Why Gold Rigging Is Ignored
by the Media
by Nelson Hultberg
June 7, 2005
In Bill Murphy's recent Midas commentary (June 6th), he hit upon
one of the more devastating condemnations that can be expressed about
a people and their society.
"It will surprise no veteran Café member/GATA supporter," Murphy
wrote, "that the New York Times failed to even mention GATA in
their New York Times Magazine story on gold on Sunday. I have
been through this drill for more than six years....
"This will give you some idea of why I rant the way I do at times
-- and have been doing so for many years now. We DO NOT have
a free press in the United States. We DO NOT have free markets
in America. As a result of controlling the press and rigging US
markets, as well as distorting the real US economic numbers, the
Orwellians are taking this once great country down the chute. The
coming US financial market / economic disaster is going to devastate
the average American, as they won't know what hit them and why."
What makes Murphy's commentary such a devastating appraisal of our
people and our society? The answer lies in the reason WHY we no longer
have a free press in America. For ours is a far more ignominious
usurpation of press freedom than those of our historical predecessors.
In all the dictatorships of history, the process of enslavement
is always brought about through a blanket "government enforced censorship." It
becomes ILLEGAL to tell the truth. It is against the law to utter
derogatory statements about one's leaders. To expose the Emperor's
nakedness, is punishable by fines and imprisonment. Read the accounts
of all the despotisms throughout history -- from the ancient Pharaohs,
to the savage monarchial tyrannies of the Middle Ages, to the Nazis
and the Communists of the 20th century -- and you will find the heavy
hand of the State dictating what can and cannot be uttered in the
press. The press is basically nationalized in some way so that the
ruling bureaucracy decides what is reported every day to the people.
Those who try to report truths deviating from the accepted government
line are PROHIBITED BY THE LAW from doing so.
Observe, however, the form of "truth suppression" that is taking
place in America today. It is not the kind that the 20th century
Germans and Russians endured under their oppressors. In fact, if
one looks around today, he sees no laws stifling the freedom of
the press at all. This is what allows the elites in Washington
and Wall Street to present themselves to the people as legitimate
governing agents rather than the sinister cabalists and tyrants that
they are in reality. For there are no laws suppressing freedom of
the press in America today. There is no legal censorship of the press.
Yet we in the gold community know that we do not have a FREE press
in this country today! So what gives? How do we explain this conundrum?
The Sanction of the Victim
The answer lies in what Ayn Rand called the "sanction of the victim." Our
dictatorship in America today is coming about voluntarily.
And because it is, it is the most despicable and shameful form of
enslavement that there is. Our media pundits and academics are willingly giving
up their freedom, their rights, and their money to the unbridled
State. They are willingly muzzling themselves. Like Pavlovian dogs,
they continuously react to the appropriate stimuli of the statist
elites in hopes of gaining the offered rewards -- acceptance in the
herd and its rituals.
There are no laws that say the punditry of America must shun Bill
Murphy, or ostracize GATA, or refuse to investigate the blatant "rigging
of the markets" in today's world. Yet the pundits never bring GATA's
issues of gold and equities rigging up. Silence is all we get. Total
silence in face of evidence any educated, intelligent person could
understand. And it's not because Murphy's style is the confrontational,
in-your-face kind of attack journalism. There are other pundits and
journalists (John Embry of Sprott Asset Management in Toronto, Kelly
Patricia O'Meara of Insight magazine, etc.) who are not possessed
of the pit bull intensity of Murphy, but are equally ostracized by
Planet Wall Street and its pusillanimous lackeys.
Why then is this inexcusable default on the truth taking place?
Why is our press NOT FREE in a country where there are no laws dictating
what can and cannot be written? Our press is not free today because
its operators have CHOSEN to sanction the enslavement process that
is being smuggled into our lives by the Washington-Wall Street cartel
of economic fascism. They have CHOSEN to give up the essence of what
makes men manly and women stalwart. They have relinquished that inner
spirit that drives all strong-willed people to never bend in face
of what they know to be wrong, what they know to be tyrannical, what
they know to be sinister and slimy.
This is what Ayn Rand meant with her formulation of the "sanction
of the victim" in her great novel Atlas Shrugged. She demonstrated
quite powerfully that the modern dictatorship comes about because
its victims willingly sanction it. They actually work for
it; they subconsciously assist their rulers in taking away the most
treasured gift they have been given -- their freedom.
How this "sanction of the victim" mindset has come about is a complex
phenomenon that naturally cannot be analyzed deeply in one article.
But I have written a good general overview of why and how it has
been brought about in my article, Invasion
of the Mind Snatchers, for any readers who are interested
in delving further into the issue. And it is a very big issue --
why Americans are so readily giving up their freedom and their rights
in their embrace of the deceptive sirens of the New World Order.
