Religion and Politics Should Not Mix The New York Pravda to the Rescue By Servando Gonzalez Copyright © 2011. All rights reserved. The Founding Fathers of this country were very farsighted when they made clear in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights that the Congress should not make any law establishing a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise of a religion. Nevertheless, with all their powers of foresight, apparently it never crossed their minds that the government itself, as a result of the concerted efforts of the religious Right and the religious Left, one day was going to turn into a religion. Of course, if you are a Christian, you are not going to ask your pastor or priest to show factual evidence of the existence of God. In the same fashion, if you are a New Ager, you will never ask Al Gore to show the data supporting his theory that human-caused global warming is threatening to destroy Gaia. That’s the reason why religious people call themselves believers: they don’t need any factual proof to support their beliefs. There is an important reason for that. Religion, science, politics, art, music, etc., are different, but necessary domains of human activity. As such, they complement each other. Asking a Christian for scientific proof of the existence of God would be as foolish as asking a scientist to show the artistic values of Einstein’s relativity theory. Religious people who look for scientific proof of the existence of their gods are either confused or their beliefs are not strong enough. Unfortunately, Americans of both the religious right and the religious left have translated their religious belief to the field of politics, and it has brought us to an inextricable conundrum. President Ronald Reagan is often quoted by his dictum: “Trust but verify,” but it is obvious that Americans don’t feel anymore the need to verify what the government tells them. They have turned into true believers. Pravda (truth) and Isveztia (news) were the two main official newspapers in the Soviet Union. But the Russians were totally aware that, as the joke said, the Truth carried no News and the News had no Truth. Actually, they systematically distrusted anything published in the official press. Unfortunately, most Americans believe everything their government tells them, and the government feels no need to provide any proof whatsoever to support its assertions. For example, all the information about the 9/11 events was supplied by the U.S. government with full, uncontested support of the mainstream media. Day after day the New York Pravda and the Washington Isveztia repeated over and over the same bunch of lies. Now we know that they were a bunch of lies only thanks to the internet, the only free communication medium that is available to us until they take full control of it as they plan to do. In the same fashion, all the information about the alleged assassination of Osama bin Laden was provided by the government. It was repeated verbatim, without any single attempt at analysis, much less verification, by the officialist mainstream media. The day after the bin Laden operation, the New York Pravda regurgitated in the first page the obviously fraudulent information provided by the government,[1] and included a full 10-page section, “The Death of Bin Laden,”[2] which included a big photo of the dramatic moments at the White House when Obama, Hillary, Biden, Gates and other members of the National Security Council watched the action in real time. Just a few hours later, however, it was known that the photo was a nothing more than a staged public relations stunt. In order to give more credibility to the lie, the photo, supplied by the White House, because no reporter from the New York Pravda was present in the room, even included a digitally blurred photo on the table in from of Hillary. This was a subliminal attempt to prove that the NYP guys are “security conscious,” not a bunch of commies as some ill intentioned people think. The first page included dramatic computer-designed drawings of bin Laden’s “compound,” which in its perfection concealed that the real building resembled more a Brazilian fabela than the living headquarters of the most wanted terrorist in the FBI’s list. If one is to believe the photos published, bin Laden’s house looked more like the home of an unemployed worker in a project in Oakland than the house of an Arabian millionaire. A New York Pravda’s Editorial Opinion of the same edition firmly stated, “The death of Osama bin Laden reflects strong leadership and painstaking intelligence work.” However, once I read the editorial piece, I found that it was fully based on undigested, unverified information provided by the government. According to the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, intelligence is the final product resulting from the collection, processing, integration, analysis, and interpretation of available information.