A quarter-century ago in 1999 The Matrix entered our theaters and became an instant film classic as well as a colossal blockbuster, earning nearly $500 million at the box office. There were also interesting epistemological implications to the notion that our own world was merely the illusion created within a computer simulation, hiding the grim reality behind it. The word “redpilling” —breaking through those illusions into the underlying true existence—soon entered our popular political lexicon, with a Google search revealing that “redpill” and its variations appear on well over 5 million webpages, and the term has even inspired the somewhat related notions of “blackpilling” and “whitepilling,” respectively inducing despair and hope.

I found the film outstanding when I originally watched it in a theater and over the years it has held up very well when I’ve seen it on the small screen, although I’d regarded the couple of sequels it quickly inspired as merely so-so or even mediocre.

However, I’ve always thought it a little unfair that this tremendous success so completely overshadowed a different Hollywood film released that same year that dealt with a similar theme. I’ve seen The Thirteenth Floor a couple of times, and although I’d hardly rank it alongside its far better known rival, I thought the plot included some interesting ideas and felt it might have gotten far more attention under other circumstances.

Lacking the hyperkinetically stylized gun-battle sequences of The Matrix, this much quieter film centered upon a virtual reality research company in 1999 Los Angeles that had successfully created a computer simulation of a 1930s society whose characters lived their lives completely unaware that they were merely software constructs. The sudden murder of the company’s director and other strange events led one of the puzzled researchers to eventually discover that his own society also only existed as a simulation in the computer of a higher-level world. The clues leading to that breakthrough came from the power of analogy, as he and others noticed that some of the inexplicable events that so puzzled the 1930s characters they had created were similar to what they were themselves encountering in their own world, which they had always assumed was real.

Thus, once we successfully pierce some of the false narratives constructed by our dishonest media we should always consider the possibility that we are still trapped within another such layer of narrative, much deeper but equally false, and use the power of analogy as a tool to unravel those illusions. These are ideas that we should keep in the back of our minds as we consider the many dangerous and disastrous falsehoods surrounding the Israel/Gaza conflict, now in its eleventh month.

Last week I published an article describing the unspeakable war crimes regularly being committed by Israeli military forces against helpless Palestinian civilians, with some of these incidents finally starting to receive coverage in mainstream American media outlets.

According to American physicians interviewed by Politico Magazine and CBS News Sunday Morning, Israeli military snipers have regularly been executing Palestinian toddlers with precisely aimed shots to the head and the heart; indeed, for many years Israelis have proudly marketed tee-shirts boasting of their success in killing pregnant women and children. An article in the New York Times also reported that IDF forces have seized and tortured to death leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical doctors, with some of the survivors describing the horrific torments they endured at the hands of their brutal Israeli captors.

All of these barbaric atrocities have been justified and encouraged by the sweeping public statements of top Israeli leaders. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded must be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Just a few days ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it would be “just and moral” for Israel to totally exterminate all two million Palestinians in Gaza, but he emphasized that world public opinion was currently preventing his government from taking that important step.

"No one in the world will allow us to starve to death 2 million citizens, although it may be just and moral."

Far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich expresses his frustration that Israel isn't allowed to starve 2 million Palestinians to death in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/SuBI8DXOSm

— Palestine Highlights (@PalHighlight) August 8, 2024

Although this officially-stated Israeli goal of eradicating all Palestinian men, women, and children has not yet been achieved, more than ten months of bombs, bullets, and famine have made significant progress in that direction. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and a few weeks ago it published a short piece conservatively estimating that relentless Israeli attacks and the complete destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous total mentioned in the media.

The massive, ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians together with these widespread, explicit public statements by top Israeli leaders led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulings that Israel appeared to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. By late July even the notoriously pro-Israel editors of the English-language Wikipedia had finally endorsed the same conclusion.

