collapse.
Meanwhile, a preponderance of evidence shows the official explanations are false narratives, that the crime scenes were covered up, and that the official explanations qualify as a really Big Lies.
The public doesn’t buy the official narratives
The 9/11 Truth Movement was onto the lie from the beginning. By 2004 a full 45% of Americans didn’t accept the Federal explanation of the 9/11 events.
Today 75 – 80% of the American people, depending on the day you ask, do not accept the official narrative about the JFK assassination that poses a lone gunman anti-conspiracy criminal theory for the president’s murder. The majority of Americans do not accept the Warren Commission Report as the truth.
The official explanations for the 1960’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Fred Hampton, have all been debunked as false narratives based on contradictory evidence, and cover up of the crimes implicate the FBI and state and local police agencies. The FBI does not deny its role in Hampton’s assassination.
There is a call for Congress to conduct investigations to get accountability for the assassinations.
Aside from Big Lies, there are also the endless small lies: the October Surprise that denied Jimmy Carter a second term. This involved Bush Senior negotiating with the Iranians while a candidate for vice – president (in violation of the Logan Act) to hold hostages until after Reagan was elected president. This later led to the Iran / Contra arms sales that engendered the Crack Cocaine epidemic, a story broken by Gary Webb. All this subterfuge is sustained over generations by what Peter Dale Scott calls Continuity of Government (COG) in which Dick Cheney has a long history of involvement including doing damage control around the Iran / Contra event.
The March 2003 decision to go to war against Iraq was based on false claims of weapons of mass destruction, and the weaponized Anthrax attack on Democratic Senators enabled quick passage of the Patriot Act, a 1000 page tome that was at the ready and passed within weeks of the 9/11 attacks.
And there are the daily state crimes conducted by police officers who fail to follow the law, and innocent people end up dead, or unnecessarily incarcerated by the overuse of police power and prosecutorial zeal.
COVID Big Lie
At the end of January 2020, under cover of Covid, National Security protocols were put in place to make the SARS Cov2 operations opaque. In February a formal national health emergency was declared and by March, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic and this triggered the full blown Federal Covid Response: lockdowns, quarantines, and warp speed deployment of Covid countermeasures. The Covid lockdowns were intended to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed (remember flatten the curve), so we shut down society.
A host of lies were deployed: from the need for economic lockdowns; to the faulty PCR testing set to an excessively high threshold cycle; to the need for quarantine; to the denial of repurposed medicine to treat Covid infections; to the illegal application for Emergency Use for vaccines given efficacy of anti-viral drugs; and ultimately, a major false claim that the Covid vaccines are “safe and effective,” and by implication were manufactured according to Best Manufacturing Practices, which they weren’t.
Mainstream Media is guilty of colluding with the Federal authorities to censor speech that was critical of the Federal Covid Response. Robert Kennedy is suing President Biden for violating his free speech rights based on Biden asking Facebook to censor Kennedy.
We remain ensnared in the Covid lie evidenced by silence about SARS Coronavirus research and the evidence of patented genetic gain of function technology, some owned by the Department of Defense. The DOD was the behind-the-scenes actual authority behind the Federal Covid Response to produce vaccines at ‘warp speed.’, and mandate the vaccine countermeasure to an unsuspecting public. Watch this video with Katherine Watt and Sasha Latypova explain the situation.
While a national campaign to ‘stop and recall’ the Covid vaccines should be in the news, mainstream media is silent about the real evidence of harm being caused. Meanwhile, the FDA / CDC continue to claim the vaccine is appropriate for children, and seniors and immune compromised. Heart injuries and blood clotting are dismissed as “rare” and “mild” and not a reason to discontinue the Covid vaccines. The blatantly brazen dissembling leaves one in a Twilight Zone of bent reality.
Conditioning the masses to accept a false narrative
Being pressed into accepting a big lie forces cognitive dissonance and this pressure event takes a toll on our consciousness, collectively and individually. The lie, as an insult to our senses, is a slap in the face of our intelligence. The lie is a hidden-transgression of mental media manipulation that turns us into victims of a form of Stockholm Syndrome; we identify sympathetically with our captors; we don’t want to upset them by questioning the logic of the lie.
So, as happens in ‘talk therapy,’ we the people living in a sea of Big Lies need to talk about state crimes to undo our collective cognitive dissonance, to be healed of the trauma of a false narrative. If we don’t do this, a liberation movement may not develop the strength of conviction and nerve, to restore democracy to our republic; otherwise, the country will remain captive to a deep state plutocracy that masterfully uses the media to make cognitive dissonance the escape valve from facing the fact that our leaders lie to us about so many things.
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This article was originally published on Green Liberty Caucus.
