The False Claim: Bad Wars
Chapter Ten
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.
+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.
+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.
+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.
+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.
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Understanding patterns is how science predicts future outcomes. Without adequate knowledge (or memory) of The Pattern we’ve been examining, we might treat every inciting incident separate from that, and then The Playbook can have its way with us.
It wasn’t shocking or reprehensible that in October of 2023 most Americans felt more empathy than suspicion towards Israel’s argument that they should defend themselves. But, pattern recognition does not bother with feelings or rationalizations for them. The only concern is whether or not the patterns are present. The emotions and sympathies are what the campaign uses to engineer consent so those can be seen as more a red flag than a justification.
Like in the Bad Boyfriend relationship, when you find yourself in the middle of some circular head games where accusations of lies are defended by endless Bad Arguments and gaslighting—is when he has you where he wants you. He doesn’t have to be right, he has you, there in his orbit, as opposed to out the door and moving in the opposite direction. With a Bad Boyfriend or a Bad Campaign, we don’t want to get lost in the weeds of that warfare. In both situations, the adversary knows our vulnerabilities so we want to avoid that kind of hand to hand combat and bypass the extended exchange all together. He/They lied before, so that’s all we need to know to not take a seat and hand over the mic as a captive audience.
For any modern war campaign, we can be tempted to insist that we weren’t fooled. We knew how it would end up. We were never “for” this war; we did not consent. This position, however, still does not verify we were invulnerable to tactics of the Pattern & Playbook. As emphasized, awareness of the lie is only the first step. A suitable defense would also have to assure that not a single component of the vast Playbook methodology dumbed down, delayed, or defanged our natural moral instincts to defend the truth.
We humbly admit that The Pattern, in this most recent and current Gaza campaign, did in fact cycle through precisely as it has in all other previous campaigns and each Playbook tactic was and is still being employed, creating the same result—too much death and suffering.
The war in Gaza could not happen without the United States’ support; the war could have been stopped by the United States retracting support. At any time.
As we know, war is not a new product we choose to buy without fully understanding what’s at risk, but a threatening situation we are coerced to buy into even though we do fully understand what’s at risk.
Because war is an extremely old and overused “product”, the public relations strategies are set in place before the first bullet or bomb draws criticism and opposition. The War Machine propagandists are armed and ready with Playbook tactic #1:
The False Claim
Using incredible wealth, power, and reputation, the PR machine launches a fraudulent counter campaign, which follows a script that emphasizes their personal responsibility, criticizes and/or buries the “junk” science that found harms associated with their actions, and makes pledges to self-regulate. Above all, the campaign will produce constant doubt by offering a manufactured version of the truth which competes with the reality.
I can tell you I’m ten feet tall. There I said it. So now I’m ten feet tall. You can measure me with a ruler and try to prove I’m really 5’8”, but I’ll deny it. And I can gather more people on my side, my friends, who will agree that I’m 10 feet tall and in fact they created their own ruler that somehow measures me at 10’. If you try to tell others I’m 5’8” I’ll call you a name (maybe a height-denier I don’t know) and accuse you of lying. You can shout all over town that I’m 5’8” and but I’ll still say I’m 10’ and I don’t even have to shout because I’ll get it repeated all over TV and radio, as my friends own the stations. So, now it’s a full blown debate. Is she 10’ or 5’8”?? There are measurements to show both. Let’s let the public fight it out…
Tactic #1 introduces the deceitful argument. Even though it’s not true, can even very easily be proven false, it is now present and so now there is a “debate”. The plain truth is now “debatable”, technically. The irony is that for society’s most important arguments there is rarely any actual well-organized public debate, anymore. Few media outlets allow for this, outside of the programs who co-opt this medium only to dehumanize it into unwatchable shouting matches just to keep it at its lowest form. So this is not the kind of Socratic dialectic with verifiable data and reasoning to get to resolution. Instead we get the ongoing “fog of debate” which we can exist in for years or even decades.
Without opportunity or a space for public discourse, an elite few can control, i.e. subvert, the processes of collaboration and consensus, just as the fathers of propaganda intended. Edward Bernays’ belief that the masses were an irrational mob that must be controlled by psychological techniques was not seen by them as undermining democracy. On the contrary, they believed they were creating conditions for democracy’s survival by keeping that process to themselves.