In addition to these ongoing massacres, many thousands of Palestinian civilian captives have been seized, none of whom have ever been tried or convicted of anything. But with Israeli prison space overflowing, National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir proposed summarily executing all them all by shooting each of them in the head, thereby freeing up their prison space for new waves of captives.

Although the militaries of many countries have occasionally committed massacres or atrocities during wartime, sometimes even with the silent approval of their political leadership, it seems quite unusual to have the latter publicly endorse and advocate such policies, and no similar examples from recent centuries come to mind. I don’t doubt that if television journalists had interviewed Genghis Khan while he was leading his Mongol hordes in ravaging Eurasia, he might have casually made such statements, but I’d always assumed that standards of acceptable international behavior had considerably changed over the last thousand years.

When top leaders regularly issue such wholesale sanguinary declarations, some of their more enthusiastic subordinates may naturally decide to partly implement those same goals on a retail basis. These horrible recent Israeli atrocities merely continued the pattern from earlier this year, which had often been documented on social media by Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote a few months ago:

Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.

Anglin’s description of the Israeli behavior as being “cartoonishly evil” seemed a very apt phrase to me, and I used it in the title of my own article on the subject.

Nothing like this has ever previously happened in the modern world, or at least I’ve never heard of such things. For example, back in early 2020, officials of the outgoing Trump and incoming Biden administrations joined together to loudly condemn China for committing a “genocide” against the Uighurs of Xinjiang province without being able to cite a single example of a violent civilian death.

In my article I noted that this very unusual behavior by Jewish Israelis seemed best explained by the underlying religious and ideological characteristics of traditional Judaism, which for nearly two thousand years has regarded all non-Jews as totally sub-human, whose only value is to serve as Jewish slaves:

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

These paragraphs had originally appeared in the first of several 2018 articles I published discussing the true characteristics of the traditional Jewish religion and the resulting behavior of Jews over the centuries. I think these unfolding events in Gaza may have been almost implicitly predicted by that past material:

One of our most level-headed and astute commenters lives in Iceland, and he came to similar conclusions, suggesting that the Israeli government seemed fully intent upon validating those extremely controversial analyses that I had published six years earlier.

To be sure a lot of what Mr Unz has written about Jews is a controversial to say the least. For a normal bloke like me I really don’t know what to think about much of it because it’s so strange and in stark contrast with my limited knowledge on the subject. It follows I haven’t had much to say about it either…

It’s almost as if Israel decided to prove Mr Unz correct. The supremacy, the blatant disregard for human (none Jewish) lives. It’s like they are slaughtering cattle. And it’s just getting worse. And they have little or no excuse, because their existence isn’t really threatened, they are the superior military force with full support of the U.S. to protect them.

It’s difficult to come up with a scenario better suited to support Mr Unz writings in the past when some wild sounding claims about Judaism are suddenly on full display -live- in Israel.

I thanked that commenter and concurred, noting that:

It really is astonishing to see one’s controversial analysis so clearly vindicated in real life.

It’s like an astronomer calculating the orbit of an undiscovered planet based upon perturbations in the orbits of other planets and then finding it shows up in exactly the predicted location.

I also suggested that the near-stranglehold that pro-Israel Jews had gradually gained across American society, especially including politics, academia, and media, was having very fateful consequences. For example, Netanyahu’s deliberate slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians actually prompted his recent invitation to address a joint session of Congress for an unprecedented fourth time, with his bombastic speech interrupted by 58 standing ovations, coming at a rate of more than once each minute.

Meanwhile, American students had been heavily indoctrinated for generations with an absolute horror of genocide, war crimes, Apartheid, and racial oppression. But when they reacted against full American government support for the worst example of these seen anywhere in the world in many decades, their peaceful protests at elite colleges were brutally suppressed by harsh police crackdowns. This problem arose because their moral instructors had failed to properly emphasize that all those sweeping prohibitions actually included the key exclusionary phrase “except when committed by Jews.”

