Russ Kick - You Are Being Lied To (2001).pdf

Russ Kick - You Are Being Lied To (2001).pdf

The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths

From The Introduction:

You Are Being Lied To. It takes some nerve to give a book that title,
eh? It came to me very early in the process, when this collection was
just a germ of an idea. I did pause to wonder if it was too audacious;
after all, I didn’t want my mouth to write a check that my butt couldn’t
cash. But after spending several intense months assembling this
book, I’m more convinced than ever that the title is the proper one.
We are being lied to. In many ways.

For the purposes of this book, the definition of “lie” is an elastic one.
Sometimes it means an outright falsehood told in order to deceive
people and advance the agenda of the liar. Or it can be a “lie of omission,”
in which the crucial part of the story that we’re not being told is
more important than the parts we know. Sometimes the lie can be
something untrue that the speaker thinks is true, otherwise known as
misinformation (as opposed to disinformation, which is something
untrue that the speaker knows is untrue). In yet other cases, particular
erroneous beliefs are so universal—serial killers are always men,
the Founding Fathers cared about the masses—that you can’t pinpoint
certain speakers in order to ascertain their motives; it’s just
something that everyone “knows.” Sometimes, in fact, the lie might
be the outmoded dominant paradigm in a certain field. Arelated type
of lie—a “meta-lie,” perhaps—occurs when certain institutions arrogantly
assume that they have all the answers. These institutions then
try to manipulate us with a swarm of smaller individual lies.

Which more or less leads me to my next point: This book doesn’t
pretend that it has all, or perhaps even any, of the answers. It’s
much easier to reveal a lie than to reveal the truth. As a wise soul
once noted, all you have to do is find a single white crow to disprove
the statement, “All crows are black.” The contributors to this book
are pointing out the white crows that undermine the “black crow”
statements of governments, corporations, the media, religions, the
educational system, the scientific and medical establishments, and
other powerful institutions. Sydney Schanberg may not know the
exact truth of the POW/MIAsituation, but he sure as hell knows that
Senator John McCain does everything he can to make sure that
truth will never be known. David McGowan may not know exactly
what happened during the Columbine massacre, but he shows us
that there are numerous puzzle pieces that just don’t fit into the nice,
neat version of events that’s been presented to us. Judith Rich
Harris is still building the case that peers matter more than parents,
but she has soundly laid to rest the notion that parenting style is by
far the most important influence on who a child becomes. Can we
say that a divine hand didn’t put a secret code in the Bible? No, not
exactly, but David Thomas can show that 1) those “holy” codes also
appear in War and Peace, The Origin of Species, and a Supreme
Court decision, and 2) you can find almost any word or name you
want to find if you torture the text enough.

There are some cases, though, when it’s fairly safe to say that the
truth has been revealed. Thomas Lyttle does show us that licking
toads will not, indeed can not, get you high, and Michael Zezima
definitively reveals that both sides committed atrocities during World
War II. Meanwhile, Charles Bufe demonstrates that the founders of
Alcoholics Anonymous lifted their ideas wholesale from the evangelical
Christian group they belonged to. They even admitted it!

Such cases of positive proof are in the minority, though. Basically, the
pieces in this book show that the received wisdom—the common
knowledge—is often wrong. Well, then, what’s right? That’s a much,
much more complicated question, and the answers are elusive.
Hopefully we’ll all spend our lives pursuing them. But the first step is
to realize that the “answers” that are being handed to us on a silver
platter—or, perhaps more often, shoved down our throats—are
often incorrect, incomplete, and usually serve the interests of the
people promoting those so-called answers. That’s where You Are
Being Lied To comes in.

So dive in at any point, and you’ll see that this book’s title is deadly
accurate. What you do about it is up to you.

—Russ Kick

Authors include: Jim Marrs, Barry Chamish, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Russ Kick, etc.