Guest Editorial 
Yanks landing on Utah beach on D-Day. While their contributions were real, their exploits would be eulogised and memorialised extravagantly by the biggest propaganda machine in history.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile the continued mental assault on what is left of public consciousness still features the idiot fiction of Russiagate, or how the evil Putin arranged to trash our great American democracy and defeat holy mother Hillary on behalf of cursed father Donald, the month of June offered not one but two major fictional treatments of historic reality to further reduce innocent minds to enslaved mentalities. The fables of D-Day, celebrated every year in glorification of a war actually won by the Soviet Union but taught as America’s gift to the global marketplace, and the unholy terror alleged by evil China in the infamous Tiananmen uprising treated here as a story worthy of creation by Disney, Spielberg, Mother Goose and Ronald Reagan combined.
While American troops paid a heavy price and contributed mightily to the victory over Germany in WW2 with the attack on the French coast memorialized as D-Day, that beachhead of some 50 miles was dwarfed by the 1500 mile wide eastern front where Russia absorbed more death and destruction than any other nation in that massive bloodbath. D-Day was a much belated response from America and Britain to endless pleas that an attack be conducted in the west to spare some of the terrible toll on Russia. That nation suffered as many as 27 million dead, entire cities and villages reduced to giant cemeteries and rubble while a post war fairy tale was spread of American GIs rescuing Europe, giving candy bars to children, creating fictional democracy and real pregnancy wherever they went. French brutality towards its women who allegedly fraternized with the German enemy, many doing so to help their families survive, was covered somewhat in newsreels released here. But American troops impregnating hordes of French women, reducing many to prostitution under conditions of wartime poverty and hardship, was hardly mentioned. The entire history of that so-called “great” war is as smothered in propaganda and fiction as any story of American conflict and we still pay a price of belief in alleged glory participating in an orgy of mass murder that may have taken the lives of far more than fifty million and was deemed totally unnecessary by many critics at the time. They, of course, were quickly labeled as fascists, communists or non-sectarian free thinkers and dismissed from any hearing by the public. Critical thinking about ruling propaganda has no place in a democracy. And boiled excrement makes for a nutritious meal.
While that war put America, untouched by any of its horror on our mainland while Europe and the Pacific were nearly destroyed, at the top of the industrial pyramid of capital by its end, its controlling global position has lasted until the present historic moment. This finds the world reeling under a series of political, economic and environmental breakdowns all due to the reduction of humanity to commodity consumers in a vast shopping mall that is reducing the planet to a garbage dump, and an ever growing ghetto of multitudes reduced to poverty while a small group enjoy riches beyond the wildest fantasies of past or present royalty. That reality has produced many conditions of revolutionary aspirations among people disgusted with the status quo, none of those having succeeded yet but some coming closer to ideals growing more necessary as more of humanity sees the potential horror of continued operation as an anti-human system of alleged democracy passing for a market place in which the rich and poor enjoy supposed equal access to the fruits of life. This political economic religious fanaticism is coming face to face with the political economic science that finds anti-social reality reducing humanity to a future that threatens to be much shorter than its past. The controlling mindset that perpetuates the madness plays a further role in the second June historic moment treated as myth by western mind management. What is called the Tiananmen “massacre” has destroyed more western consciousness than any eastern bodies allegedly taken in that event.
When Chinese seekers of more democracy and less corruption rose in protest against their government much of the organization came from outside China, in the tradition of so-called “color revolutions” of the present promoted by western capital’s agents both in and outside the country supposedly experiencing the call for freedom. More recently the events in the Ukraine were similar when an elected government was overthrown with open American involvement in league with some former Ukrainian fascists, but the 1989 demonstrations in China were not only given great coverage then but memorialized with still unsubstantiated death tolls and alleged horrors claimed which rarely if ever mention Chinese troops attacked and beaten to death by mobs of supposedly peaceful demonstrators. While originally claiming thousands killed, more recently the toll has been carefully lowered by some to hundreds, but others still shriek that thousands were murdered by the bloody monsters in China. There is as much evidence for this number of deaths as there is for Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, Israel’s great suffering at the hands of murderous Palestinians, and the injustice experienced by American women when Trump leaves the toilet seat up.
Widespread belief in these two summer fantasies of history would not last ten minutes in a nation with a truly free press able to widely distribute the stories of what actually took place, what behind the scenes activities played a role in both, and what the outcomes have actually produced. The duplicity and disinformation of much that passes for reality in the hands of stenographers and paid agents for power has led to some not believing anything they are told about anything, which is understandable but only leads to acceptance in often almost as maniacal and far fetched conclusions reached by far too many of us. But at least doubt may cause many to try to look further and find out more of what has really been kept from us and not simply relying on new fables and follies to explain old ones. A place to begin might be these two giant creations of mass mythology that could help us all learn more about the real world rather than the one presented to us by the owners and operators of our supposed democracy .
- James Russell Lowell, amended by frank scott
email: fpscott@gmail.com
