|
Alternative News Sites WHEN THOSE WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO WRITE THE LAW AND TO ENFORCE IT OVERTLY ACCEPT DECEPTION AS AN ACCEPTABLE MEANS, SATYAGRAHA IS THE ANSWER. M.K. GANDHI
|
| When deception is pervasive, when the conventional news media have lost credibility amongst vast sections of the population to the extent that it seems they have no more reason to exist, now more than ever we need to use all resources available to recover the truth by supporting those who base their reporting on the facts. |
|
The following websites are resources for recovering the truth Truthout www.truthout.com Common Dreams www.commondreams.org Institute for Public Accuracy www.accuracy.org DC Independent Media Center www.dc.indymedia.org BBC World Service www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice Znet www.zmag.org United for Peace www.unitedforpeace.org Culture of Peace News Network www.cpnn-usa.org Peace Media - http://www.peacejournalism.com/AboutUs.asp |
|
They say the first casualty of war is the truth. In the case of the present war, the truth died long before the first bombs fell and, like the slain soldier who is dragged through the streets and hung from a lamppost for passersby to jeer and gawk at, the truth continues to be slaughtered. It’s so easy to lie. It’s even easier to exaggerate; to deliberately deceive; to bend, stretch and otherwise manipulate the truth. And, while the “powers-that-be” may justify their massacre of the truth by telling themselves and the citizenry that it’s all for a noble cause, we will never have real peace until the truth is resurrected and becomes a given factor in foreign and domestic policy. This doesn’t mean that there can be no “state secrets,” (although in an ideal world there would be no need for them). A resurrection of the truth in government policies would simply mean that what a government tells its citizens and the rest of the world is fact, not fiction or fantasy. The reasons given for invading Iraq were fiction; the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a gross distortion of the truth, the Jessica Lynch rescue was a fairy tale. It goes on and on. By continuing to use words and phrases that have been skillfully employed to invoke fear, hatred and divisiveness the government attempts to hold the citizenry in a state of high anxiety. And they are very successful. That high
anxiety is the general state of our society can hardly be questioned when
9.2 % of the US population over 12 years of age suffers from substance dependence
or abuse* And that doesn’t even take into account those people
who use mood altering drugs but aren’t considered abusers.
The fact that they have become an accepted element in our lives is
evidenced by the open and constant effort on the part of the
pharmaceutical companies to market these products directly to the public.
For far too many people (adults and children alike) life has become
an ongoing anxiety attack and can only be tolerated (or so they believe)
with the help of chemical intervention. In
psychiatry anxiety is defined as “abnormal fear that lacks a specific
cause,” an accurate description of the state of our society.
We may think we know the cause of our fear but we’re really not
certain. There is this
nagging sense of doubt as to the validity of the information being fed to
us by the major media, a doubt that is ever more frequently, reinforced
by the eventual validation of the information offered by the so-called
alternative news sources. We
know that there is something to fear but we don’t know exactly what it
is, and we suspect that our own government may be as much of a threat to
our peace and security as is the illusive “enemy.” So how can we
go about breaking the cycle of lies and fear and violence?
For starters we can stop the feeding frenzy that occurs whenever
something scandalous or tragic happens.
We are spellbound by the morbid details of murder trials that have
nothing to do with our lives, sex
scandals involving the lives of the rich and famous, scenes of carnage and
chaos created by acts of war and terrorism.
We need to know what is happening in this world; we do not need to
wallow in misery and disaster. The
tendency to do so and the resultant state of increased anxiety is a
symptom of the sickness of our society and, like constantly picking at an
open wound, if we are ever going to get well we cannot keep aggravating
the symptoms.
|