Fake News
Hallo vrienden,
My mother was heavily pregnant with me when the RAF bombed the Haarlem suburb in which she lived. That was exactly 75 years ago, on the 16th April 1943.
A friend of my mother’s, Margot Gimpel, was amongst the 85 civilians who lost their lives. No smart bombs, nor GPS back then. Not a single bomb fell on the intended target.
From my dad’s anecdotes (translated from Dutch):
“At great risk, we had a radio mounted under the table. We listened to the Dutch broadcasts of Radio Orange out of London. We were told that the railway works in Haarlem had been totally destroyed…”
Never again was my dad to believe everything he heard on the news or read in the papers.
PHOTO- Destruction in the Teding van Berkhout Street (the street I was born in and where we lived)- The lads in black shorts, helping in the clean-up, are members of the Dutch equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and the photo was used for propaganda purposes.
Dad ‘infected’ all of us with such skepticism. Almost none in our immediate family ever thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (How do you move and hide a tunnel?).
Lies and propaganda have been with us for a long long time. These days it is called fake news.
Just a few examples:
The expulsion of Jews from England after the populace was made to believe that child sacrifice was an integral part of Judaism.
The annexation of Czechoslovakia, justified by the alleged mistreatment of the Sudeten Germans.
The bombing of North Vietnam as reprisals for the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin incident.
And who can forget Colin Powell showing those children’s drawings of chemical weapon factories on the back of trucks to a credulous audience at the UN?
Closer to home, John Howard’s re-election on the basis of the throwing of non-existent children overboard.
So what are we to make of the recent chemical weapons attack in Syria?
It is now over a decade ago that in a failed re-election attempt the Northern Territory Emergency Response- The Intervention- was launched. We were told that the sexual abuse of children was an integral part of Remote Aboriginal society. Millions of dollars were spent on trying to prove the existence of alleged paedophile rings, with as much success as locating the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
So when will humanity begin to discern the nakedness of its emperors? When will we ever learn?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y2SIIeqy34 Pete Seeger, Where have all the flowers gone?
The spin-doctors have succeeded beyond their wildest wet dreams in inducing Global Amnesia.
Hardly a soul (except for those of us on the front line) knows what the Intervention is, yet the disempowering, assimilationist legislation remains in place doing its dirty deeds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYeMhiWWP8s AC/DC Dirty deeds done dirt cheap…
Tot siens,
Frenk