"Gaslit" Isn't Just A TV Series
From COVID To Ukraine, It's The State Of Contemporary America and The Western World in 2022
So, apparently, there is a brand new entertainment diversion as Hollywood “returns to normal” after two years of leaving the hungry beast that is streaming television largely unfed.
I literally just discovered this minutes ago. “Gaslit” is a new politically themed drama on the STARZ network that dramatizes the events surrounding the lead-up to the Watergate trials, and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon from public office in 1974.
One of the selling points, as with all Hollywood products, is casting. “A-List” celebrities I grew up watching as young, rebellious, sexy characters in the films of the 80s and beyond are now facing the truth and reality of aging in Hollywood themselves.
“Pretty Woman” star Julia Roberts is cast as Martha Mitchell, wife of the Attorney General at the time, John Mitchell. I seem to recall that Martha Mitchell was unflatteringly featured in multiple stories and gossip columns as the events of Watergate swirled around the public in 1974. John Mitchell was, indeed, a pivotal figure in both the leadup, and in the trials, and had plenty of bad advice for Nixon, despite being the top law enforcement official in the country. Sean Penn is cast as Mitchell, whose character is described as a "temperamental, foulmouthed and ruthless" man whose Achilles heel is his love for his outspoken wife, and who's ultimately forced to choose between his loyalty to her, and to the President.”
Watergate as a “love story”? I laugh to myself at the irony that this is the best gaslighting ever.
I was a teenager heading into my Senior year in High School in the Summer of 1974, and there is no doubt that Watergate was holding the attention of the entire nation at that moment in time. The resignation of Richard Nixon, to the shock of the entire country, occurred on August 8th. The hearings had been televised over the past months in a sort of parallel, historical Deja Vu to the Army McCarthy hearings. On August 18th, I went to see Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at Foreman Field, the football stadium at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Seeing my musical heroes in person, was thrilling.
Years before bands like Rage Against The Machine used music as a message to speak truth to power, and fuel political consciousness, CSN&Y had been pioneers in the technique. They (IMHO to their credit) were outspoken against the policies of the Nixon administration in escalating the war in Vietnam, and with the denouement of Watergate actualized in the resignation of Nixon, they were proven right. I specifically recall Nash and Crosby making joking references to Nixon and Watergate a few times.
As some people may or may not know, one of their biggest hits, a literal emergency broadcast bulletin in the form of a song, was “Ohio”. Neil Young, as the story goes, wrote it after reading a LIFE magazine account of the tragic and unmercifully militant shootings of anti-war protestors by the Ohio National Guard on the campus of Ohio State University in broad daylight.
The combined force of “music as the message”, and young people hitting the streets as anti-war activists in Nixon’s DC backyard had a profound effect. The gaslighting by the Nixon administration was at an all-time high. The student activists were having none of it.
Nixon had always publicly decried the war as a success, but, in secret, he was putting together plans to cross over the borders of Viet Nam into Cambodia and expand the war. He had also told people that the yet-to-be-proven rumors of breaking into the rival Democratic National Campaign Committee headquarters, with his knowledge, were false. Nixon infamously said, “I Am Not A Crook”. This is a master class in gaslighting.
I have nothing against political dramas or the STARZ network, but if you want a real, unglamorized account of what happened during the events of Watergate, check out “All The Presidents Men”. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two ambitious reporters for the independently owned Washington Post, (corporate and billionaire ownership was yet to happen) who are threatened, harassed, and followed while they tried to find sources who would reveal the truth behind the rumors.
History is definitely repeating itself, this time, in shorter cycles.
In April of 2022, we are being gaslit yet again, by not only the current administration but, even more dangerously, by the combined propaganda and media forces of the NATO alliance and Western media. They are frantically urging us towards war and possible nuclear annihilation. For someone like myself, who grew up watching examples of journalists like Woodward and Bernstein as watchdogs, literally seeking truth, today’s court stenographers in corporate media are shocking to see.
Journalism is supposed to be about asking questions and pushing back. Today they ask why we aren’t engaging in war as soon as possible. There is only a mob mentality echoed across television and social media, with no afterthought to consequences. Atrocities, they say, have been committed, as if it were an unusual circumstance. So, “Why not” escalate NOW? You can see exactly what I’m talking about at 1:00 in.
The lack of clear, concise information about what exactly is happening on the ground in Ukraine, and most importantly, free of subjective rhetoric, is at a premium.