In one of the highest-profile and most grotesque recent incidents, Israeli doctors reported that a Palestinian captive had been severely injured after being brutally gang-raped and sodomized by nine IDF soldiers. Israeli military leaders have been facing the threat of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, so they decided to demonstrate their adherence to international law by having the soldiers arrested and tried, but a huge, violent mob of Jewish activists invaded the army base to free them, and the government later ordered them released. Israeli TV has widely broadcast footage of Palestinian prisoners being raped and sodomized by IDF soldiers, with claims that these brutal scenes were sometimes even live-streamed for the edification of gleeful Israeli political leaders.

BREAKING: CCTV footage of Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian hostage at Sde Teiman published by Israel's Ch12

The soldiers put up their riot shields to hide their actions from the camera. pic.twitter.com/QwGiEaPQQM

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) August 7, 2024

Mike Whitney had summarized much of the shocking early evidence in late July when the story first broke in the Israeli media and a more recent article by journalist Jonathan Cook collected together a great deal of the background information. Cook noted that according to human and legal rights groups, Israeli soldiers and police have a very long history of raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children, and such behavior has been endorsed by the country’s highest religious authorities:

In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.

The Grayzone is a popular video channel run by young Jewish progressive journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, and I regularly watch their weekly live-streamed podcasts, which over the last ten months have heavily focused upon aspects of the ongoing Israel/Gaza conflict.

Beginning around the 31:40 mark on their Friday show, they devoted more than 15 minutes to covering this anal-rape story, which although very heavily reported for two weeks in the Israeli media has been totally ignored by the New York Times and nearly all other mainstream American media outlets. They explained that public support for this systematic policy of raping and torturing Palestinian civilian captives had become widespread across much of the Israeli population, with an influential mainstream pundit publicly declaring on Israeli TV that it was perfectly right and proper for Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian prisoners as a form of revenge for the October 7th attacks and also as a powerful deterrent against any future uprisings.

Video Link

The Grayzone editors emphasized that this widely supported Israeli policy of raping and torturing Palestinian captives has been publicly justified by the belief that Hamas militants had gang-raped Israeli women during their October 7th raid. But although those claims were been given massive coverage by the New York Times and other Western media outlets, absolutely no evidence has ever been provided to support them, and they merely appear to be concocted atrocity-hoaxes, now largely debunked.

The advocates of Palestinian rape speaking on Israeli TV sometimes also refer to the Israeli children burned alive by Hamas fighters, an even more ridiculous hoax once widely covered in the Western media, along with the claims that 40 Israeli babies had been beheaded. Although the media eventually backed away from these absurd stories, I suspect that they were still widely believed by much of the Israeli public, helping to inspire their remarkable continuing blood-lust.

As I’ve pointed out in various articles, all these atrocity stories are almost certainly false, with both personal testimony and other strong evidence providing a very different version of events:

I’d previously mentioned the short interview of an Israeli woman with two young children who emphasized that the Hamas militants who occupied her home for a couple of hours had been quite respectful to her family. I had also reported the eyewitness testimony of a survivor from a Kibbutz near Gaza who explained that the civilians had been killed when the Israeli military attacked the Hamas fighters holding them.

Furthermore, the official list of dead Israelis indicates that nearly all of the victims were non-elderly adults, with a large fraction being soldiers or security personnel, hardly suggesting a policy of indiscriminate slaughter.

The latest wave of very doubtful claims has focused upon second-hand stories of Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations. These accounts only came to light two months after the events in question and lacked any supportive forensic evidence, with many of the claims coming from the same individuals behind the beheaded babies hoax, suggesting that they are equally desperate propaganda ploys. Journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others have discussed the extreme credulity of the Times and other media outlets in promoting these blatantly fraudulent stories. Many of these points are summarized in a brief video discussion:

Inspired by my reporting at @TheGrayzoneNews, this brilliant takedown by @propandco provides the strongest and most accessible refutation of the bogus atrocity propaganda Israel concocted to justify its genocidal rampage in Gaza

