The above video was recorded after the Gulf “war” which ended in early 1991. The first time I heard it was in 2003 when the second Gulf “war” was hourly news and knowing Bill Hicks died in 1994, I was a little confused at first. Realising that exactly the same words and rhetoric were used twelve years later was something of an awakening for me and changed the way I looked at the media from then onwards.
Nothing has changed since, I’ve just become more conscious of it.
It wasn’t just the same rhetoric that was used as the war was fought in the same part of the world and the United States was on its second President Bush as well! There are in fact many more characters who returned for the sequel which have already been exhaustively documented in many other places. I was only a child during the first war in the Gulf and I only vaguely remember images of Saddam Hussain, George H. W. Bush and General Norman Schwarzkopf on television.
When it came to the sequel, I was a young adult and was decidedly against the conflict which was a rather lonely position for a young “conservative” at the time. Mainstream conservatives were almost universally for the war and the political left was almost universally against with the prominent exception of Christopher Hitchens. Unlike the left, I remained consistently against US foreign policy into the Presidency of Barack Obama and beyond. I was so consistent that when most of the political right had tired of the (still ongoing as of writing), occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, I finally held a political position with mainstream support. The political left meanwhile, remained ferociously hostile to wars and US foreign policy right up until Obama became president and carried on much as his predecessor had only with more dignity or something like that. There are some exceptions but this has remained so into the present with Fake President Biden — one of the slimiest politicians in US history which really is saying something.
Getting back to the video above, both “wars” had generally bipartisan support and the mainstream media in general, very much enjoyed covering it regardless of the position of the journalists. This very cynically changed when it became politically expedient to do so. As I have a long-term memory that goes well beyond the ever truncating media cycle, I noticed this and I remembered this.
I remember that the much feared WMDs came to nothing. I remember how this was exploited. I remember how this was forgotten when Obama was president and expanded attacks into Middle Eastern countries despite this.
Now we have what is outwardly different but all to familiar “crisis” around the world. I have found myself holding a position far outside the mainstream. The media has had a field day pushing it by the hour. The switch has not yet flipped with either side of our political theatre but there are some indications of this happening. When it does, I do not intend to allow anyone to forget the positions they held.
This goes especially for the media and politicians. I will not forget (and nobody else should) the way they pushed the totally overblown “crisis” we have at the moment. When the public begins to flip, I will be there calling everybody out on it.