In Socrates’ day, it was the Ancient Agora of Athens which served as a forum for public discussion and participation fundamental to the development of democracy. Such a forum would be vital to its preservation here today. But this space for us has been reduced and degraded to the Twittersphere, and we all know how well that’s working for citizens to reach consensus.
The disappearance of this staple of a high-functioning society gutted our ability to talk to each other, to think things through together. And without that, we can start to resemble the irrational mob of those projections. The consequence of this is the division which has been sewn in our nation, after this literal elimination of our common ground. Keeping us isolated in our separate silos is part of protecting any false claim from ever squaring off with the troublesome logical conclusions produced by a community who uses the socratic methods of critical thinking.
False claim is the capitalist legalese for outright lie. The campaign begins with a PR-crafted rationale to be “for” the product/idea and puts that on blast until the foundational catch phrase or slogan becomes a mantra. Outright lies spoken more emphatically can win out over truth muttered tentatively.
After October 7th, Israel’s claim was that their military actions were necessary as self-defense and to dismantle Hamas’ military so it could not launch attacks in the future. There was no deception in that argument. The fraudulent counter campaign which would take over from there was: After October 7th, anything they do, no matter how immoral or criminal, is justified by this claim, forever.
As with all false claims, the strategy of the public relations team is to make the initial slogan simple and broad and continuously repeat it louder and louder to drown out any other information as it comes in. “Israel has a right to defend itself” is the emphatic claim, which is valid, as it is for all nations. Every answer given from representatives from both parties, to every question regarding America’s support for the invasion, began with that mantra. The indisputableness of the statement is used as a monolith to prevent any deeper examination, reevaluation or debate on any piece of the rationale. Without sufficient clarification and deliberation, it became an “umbrella mantra” that the most heinous atrocity could hide under.
Simple and broad is a trap. With complex issues, as most societal issues are, exploring nuance is the only way to reach full understanding and navigate through the traps. This is why the ancient Greeks spent hours, days, as long as it took, walking and talking in the Agora with their peers, to work through the layers of complexity by applying all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom from multiple perspectives. All parts of the Playbook rely on us to remain simple and broad and adverse to digging deeper or collaborating with others in this effort. If we stick to the large fonts of the headlines on the first page, we will miss a lot of crucial details beyond the margins.
Big Tobacco’s umbrella mantra, stated everywhere including even under oath by all of its CEOs to Congress in 1994—that “nicotine is not addictive”—was criminal deception that led to widespread fatalities.
Monsanto/Bayer’s umbrella mantra, avowed in 192,000 courtrooms—that its Roundup herbicide is “safe and non-toxic”—its rebuttal to the mountain of evidence showing otherwise, was criminal deception that led to widespread fatalities.
The umbrella mantra of Purdue Pharma reps, assured over and over into the ears of their physician clients, who then repeated those promises to their patients—that “the risk of addiction to OxyContin is less than 1%”—was called the most criminally deceptive claim of all (at that time) as it led to the deadliest public health crisis the nation has ever faced and has not yet been able to recover from.
In Gaza, the mantra Israel and the majority of the United States leadership cited again and again, what they claimed was only a nation exercising its lawful “right to defend itself” is a criminal deception of what the majority of the rest of the world claims is an unlawful genocide.
With war campaigns, the fear event gets the public emotional enough to opt in to the campaign. The false claims and Bad Arguments fuel the momentum to support the campaign. The Watchdogs struggle to catch up to this momentum and prove the claims false. By the time they do, it will be too late.
For the VIETNAM WAR the fear event was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, used to create the false claim that we must use military force against the North Vietnamese in order to to protect international waters and remain safe from encroaching communism.
The U.S. government continued to present a fictitious narrative of our military progress in Vietnam to justify continued involvement, they lied about the role of our military, and the justifications for its expansion.
Key ideological deceptions involved the misuse of the “domino theory,” which claimed if Vietnam fell to communism, all of Southeast Asia would follow, posing an enormous threat to our safety in the United States. (Bad Arguments: Slippery Slope, Appeal to Fear Fallacy).
The biggest part of the Watchdog coalition against this war, as we know, was The People. The youth of America—defying their parents, vilified, arrested, beaten, even shot and killed—filled the streets and held continuous anti-war strikes on hundreds of college campuses which led President Nixon to cancel plans for a massive escalation of the war.
Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers to the press which exposed the Johnson administration’s systematic lying to the public and to Congress about our involvement in the Vietnam War.
The information brought forth by Watchdogs eventually turned public sentiment against the war.
The deceit would later be proven: Evidence would show that one of the two attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin incident which incited the war never took place. Government leaders relied on the wrongly interpreted National Security Agency data to conclude that the attack was real.
The deceit and harm would eventually be the subject of award-winning documentaries and movies:
The Most Dangerous Man in America
All these truths were brought to light by the truth-tellers, but not fully accepted or understood until after the damage was done in Vietnam:
Millions of deaths, environmental devastation from chemical warfare, and lasting health and psychological damage to veterans and civilians. An estimated two million North and South Vietnamese civilians were killed during the war, an estimated 300,000 more in Laos and Cambodia. Millions of Vietnamese were also internally displaced, creating a humanitarian crisis.
And—we did not accomplish the campaign’s intended goals. The U.S. did not stop communism in the region; the war ended with a unified, communist Vietnam. Instead we fueled economic instability and profound social and political distrust in the United States.
For the IRAQ WAR the fear event was of course 9/11. Even though Iraq was not behind this attack, the emotions from it could still be used to gather consent for war, somewhere.
The false claims to persuade the public were that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that the Iraqi government had ties to al-Qaeda. Together, these two things posed an unacceptable threat to American security. Dick Cheney’s slogan that we would be “greeted as liberators” was added justification for the invasion.
Repeating the lies told by the Bush/Cheney administration and media, Secretary of State Colin Powell perjured himself to the UN Security Council: “The facts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction...Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
Key ideological deceptions of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda falsely asserted the necessity of regime change in hostile states, and that the promotion of democracy would ensure American hegemony and global stability. (Bad Arguments: Appeal to Fear, Appeal to Authority).
This conflict had a tragic shortage of Watchdogs which allowed the violence to be sustained for eight years. It ignited the ambiguous “War on Terror” launched by the NeoCons which has only spread and continued as it was designed to have no end points.
However, whistleblower Chelsea Manning disclosed information ultimately published by The New York Times and others which proved undisclosed civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and U.S. attempts to cover up the CIA torture program.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks exposed the U.S. National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, that our government and its allies were monitoring the communications of millions of ordinary citizens and foreign officials, sparking the ongoing global debate over privacy, security, and government overreach.
The information brought forth by Watchdogs eventually turned public sentiment against the war, even though this disapproval would not end the conflict.
The deceit would later be proven: evidence would show that there were no weapons of mass destruction or active ties to Osama bin Laden. It would be affirmed that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and the U.S. government had a flawed strategy rooted in poor incentives and dubious analysis. And, The Torture Report would show the CIA was illegally torturing detainees at Guantánamo Bay without Department of Justice approval.
The deceit and harm would eventually be the subject of award-winning documentaries and movies:
All these truths were brought to light by the truth-tellers, but not fully accepted or understood until after the damage was done in Iraq and Afghanistan:
The death toll estimates range from approximately 150,000 to over 1 million, including military personnel and civilians. Total long-term costs are estimated at $7 trillion and counting. The war destroyed state institutions, military, economic, and social foundations, and public infrastructure like the health and electricity grid. Millions of Iraqis were displaced.
And—we did not accomplish the campaign’s intended goals. The U.S. did not replace the hostile regime with a stable, democratic government and transform Iraq into a prosperous state. Instead the war shifted the regional balance of power, leading to the strengthening of Iran’s influence and to the rise of extremist groups such as ISIS. We were seen not as liberators, but as violent, torturing invaders.
For the War in Gaza the fear event was the October 7th massacre.
Israel and its American allies presented many false claims to persuade the public, such as: all the IDF’s military action was self-defense, their priority was to free the hostages, they only attack Hamas and not the Palestinian people, they are doing all they can to get aid to the Palestinians but Hamas is stealing it, Hamas and not the IDF is shooting the innocents when they try to get the aid, Israel is not killing journalists, there is no starvation, there is no famine, there is no genocide.
The ideological deceptions are many and complex pertaining to Israel, as much of the unconditional support is defended as a moral duty in the long wake of the Holocaust, even when it means enabling war crimes. Israel’s wars and occupation have become a shared ideological mission for western civilization, regardless of the cost for each sovereign nation. (Bad Arguments: False Dilemma—“You’re either with us or against us”. Appeal to Tradition—“we’ve always done it this way.”)