Watch and share it widely pic.twitter.com/Q8XawKN07Y

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 27, 2023

Meanwhile, consider the very strong evidence from silence. According to news reports, small GoPro cameras were worn by the attacking Hamas militants, which recorded all their activities, and the Israelis recovered many of these from their bodies and began carefully examining hundreds of hours of this extensive video footage. They surely would have soon released a video compilation providing any incriminating evidence that they found, yet I’m not aware of a single public clip that shows any such brutal atrocities or mass killings, strongly suggesting that very little of that occurred. Indeed, the Gray Zone discovered that the main photograph provided of an allegedly raped and murdered Israeli woman actually turned out to be that of a female Kurdish fighter from years earlier that had been plucked off the Internet, demonstrating the apparent desperation and dishonesty of the pro-Israel propagandists promoting these stories.

Over the last couple of months it has gradually been admitted that perhaps half or more of all the 1,100-odd Israelis killed on October 7th probably died at the hands of their own panicked and trigger-happy military forces, in some cases being deliberately targeted due to Israel’s controversial “Hannibal Directive,” and those victims of friendly-fire were overwhelmingly civilians. Therefore, it seems quite possible that as few as 100 to 200 unarmed Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas militants, in many cases accidentally. This underscores the extreme disproportionality of perhaps as many as 200,000 Palestinian civilian dead.

In that same livestream, Blumenthal and Maté also focused on the methods used to keep American elected officials in line on this issue, noting that a few days ago Zionist billionaires spent an almost unprecedented $8 million to defeat Rep. Cori Bush in her own Democratic primary, angry that the black progressive member of “the squad” had called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Just a few weeks earlier, roughly twice as much money had been spent by similar individuals for very similar reasons to successfully eliminate her close political ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Those two primary races were by far the most expensive in American history, and in their aftermath most members of Congress must surely realize that they only remain in office at the sufferance of AIPAC and its ideological allies. Although leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the role of big money in those primary races, she was obviously too fearful of pro-Israel donors to even mention whose big money had been involved. The Grayzone editors were far more candid and accurately characterized the dollars as being deployed by “the foreign agents of an Apartheid state.”

Back in May, I’d described some ironic statements I noticed in an earlier Grayzone podcast:

This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.”

They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.

That particular article of mine proved quite popular so it’s possible that my remarks may have directly or indirectly found their way to those individuals. Whether or not that was the case, in their current podcast they mentioned that although they’d always dismissed “ZOG” as some ridiculously antisemitic expression, recent events had demonstrated its reality, and Americans were obviously now living in “one nation under ZOG.” I think this marked an important step forward in their understanding of our world.

These successful attempts to intimidate elected officials have been matched by other government efforts targeting journalists or other private citizens who challenge our pro-Israel policy. Although it didn’t come up in their podcast, over the last few days that latter campaign seems to have dramatically escalated, as Scott Ritter’s home was raided by twenty FBI agents on grounds that he may have violated FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Ritter, a tough former Marine officer, had spent part of the 1990s serving as Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq. In that role, he worked closely with his Israeli colleagues, and his many years of service in the Middle East and numerous visits to Israel had given him a warm admiration for that country and its people. In a couple of his podcasts earlier this year, he had explained how overcome with emotion he and his wife had been during their first visits to the Holy Land, the birthplace of their Christian religion.

Over the last few years, Ritter had become a very strong critic of American policy towards Russia and Ukraine, and during this same period he may have gradually become more aware of the dark side of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, including some of the harsh oppression suffered by the latter population. Then the massive Israeli military response to the October 7th attacks completely pushed him over the line, and he became a loud, even bombastic critic of the Israeli government and the huge number of war crimes it was committing.

Ritter’s bold new position even extended to some admiration for Hamas, despite its official classification as a terrorist group by the American government. He reasonably described its October 7th attack as one of the most successful light infantry military operations in modern world history, with disciplined Hamas fighters facing elite Israeli combat units on the field of battle and severely mauling them. Some of Ritter’s recent podcast interviews on these matters have been viewed two or three hundred thousand times each.