Suffice it to say that Rand exposed one of the most powerful tools
that modern day dictatorships make use of to take people's freedom
away from them. The power elites convince the populace that what
they (the elites) are doing is "inevitable," "desirable," and "progressive." The
pitiful thing is that it requires a servile mentality to buy into
it. And regrettably there are thousands of pundits today who are
just such servile mentalities.
These are the members of today's media. There are no laws that say
they must obey the establishment elites and ignore all reports about
market rigging. Yet this is precisely what they ritualistically do.
The Archetype Servile Mentality
Back in the 1970s, I worked in the real estate business in Las Vegas
over a ten-year period. And during that decade I traveled in a social
circle that included real estate agents, finance people, lawyers,
stockbrokers, etc. It also included two aspiring journalists who
worked for one of the secondary (or weekly) newspapers in the area.
As I think back on these two media wanabees now, I see that they
were very dangerous humans because of the warped philosophical and
psychological drives that motivated them.
I would like to portray a brief depiction of their personas and
their beliefs, for these two aspiring journalists were basically
archetypes of the mindset that permeates today's media class from
L.A. to New York. The difference lies only in the fact that they
were never going to make it into the big leagues. But in regards
to their guiding philosophy and their level of intellectual integrity,
they were identical to the bigger league models.
In observing the twisted cerebral workings of these two aggravating
per¬sonalities, I came to understand one of the most important
reasons why freedom is always in jeopardy of being destroyed whenever
and wherever it has gained ascendancy in civilization. We'll call
these two past associates of mine Robo and Barry.
Robo was a short, stocky Charlie Chaplan look alike, with the personality
of Cliff Claven on the TV sitcom, Cheers. Barry informed him
one night over beer, that he was the "most interesting bore he'd
ever met." Robo needed elevator shoes to reach five and a half feet,
and apparently suffered from a complex about his shortness. All his
conversations were pedantic marathons devoted to giant, detailed
dissertations on every mundane subject mankind had ever chronicled
in the Statistical Abstract. It was as if he hoped glib, gargantuan
displays of "facts" would make him into a big man like other men.
Not unlike the Orwellians of today's establishment media hoping to
bamboozle the populace into acceptance of their own lie -- that they
still revere adherence to truth because they portray voluminous government
released data glibly and skillfully. One thinks of the bland automatons
that work for each new administration in Washington (such as former
Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer).
Barry, on the other hand, was a big, grungy Woody Allen sort of
character, with a penchant for cutting cynicism and humorous vulgarity
that would put Andrew Dice Clay to shame. One of his favorite movie
heroes was actually Ratso Ritzo in the 1969 trash exploitation flick, Midnight
Cowboy. Oozing envy for all who displayed superior skills, Barry
saw life basically in terms of what he could mooch from his friends
by means of his weird wit, and coax from the government by means
of his crypto socialism.
Barry could articulate thought, no doubt about that, but it was
thought that squirted all over the place and lacked logical coherence.
What's worse, it was adrift from moral-philosophical moorings. It
was totally amoral (very much like our big league media pundits today).
Vulgarized humor was the real distinctive talent nature had bestowed
upon him, and he cultivated this attribute as other men practice
music, or law, or athletics. Every human encounter with him inevitably
turned into bouts of pornographic crudity, peppered with razor like
barbs hurled at mankind's traditional values (very much like today's Rolling
Stones journalists, or the rank vulgarity of Chris Rock.)
Infatuation with vulgarity was only a sideline to Barry, however.
His real dream was to be an intellectual. Actually becoming one was
apparently too much work, so he settled for the appearance of
intellectuality, which he had decided meant the knowledge and
use of large words sprinkled into collectivist diatribes against
the American concept of free enterprise. He was constantly memorizing
vocabulary books, as if prolific displays of "big words" would somehow
make him into a thinker who was respected for his mind. Such books
sat everywhere like icons of salvation in the dingy two room flat
out of which he operated.
Over the years as I became more philosophically educated, I came
to see that these two America haters were the ultimate result of
the modern school system and its inculcation of Marxist-Keynesian
irrationalism. Their brains were cognitively stunted, for they thought
only in terms of the short run. (When asked once about the fact that
in the long run, his inflationist monetary policies would surely
wreak havoc, Keynes replied that, "In the long run, we're all dead." This
kind of clever superficiality has come to pass for wisdom in today's
illiterate journalistic world.)
Thus, discussing the long-range ideological forces of civilization,
or the integrated nature of existence, or the "big picture" with
Robo and Barry was like washing water over glass. Nothing ever soaked
in. They were incapable of any vision beyond a decade, unable to
carry cause and effect relationships back to first principles, exasperatingly
devoid of all sense of history, impervious to reason, and obsessively
enamoured with the gaucheries of materialism. Truth, idealism and
the long run were not concepts to which they were able to relate.