[3] So, even though the term intelligence comprises something much more complex, we may safely accept the shorter definition that intelligence is just information after it has been properly evaluated. And that is exactly what the NYP passes to its readers disguised as intelligence: just information. An non-evaluated information can easily turn into misinformation or, even worse, pure disinformation. In other words, the New York Pravda’s OpEd and the whole 10-page section about bin Laden’s capture was fully based on hearsay. No wonder its circulation is shrinking every passing day. One of the Letters to the Editor written by a true believer expresses his opinion that “We need to congratulate and thank President Obama, the Central Intelligence Agency and particularly all the military people involved in the Navy Seal mission that finally meted out justice to Osama bin Laden.” Well, if the photos of Osama’s command and control center from which he coordinated and directed Al Qaeda operations for more than five years are the real thing, they reveal that we are wasting our taxpayers’ money giving so much unnecessary resources to the Pentagon. If true, Bin Laden’s minimalist approach proved to be a much more cost-efficient operation. The New York Pravda included a long article describing how the religious left accepted the miracle without asking for any factual evidence. Not surprisingly, Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Duhame, Carl Rove, and other ex-members of the Bush regime joined the cacophonic chorus praising Obama -- accepting the new lies without reservations, gives credibility to past ones.[4] The article continued on page F5, displaying a big photo of a smiling Obama with the user-friendly caption: “The raid gave Mr. Obama a boost in stature at a time when his ratings had been low.” Just a few days after the raid, however, the polls showed that Obama’s “boost” had been minimal. Nowhere in the extensive NYP report one can find an explanation as to why no member of bin Laden’s security detail was killed or wounded in the assault. The fact, that passed unnoticed because the sychophantic press didn’t ask and would not tell, is extremely difficult to explain. An educated guess could be that there were no casualties among members of bin Laden’s security apparatus because he had no security at all. And there was no security protecting the most wanted and dangerous terrorist leader in the world because . . . well, if you are not a true believer member of the religious left or the religious right, by this time you may have reached your own conclusions. For many years, the New York Pravda’s motto has been: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” and the readers took for granted that the news were based on facts. Not any more. Currently, what the NYP passes as facts are actually factoids: pieces of unverified or inaccurate information that is presented in the press as factual, often as part of a publicity effort, and that is then accepted as true because of frequent repetition.[5] The NYP and most of the American mainstream media have become veritable factoid factories. On the other hand, every dark cloud has a silver lining. One of the few jobs American corporations have not been able to outsource abroad is the production of factoids (a.k.a. lies). Currently, no country in the world can compete with American corporations in the production of factoids. Not the Chinese. Not the North Koreans. Not even the Cubans. We Americans should be proud of our factoid factories disguised as newspapers, magazines and TV channels. Our factoids should carry this sign: Made in America by American workers! --------------- Notes: 1. Mark Mazzetti, et al, “Behind the Hunt For Bin Laden: Clues Slowly Led to Location of Qaeda Chief,” The New York Times, May 3, 2011, p. 1. 2. The New York Times, Section F, May 3, 2011. 3. Quoted in Michael Warner, “Wanted: A Definition of ‘Intelligence.’ Understanding Our Craft,” CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/ vol46no3/article02.html. 4. Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg,” The New York Times, May 3, 2011, p. 1. 5. The term factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as "a fact which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper", and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean "similar but not the same". At the time, The Washington Isveztia described Mailer's new word as referring to "something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact." --------------- Servando Gonzalez is a Cuban-born American writer, semiologist and intelligence analyst. He has written books, essays and articles on Latin American history, intelligence, espionage, and semiotics. Servando is the author of Historia herética de la revolución fidelista, The Secret Fidel Castro, The Nuclear Deception and La madre de todas las conspiraciones, all available at Amazon.com. He also hosted the documentaries Treason in America: The Council on Foreign Relations and Partners in Treason: The CFR-CIA-Castro Connection, produced by Xzault Media Group of San Leandro, California. His latest book, Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People just appeared and is available at Amazon.com. Or download a .pdf copy of the book you can read on your computer or i-Pad. Servando's new book, OBAMANIA: The New Puppet and His Masters, is already available at Amazon.com.