Large numbers of Americans work or write for foreign publications, including government-owned ones such as the BBC or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. But because Ritter regularly writes for Russia’s RT, he is now facing selective prosecution, and a former FBI agent has denounced these charges as utterly ridiculous, clear violations of our First Amendment rights. Whether or not these charges stick, the obvious intent is to intimate Ritter and any others willing to publicly speak out against government policy. Meanwhile, as has been widely noted, the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars injected into American politics on behalf of foreign agents serving Israel has been completely ignored.

For decades, FARA had remained almost entirely unenforced and I’ve never previously heard of a large FBI raid targeting the home of a private individual who was merely accused of writing articles or doing podcast interviews, so this development might take us several steps down the road towards a totalitarian society.

Former Ambassador Chas Freeman has spent more than a half-century as a highly regarded foreign policy expert, and he strongly denounced this attack on Ritter’s constitutional rights, condemning it as reminiscent of the anti-radical Palmer Raids of 1919 and the McCarthyite Era of the 1950s; but I think he is mistaken. Nearly all the 1919 arrests targeted non-American citizens, often recently arrived foreign immigrants, many of whom were avowedly committed to overthrowing the U.S. government and establishing a Bolshevik-type regime in its place, a situation totally dissimilar from that involving Ritter. Meanwhile, although considerable numbers of real or suspected Soviet agents were investigated or prosecuted during the 1950s, Ritter is not being accused on such grounds, and I’ve also never heard of any FBI home raids taking place during that era. So the government attack on Ritter seems far worse than anything Freeman suggests.

However, I do think that there exists a much closer but long forgotten historical analogy. In “the Great Sedition Trial of 1944,” dozens of independent writers, intellectuals, and activists who opposed American foreign policy and our involvement in World War II were brought to trial purely for exercising their free speech rights and criticizing our government, although the case eventually collapsed. A prominent former State Department official and public intellectual named Lawrence Dennis was among those defendants, and although I haven’t read it, he later co-authored a lengthy 1946 book A Trial on Trial, denouncing and ridiculing the legal proceedings.

Obviously, the analogy is not an exact one given that our county was at war in 1944, with millions of Americans fighting and dying overseas, but many other aspects of that case seem eerily reminiscent of today’s America. The defendants were an extremely heterogenous group, most of whom had never had any contact with each other, and they were publicly vilified as isolationists, antisemites, fascists, and lackeys of a hostile foreign government, with the obvious aim of their prosecution being to intimidate anyone strongly opposed to American foreign policy. Given current political trends, it is easy to imagine similar such prosecutions in our country’s future, with the public charge of “terrorist sympathizer” probably being added to the mix.

Ritter and Freeman both frequently appear on the popular YouTube channel of Judge Andrew Napolitano, whose other guests include a long list of very notable figures drawn from academia, national security, and journalism, including Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ray McGovern, Douglas Macgregor, Larry Wilkerson, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Larry Johnson, and Philip Giraldi. I usually spend several hours each week watching these interviews and thereby gaining a great deal of important information from all these experts. Yet I’ve also noticed that some of those individuals may possess certain historical blind spots.

Over the last year, Hamas has become the target of a massive media barrage, intended to totally demonize it as one of the most evil terrorist organizations in the history of the world. Probably many tens of millions of gullible Americans, ranging from top elected officials to ordinary citizens, still vaguely believe that Hamas militants fiendishly beheaded 40 Israeli babies and roasted others alive in ovens, while gang-raping and sexually-mutilated many helpless Israeli women. As the mastermind and organizer of that Hamas attack, Yahya al-Sinwar would surely rank as one of the worst monsters in human history.

