Edizioni ARCIPELAGO

You are being lied to

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This anthology © 2001 The Disinformation Company Ltd.

Editor: Russ Kick
INTRODUCTION
You Are Being Lied To. It takes some nerve to give a book that title, eh? It came to me very early in the process, when this collection was just a germ of an idea. I did pause to wonder if it was too audacious;
after all, I didn't want my mouth to write a check that my butt couldn't cash. But after spending several intense months assembling this book, I'm more convinced than ever that the title is the proper one.
We are being lied to. In many ways. For the purposes of this book, the definition of "lie" is an elastic one. Sometimes it means an outright falsehood told in order to deceive people and advance the agenda of the liar. Or it can be a "lie of omission," in which the crucial part of the story that we're not being told is more important than the parts we know. Sometimes the lie can be something untrue that the speaker thinks is true, otherwise known as misinformation (as opposed to disinformation, which is something untrue that the speaker knows is untrue). In yet other cases, particular erroneous beliefs are so universal-serial killers are always men, the Founding Fathers cared about the masses-that you can't pinpoint certain speakers in order to ascertain their motives; it's just something that everyone "knows." Sometimes, in fact, the lie might be the outmoded dominant paradigm in a certain field. Arelated type of lie-a "meta-lie," perhaps-occurs when certain institutions arrogantly assume that they have all the answers. These institutions then try to manipulate us with a swarm of smaller individual lies. Which more or less leads me to my next point: This book doesn't pretend that it has all, or perhaps even any, of the answers. It's much easier to reveal a lie than to reveal the truth. As a wise soul once noted, all you have to do is find a single white crow to disprove the statement, "All crows are black." The contributors to this book are pointing out the white crows that undermine the "black crow" statements of governments, corporations, the media, religions, the educational system, the scientific and medical establishments, and other powerful institutions. Sydney Schanberg may not know the
exact truth of the POW/MIAsituation, but he sure as hell knows that Senator John McCain does everything he can to make sure that truth will never be known. David McGowan may not know exactly
what happened during the Columbine massacre, but he shows us that there are numerous puzzle pieces that just don't fit into the nice, neat version of events that's been presented to us. Judith Rich
Harris is still building the case that peers matter more than parents, but she has soundly laid to rest the notion that parenting style is by far the most important influence on who a child becomes. Can we
say that a divine hand didn't put a secret code in the Bible? No, not exactly, but David Thomas can show that 1) those "holy" codes also appear in War and Peace, The Origin of Species, and a Supreme
Court decision, and 2) you can find almost any word or name you want to find if you torture the text enough. There are some cases, though, when it's fairly safe to say that the truth has been revealed. Thomas Lyttle does show us that licking toads will not, indeed can not, get you high, and Michael Zezima definitively reveals that both sides committed atrocities during World War II. Meanwhile, Charles Bufe demonstrates that the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous lifted their ideas wholesale from the evangelical Christian group they belonged to. They even admitted it! Such cases of positive proof are in the minority, though. Basically, the pieces in this book show that the received wisdom-the common knowledge-is often wrong. Well, then, what's right? That's a much, much more complicated question, and the answers are elusive. Hopefully we'll all spend our lives pursuing them. But the first step is to realize that the "answers" that are being handed to us on a silver platter-or, perhaps more often, shoved down our throats-are often incorrect, incomplete, and usually serve the interests of the
people promoting those so-called answers. That's where You Are Being Lied To comes in. So dive in at any point, and you'll see that this book's title is deadly accurate. What you do about it is up to you.
Russ Kick

Introduction 6
K E Y N OTE A D D R E S S
Reality Is a Shared Hallucination | Howard Bloom 12
C O N T E N T S
THE NEWS MEDIA AND OTHER MANIPULATORS
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream | Noam Chomsky 20
Journalists Doing Somersaults | Norman Solomon 25
The Puppets of Pandemonium | Howard Bloom 29
New Rules for the New Millennium | Gary Webb 38
The Covert News Network | Greg Bishop 40
Why Does the Associated Press Change Its Articles? | Russ Kick 44
We Distort, You Abide | Kenn Thomas 47
The Media and Their Atrocities | Michael Parenti 51
Making Molehills Out of Mountains | Marni Sullivan 56
Why They Hate Oliver Stone | Sam Smith 60
The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV | Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon 63
Sometimes Lying Means Only Telling a Small Part of the Truth |
R.U. Sirius, with Michael Horowitz and the Friends of Timothy Leary 64
Upon Hearing of the Electronic Bogeyman | George Smith 66
School Textbooks | Earl Lee 73
The Information Arms Race | Douglas Rushkoff 82
P O L I T R I C K S
The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides | Sydney Schanberg 88
Jimmy Carter and Human Rights | Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon 95
All the President's Men | David McGowan 97
Oil Before Ozone | Russ Kick 101
God Save the President! | Robin Ramsay 107
Colony Kosovo | Christian Parenti 111
The Truth About Terrorism | Ali Abunimah 114
You Can't Win | James Ridgeway 117
OFFICIAL V E R S I O N S
Anatomy of a School Shooting | David McGowan 124
How the People Seldom Catch Intelligence | Preston Peet 128
Reassessing OKC | Cletus Nelson 139
Votescam | Jonathan Vankin 143
The Rabin Murder Cover-up | Barry Chamish 147
What's Missing from This Picture? | Jim Marrs 152
THE SOCIAL FA B R I C AT I O N
Don't Blame Your Parents | interview with Judith Rich Harris 164
The Female Hard-on | Tristan Taormino 170
Art and the Eroticism of Puberty | David Steinberg 172
"A World That Hates Gays" | Philip Jenkins 176
Apt Pupils | Robert Sterling 187
A Panic of Biblical Proportions over Media Violence | Paul McMasters 194
The Man in the Bushes | interview with Philip Jenkins 196
THE BIG PICTURE
Will the Real Human Being Please Stand Up? | Riane Eisler 328
You Are Being Lied To: A Disinformation Books Roundtable | Alex Burns 335
I Have Met God and He Lives in Brooklyn | Richard Metzger 347
Church of the Motherfucker | Mark Pesce 354
A Sentient Universe | Peter Russell 356
A Lost Theory? | David Loye 359
TRIPPING
Drug War Mythology | Paul Armentano 234
Toad-Licking Blues | Thomas Lyttle 241
Poppycock | Jim Hogshire 245
AA Lies | Charles Bufe 254
The Unconscious Roots of the Drug War | Dan Russell 261
BLINDED BY SCIENCE
Environmentalism for the Twenty-First Century | Patrick Moore 296
Humans Have Already Been Cloned | Russ Kick 304
NutraFear & NutraLoathing in Augusta, Georgia | Alex Constantine 307
Forbidden Archaeology | Michael A. Cremo 311
There Is So Much That We Don't Know |William R. Corliss 316
CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT
Amnesia in America | James Loewen 202
Columbus and Western Civilization | Howard Zinn 205
Go Out and Kill People Because This Article Tells You To | Nick Mamatas 214
Saving Private Power | Michael Zezima 219
What I Didn't Know About the Communist Conspiracy | Jim Martin 227
H O LY RO L L I N G
The Truth About Jesus | M.M. Mangasarian 272
The Bible Code | David Thomas 278
Mystics and Messiahs | interview with Philip Jenkins 286