The decline and fall of Truthout: another casualty in greater war: [View All]

I believe Truthout -- its credibility now destroyed forever -- was deliberately sandbagged by the federal government, whether by agents of the regime or by other equally anti-progressive forces it matters not.

The logical suspects include Prosecutor Fitzgerald himself. Never forget that Fitzgerald is, after all, part of the system headed by George Bush -- the same system that produces successive outrages afterward labeled "scandals" merely as semantic sleight-of-hand: the labeling to conceal the fact that, just as Deadly Nightshade predictably produces poison berries, so does capitalism predictably produce its own toxins: Watergate, the savings-and-loan ripoff, Enron, the Valerie Plame affair, 9/11, Iraq, the aftermath of Katrina, NSA spying etc. ad nauseum.

To imagine that a Fitzgerald (or any other creature of U.S. capitalism) is going to make any significant systemic changes is no less absurd than imagining Santa Claus rules Christmas from a toy-factory at the North Pole. And endorsing an alternative news source by such a leak would indeed be a systemic change -- one of enormous and far-reaching magnitude.

The Left's failure to grasp this simple principle is worse than troublesome. Indeed it is yet another illustration of the dire truth that all the problems of the Left in the United States today can be summed up in two phrases: the reflexive, McCarthy Era anti-intellectuality that prohibits the development of a unifying theoretical base; and the frantic, empty-minded search for heroes -- a search the anti-intellectuality makes necessary precisely because the anti-intellectuality (deliberately) denies us the tools of self-liberation.

Were Truthout not caught up in this desperate search for heroes, the credibility-destroying debacle of the false Rove indictment -- a debacle that has shrunken Truthout's journalistic status to nothingness and condemned it to die of oblivion -- would never have happened at all.

Indeed what Truthout has fallen victim to is a classic disinformation campaign: a cunning amalgam of facts and falsehoods glued together by absurd hopes and wishful thinking. I sensed this from the very beginning -- why leak to Truthout when one could leak far more effectively to The Washington Post? -- but despite my dire suspicions (founded on nearly 50 years in journalism), I refrained from commenting until now more out of my own absurd hopefulness than anything else.

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Those who doubt the regime would employ such elaborate measures against Truthout and its ilk should study Operation CHAOS, the CIA’s overwhelmingly successful campaign to destroy the Counterculture from within. One of CHAOS's primary targets was the underground and/or alternative press, which the LBJ and Nixon administrations feared as the prime "subversive" force in the United States, fueling not just the anti-war movement, but also (and often more effectively) the feminist, environmentalist and back-to-the-land movements, as well as the earliest manifestations of the pagan renaissance. The Counterculture's signature self-description -- "revolution in consciousness" -- originated with East Village Other editor Walter Bowart sometime in 1966, and was disseminated across the nation by the era's three alternative news services: TransMundo (primarily a picture agency and the very first such organization); Liberation News Service (LNS); and Underground Press Service (UPS). Truthout was to the present era of electronic media precisely what these publications and news services were to the era of the Countercultural Rebellion -- and to imagine such information outlets don't matter "a whit" is to ignore the biggest lesson of all: how the energies of the Countercultural Rebellion were contained, suppressed and finally perverted into the zomboid consumerism of the '80s and politics of idiocy that have plagued us ever since.

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This is in fact the main reason I have no hope: anti-intellectuality of the sort identified above is both self-perpetuating and permanently crippling. Not only is no escape from it possible, but it has the added effect of constantly lowering the least common denominator -- the phenomenon commonly known as "dumbing down" carried to its most ruinous extreme. Hence the frantic and ultimately doomed search for heroes that has become the sole preoccupation -- indeed obsession -- of the U.S. Left: an obsession that (because of its yawning absence of any ideological foundation or even cautionary principles) can only end in defeat -- just like Truthout’s now obviously bogus claim Rove was indicted.