A global coalition of Watchdogs were activated to verify and sound the alarm about the atrocities in Gaza. In April 2024, more than 250 humanitarian and human rights organizations called to stop arms transfers to Israel and Palestinian armed groups, and for an immediate ceasefire. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed global hunger watchdog and a group of international experts formally declared a famine in Gaza.
In July 2024, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system (the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council) declared that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza. They called upon the international community to prioritize the delivery of humanitarian aid by any means necessary, to end Israel’s siege, and establish a ceasefire.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant.
The journalism arm of the Watchdog body which had been deteriorating for decades due to widespread capture was resuscitated by the rise of Palestinian citizen journalists, who have used social media platforms to document the war in real-time, effectively bypassing the traditional media landscape. Gazan journalists had significant success in reaching western audiences to reveal the actual reality of this conflict. More than 270 journalists have been killed by the IDF doing this.
As in all campaigns, it is the People who play the most critical role of holding institutions accountable. The anti-Zionist college protests raised and sustained public awareness and remained vocal through an onslaught of crackdown against them led by both the Biden and Trump administrations. The resistance is active worldwide and within Israel also, including the families of the hostages and former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs have also expressed opposition to the expanded operations.
The Watchdogs are what turned public sentiment against the war in Gaza, even though this disapproval has not yet ended the conflict or been able to impel a sustained ceasefire.
The deceit would later be proven: Israel’s military actions in Gaza have exceeded the scope of self-defense and in so doing violate international law. The families of the hostages attest to their Israeli government’s dubious claims that the priority is to free the hostages. Over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, 83% were civilians. Israel did block life-saving aid to Gaza, Hamas was not stealing it. The IDF, and not Hamas, was shooting the innocents when they try to get the aid. Israel has killed more journalists than any other conflict on record. Israel has caused a famine. Israel has committed genocide.
Israelis and the world have come to realize that this war is more about keeping Netanyahu’s governing coalition together and shielding him from legal issues than about achieving security goals. In our country, we have come to understand that this war is more about appeasing the War Machine and a shadowy syndicate’s geopolitical agenda than any worthwhile goals for our own nation’s protection or provision.
We can expect all this deceit to eventually be the subject of award-winning documentaries and movies in a few years…
All these truths were brought to light by the truth-tellers, but not fully accepted or understood until the damage was done, or as the damage continues:
The Israeli invasion in Gaza has resulted in unprecedented human suffering and infrastructure destruction. An average of 92 Palestinians were killed each day before the “ceasefire”, and there have been at least 241 deaths after it. Assessments from international bodies describe the catastrophic damage as “on a scale never before seen”. Here at home, our government has spent between $31 and $33 billion dollars in military aid to Israel in just two years, as America’s economic situation nose-dives. U.S. support for Israel has led to a global perception of our complicity in a genocide, particularly in the Arab world, damaging U.S. foreign policy standing and leaving us less safe.
Israel and its allies did not accomplish the campaign’s intended goal of making Israel safe or dismantling Hamas. They have not established a new governance structure, but instead expanded its control over Gaza and sown chaos by not developing plans for postwar stabilization.
The Pattern is consistent. In all the above wars, the costs outweighed the benefits. In all of the above, the predicted benefits never even came to be and the costs continue to this day. All of the above include brazen lying to the American people and breaking international law.
We can witness the current moves towards regime change or war in Venezuela and see where things are falling into place. Perhaps the U.S. blowing up Venezuelan “drug boats” are the intended fear events to get the public feeling vulnerable. I do pray there will not be a bigger, deadlier fear event on the horizon.
Whatever happens with this or the next war campaign, we can lay good odds that it will cycle precisely like all of the above situations. The powers that (shouldn’t) be will lie outright and publicly deny what they know to be true in order to achieve their goals, which are clearly not the intended goals they will sell to us. As the results confirm from the Pattern so far, the actual purpose of the war will be to get millions and billions of our taxpayer dollars into the pockets of each individual architect who campaigned for it.
And the Watchdogs will also persist. These people do not have supernatural abilities to see what others cannot, or extraordinary investigatory skills to uncover what others cannot—because the truth they seek to bring forth is usually not well hidden and in fact often in plain sight and spoken aloud in plain english. They do have courage and tenacity. Perhaps in these times, these can be considered extraordinary attributes. Yet they are still inborn qualities of human nature available to all.