Sophistry governed their modus operandi as instinct drives
worker ants. But this was inevitable, for the dominating characteristic
of the modern mind is its compulsion to evade reality. (Witness Wall
Street and Washington these days.) Skillful sophistry naturally becomes
the first and most important tool all media pundits need to acquire
so as to maintain their evasions. Sophistry allows them to hold contradictory
premises; to flaunt the facts; to choose pusillanimous paths, yet
still consider themselves brave; to employ massive government coercion
and dispense arbitrary privileges, yet still claim to advocate freedom
and objective law. It allows them to sanction the evils of despotism
yet con themselves into believing it is a "new kind of freedom."
Robo and Barry had decided early in life that any form of a free-market
world was intolerable. Early on they had taken flight into the paradigmatic
falsities of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Noam
Chomsky. Like homing pigeons, all their ideas moved toward justifications
of the leftist world-view: America is a democracy, and "the people" have
a right to vote for whatever they desire. Our environment molds us,
so there is no such thing as free will. The state must regulate everything
in order to establish "justice." Equality demands more redistribution
of the "national income," so a 90% progressive income tax would be
fair. America should emulate Sweden where everyone is guaranteed
happiness and security by a centralized government. Arguments for
bigger government tumbled out of their brains like rats scurrying
from a flushed out sewer. Their journalistic output always expressed
to some degree or another their antagonism toward the ideas of freedom
upon which America had been built.
Seeing that I was young and unsophisticated at the time, it took
me a little while to grasp why I immediately did not like Robo and
Barry. But I soon came to realize I didn't like them because they
personified weakness in a world that demanded mental and spiritual
strength. With their clever sophistry and incessant whining about
the rigors of reality, they were violating the unwritten law of manliness
that men carry ingrained in the essence of their being. These two
soft, indulgent, little liberals were copping out on life's foremost
duty of self-reliance -- and it was not pleasant to have to
endure their relentless egalitarianism.
They Love their Servitude
What kind of nation will America of the 21st century become with
recreants of this nature at the helm of our media -- so fearful of
facing up to reality, so anxious to compel their fellow man to fight
the battle of existence for them through more and more redistribution
of wealth, so forgetful of the great truths upon which our country
stands, so desirous of greasing the path of the manipulators who
now rule Washington?
What kind? Read the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington
Post, or tune into CNBC on any given day. And you will see
the servile, egalitarian mindsets that are ever so eager to "sanction
their own enslavement" and ease the way for a New World Order.
They speak the language of free enterprise and emanate Americanism,
but it is only lip service. They are not advocates of freedom.
They are not in search of truth and what our country is really
all about.
One of the 20th century's most percipient intellects, Aldous Huxley,
had their number. In the Introduction to Brave New World,
Huxley wrote, "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one
in which the all powerful executive of political bosses and their
army of managers control a population of slaves WHO DO NOT HAVE TO
BE COERCED, because they love their servitude. To make them love
it is the task assigned, in present day totalitarian states, to ministries
of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." [Brave New
World, Bantam Books, 1967, p. xii. Caps added.]
The "army of managers" Huxley was warning about is already upon
us. They are the statist bankers and bureaucrats of New York and
Washington. And horrifyingly, they do not have to pass any laws to
censor today's press because today's journalists censor themselves.
Today's journalists LOVE THEIR SERVITUDE. They have been taught to
love it by the "ministries of propaganda" -- the intellectuals in
our colleges.
Today's media pundits have willingly and pusillanimously chosen
to relinquish their freedom. This is why we have no free press
in this country! The journalists of America have chosen to live
the lives of lackeys rather than free men. They have chosen popularity
over principle. They have succumbed to an obsession with being liked,
to being a part of the establishment's "in crowd," to being invited
to elegant Washington soirees of smarmy fascist insiders and gala
Wall Street bashes of the mega-bankers and financial quislings.
Such pigmy men dare not bite the hand that feeds them their obsessive
desires. Such craven humbugs are not journalists; they are dutiful
apparatchiks serving the menacing State. The real journalists of
old -- men like H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun, Garet Garrett
of The Saturday Evening Post, John T. Flynn of the New
York Globe, etc. -- are turning over in their graves at sight
of this display of submissive sophistry and renunciation of the journalist's
creed to seek always the truth even if it brings one down outside
the boundaries of respectability and popularity. This is not a pretty
sight. This is the capitulation of a nation's intellectual leaders.
It will bring us nothing but the ignominy of a serf's existence under
the lordship of centralized Washington oligarchs.
So Bill Murphy, don't stop your rant. Keep pouring out the pit bull
prose and that intensity that scalds your opponents' sensitivities.
Your adversaries are seedy sycophants that are defaulting on the
fundamental reason for their being. They well deserve the lambasting
you give them for their contemptible groveling at the feet of their
controllers.
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