But knowledgeable individuals, including all the guests on Napolitano’s podcast, are well aware that those stories were apparently just propaganda-hoaxes, concocted by pro-Israel activists and their media enablers to inspire tremendous hatred of Hamas and thereby help justify and excuse Israel’s enormous retaliatory massacres against the helpless civilians of Gaza. Indeed, given this more accurate understanding, al-Sinwar’s history might instead be portrayed in a very different, even heroic light.

However, just as in the case of the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor, sometimes individuals who successfully uncover and pierce one layer of an artificially-created version of reality may remain unaware that there might still exist another deeper layer behind that one. I think that they should consider that if our entire media could shamelessly promote such absurd lies about things that have happened in the here and now, they must be very cautious about accepting without question what that same media and its mainstream academic allies say about events that took place long ago and far away.

Numerous decent individuals have been horrified by the unspeakable atrocities currently being committed by the Israeli government in the plain sight of the entire world. Many naturally express that outrage by comparing the Israelis with the supreme exemplar of purest evil that our media has constructed over the past couple of generations, namely the Nazi Germany of Adolf Hitler. Ritter, Wilkerson, McGovern, and many others regularly level these charges against Israel, and I have heard they have become so common that Facebook automatically bans any comparison of Israelis and Nazis.

But we must remember that those who constructed the “black legend” of Nazi Germany eighty or ninety years ago actually share many characteristics with those who much more recently constructed an equally vivid “black legend” for Hamas. So if we now believe that the latter is false, perhaps we should carefully investigate the former as well. Over the last decade or so, I have done exactly that, and I regard my findings as fairly conclusive.

Ray McGovern is a highly-regarded former intelligence professional, who regularly briefed a half-dozen American presidents during his long career as a CIA analyst, and I very much trust his candid judgment over the claims made by our dishonest and compromised media regarding current events in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the world.

But during World War II McGovern’s rough counterpart might have been Prof. John Beaty, who as a senior officer in Military Intelligence prepared the daily intelligence briefing reports that were distributed to the White House and all of our other top-ranking political and military leaders.

A few years after the end of the war, Beaty published an enormously popular conservative best-seller in which he explained that the true origins and circumstances of the conflict were totally different than what had been portrayed by our government and its subservient media, and his striking statements were strongly endorsed by a long list of our top wartime military commanders. The recent lies of the American government regarding Russia, Iran, and Hamas seem remarkably similar to the earlier lies that previous American governments had told about Germany and Japan.

Beaty’s views were hardly alone. During that same war, Classics Prof. Revilo Oliver served as Director of Research in a secret War Department intelligence unit, with 175 professionals working under him, and at the end of the war he was decorated for his outstanding service. His views were quite similar to those of Beaty and in his memoirs published decades later, he was scathing about the horrific war crimes committed by his own country and its British allies against Germany:

Great Britain, in violation of all the ethics of civilized warfare that had theretofore been respected by our race, and in treacherous violation of solemnly assumed diplomatic covenants about “open cities”, had secretly carried out intensive bombing of such open cities in Germany for the express purpose of killing enough unarmed and defenceless men and women to force the German government reluctantly to retaliate and bomb British cities and thus kill enough helpless British men, women, and children to generate among Englishmen enthusiasm for the insane war to which their government had committed them.

It is impossible to imagine a governmental act more vile and more depraved than contriving death and suffering for its own people — for the very citizens whom it was exhorting to “loyalty” — and I suspect that an act of such infamous and savage treason would have nauseated even Genghis Khan or Hulagu or Tamerlane, Oriental barbarians universally reprobated for their insane blood-lust. History, so far as I recall, does not record that they ever butchered their own women and children to facilitate lying propaganda….In 1944 members of British Military Intelligence took it for granted that after the war Marshal Sir Arthur Harris would be hanged or shot for high treason against the British people…

Much like today’s Iran, Hitler’s Germany had made absolutely every effort to avoid war with America, just as it had earlier attempted to reach a negotiated settlement with Poland in 1939. But FDR had personally orchestrated the outbreak of World War II for domestic political reasons and he was determined to see our countr