While traditional watchdogs, such as the media and government oversight offices, play important parts, the collective power of an informed, engaged, and vigilant public can have the greatest impact in maintaining transparency and preventing corruption.
Before we can fully harness this collective power, we would need to make 1000% sure we can call a lie a lie, a hoax a hoax, a crime a crime, a criminal a criminal, and can make our decisions according to the actual reality and not in any way according to the artificial one. The crucial decisions being—who do we define as our enemy, who is causing the most harm to the people, to what or whom do we give or withhold consent. What we know of The Pattern should empower us to make these determinations from the very first false claim. Because what the history confirms is that once we’re in, we’re in, and it’ll be decades before we’re out. The wisdom gained ought to be—we should not get in.
If any one of these conflicts resulted in peace and democracy in the region, that would be a break in the pattern. But we lost all these wars—lost those soldiers and civilians who died, lost the sanity and souls of those who didn’t, lost the trust of the world that our nation would stand for morality and justice.
We cannot undo this. As I repeat, what we can do is ensure our thinking about these wars, more specifically the campaigns for war, matures from irrational to rational. We can either think of these conflicts as terrible mistakes or as deliberate assaults launched from the enemies of peace within our government. It’s much harder to build a suitable defense against mistakes.
As obvious and redundant as any argument against war might seem, the exactitude of the repetition illustrated above forces us to admit that public sentiment is still malleable and susceptible to the Playbook tactics no matter how many cycles its been through.
The methodical strategies of public relations and the engineering of consent were designed to intercede at all the points where an individual would naturally react with disapproval or resistance. The Gaza PR campaign executed by Israel + United States used these methods well to manipulate opinion and momentum in their favor and crush dissent, to ultimately deter constructive oppositional action on our part.
The tactics tamper with our reasoning, our processing, and our recall, which all serves to debilitate the logical development from getting burned to never touching the flame again. The historical amnesia—which allows one generation’s Vietnam War to be followed by the next generation’s Iraq War, or cigarettes to be followed by vapes—is not natural. It is the result of successful attempts to impair our cognition and distort our memory so that we cannot effectively use them in our protection against the next campaign.
As I go to publish this chapter, Dick Cheney has died. Reading the New York Times eulogizing headline “For Dick Cheney, a Journey From Champion of War to Voice of Resistance” or any of the other mainstream media articles about his life, these descriptors of “champion” and “resistance” paint a very different picture than “liar” or “criminal”. If you read these articles, or the tweets from our respected leaders, there is no mention of lies and crimes, or the horrific damage they caused; there was no mention of the wealth and power illicitly gained by the conflict of interest in his revolving between Haliburton and the Vice Presidency. Reading these documents of how his contributions to our country will be logged into American history, which inform how his persona and actions will live in the memory we all rely upon to develop the wisdom we use to survive, we might feel more inclined to give our admiration or respect to his legacy than to build a better shield against the deceit and corruption his life was empowered by. By this whitewashing of our recent past, the lines get permanently blurred between the actual and the artificial realities.
At this present moment, our country is committed in focus and precious resources toward three different external military conflicts on three different continents. As the public squares off against these, or any other campaign for bad wars or bad products, our analysis here attempts to determine where we are on the arduous path between recognition of impending harm and active resistance to it. We must bear witness as the crafters of this particular never-ending campaign get the last word on Dick Cheney, considered so sinister a symbol of evil and death that he was nicknamed Darth Vader. This collective memory has been manipulated before our very eyes this week. One of the most powerful masterminds and profiteers of the Military Industrial Complex, whom the people fighting against war and violence opposed for three decades, gets his legacy rewritten with the ironic yet emphatic final slogan: “Voice of Resistance”.
The Neo Cons of this world and their War Machine do not stop, they do not rest, they do not ebb back the other way, they do not change pattern. While we catch our breath from the last battle, tend to our wounds, bury our dead, write the analysis and make the movies—they are well into their preparation for the next round. There is nothing so threatening to human life than the Global War on Terror (GWOT) team on the hunt for its next meal ticket.
An individual citizen cannot successfully defend against a Global War on Terror campaign. But any one of us can become so conscious of the campaign tactics that we never find ourselves on the opposite side of the truth for any amount of precious time.
+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting. =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….