That’s not to say that we should be void of empathy for the plight of Ukrainian civilians who have been unmercifully attacked. What we do need is for cooler heads to prevail in an escalating situation from which there will be no turning back if we cross the line into full-scale war.
Nixon took to the airwaves in 1969 to outline his new administration’s war policy and effectively gaslit the public in a televised speech in which he said, with convoluted logic, that because 35,000 US soldiers had already died, presumably as an “investment in the cost of war”, withdrawing from Vietnam would be an “abandonment of the promise made to the South Vietnamese people and would threaten the prospects for long term peace”. War is Peace in an Orwellian nutshell.
The Biden administration and NATO have joined together to gaslight in the same sense. Unproven allegations of war crimes by Russian forces, in which Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are summarily executed and left in the street, are taken at face value.
That is not to say it didn’t happen, that’s to say that it has yet to be proven.
On the one hand, you have paid academics for the Military-Industrial Complex like Eliot A. Cohen, who gaslights the public urging war, safely ensconced in an academic bubble. The scholarly articles for The Atlantic are written with the alleged credibility and authority of a political scientist with a Harvard pedigree. This doesn’t make sociopathic commentary like: “To break the will of Russia and free Ukraine from conquest and subjugation, many Russian soldiers have to flee, surrender, or die, and the more and faster the better” anymore palatable or less insane sounding.
Biden has openly called, not only for Putin’s removal (speaking of emotionally charged outbursts according to Biden himself) but called Putin a war criminal. The effectiveness of gaslighting the public can’t really be underestimated here. The war crimes that the US has not only committed itself but continues to aid and abet, make this a glaring example of moral hypocrisy. The recent history of the Iraq invasion should make that clearly evident, but even the atrocities committed in recent wars seem to have disappeared in the collective consciousness of Americans down the memory hole. The Western media thoughtfully ponder Putin’s crimes as if the US itself, or its allies, had never broached that territory.
The Kyiv Independent, which has been providing alleged objective, on the ground coverage of the war, free from gaslighting and agendas, turns out to be financed as a propaganda outlet for Western interests. This excellent article from Mint Press news states:
“But, while almost universally presented as a collective of unbiased journalists producing credible content, the Independent’s history, funding sources, and the proximity of many of its key staff to Western governments suggest that the news organization is not nearly as independent as its name implies.
Since November, the outlet has amassed over two million Twitter followers, up from around just 20,000 one week before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Twitter also constantly promotes its content on its homepage, encouraging hundreds of millions of people to read and follow them.
The Independent has also managed to raise more than $3.2 million from two separate crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe and rakes in more than $72,000 per month from supporters on Patreon. This is partially down to ringing endorsements from the likes of The Washington Post, CBS News and PBS, who endorsed their funding drives as the perfect way to do something to help Ukrainians.
What this means in actuality is that the working class, and their children and families, are expendable “commodities” whose lives can be sacrificed in service to some bizarre, sociopathic vision of “normal” life prior to the advent of COVID. “Normal” in their view and “health” is defined as attending school, work, and other vital components of the engines of commerce mask free. From the above-referenced paper:
“As the COVID Omicron variant subsides, and schools cautiously reopen, a tiny but vocal group of doctors is arguing to end all precautions, including masking. Their arguments distort public health evidence. Under-vaccinated and under-resourced communities are the most likely to suffer from such a strategy.”
This distortion of public health evidence is synonymous with gaslighting as dangerous as the type promoting escalation of war and possible existential crisis. Yet, the government itself, in the guise of public health “guardians” Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, has gaslit the public into thinking the crisis is far behind us, or more conservative interpretations, that we are “emerging” from it.
Is it any surprise then, that the minute masking mandates were surrendered to a policy of “personal choice” COVID is exploding? It would seem that in the elite halls of power in Washington, this should be cause for alarm, and at the minimum, an urgent reversal of policy. Twitter feeds from prominent politicians like Nancy Pelosi or Adam Schiff, attending maskless events, who announce they test positive for COVID seem more like advertisements for pharmaceutical companies’ drugs that you would see on TV. All of course ”thankful” they are vaxxed and boosted, all is well, they feel fine, they are asymptomatic, etc. It’s insidious gaslighting sold as Hopium.
From war to COVID policy, governments have put on notice that our lives are expendable, and we are just parts of an equation in a zero-sum game. We cheer our own demise, beg for war, and ignore the reality of the rampant disease.
Sadly this is what the triumph of gaslighting results in.
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