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First, I would like to repeat\u00a0wishes for a Happy New Year and all the rest of that business\u00a0that took place between posts.<\/p>\n
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In considering my next opinion article at the\u00a0global news website Press TV<\/a>, there are several topics I may choose to address. One is the movie, The Interview<\/em>, and the cyber-attack on Sony that is alleged to have been a retaliation by North Korea over this movie. I already addressed this, reacting primarily to the mainstream coverage of the issue<\/a>, at this blog. Even unknown\u00a0to as big of a sceptic as me\u00a0at the time I wrote the previous post, the\u00a0facts tell a very different story. The FBI and the rest of the American government, as well as their intertwined corporate parrots in the mainstream press, have instead chosen the path of demagoguery and lies by once again pointing the finger at a country they don’t like (Iraq, Iran, North Korea, blah, blah) and ignoring the fact that this cyber-attack came from inside their own country. Experts say it was almost certainly\u00a0launched from or at least masterminded within the United States, by Americans with direct access to the computer systems that were affected.<\/p>\n Revising knowledge structures, dismantling arrogant power rhetoric will make world #peace<\/a>: my latest @PressTV<\/a> op-ed http:\/\/t.co\/3YhhCtYIiO<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Harry J. Bentham (@hjbentham) December 7, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now it has foolishly\u00a0prematurely\u00a0pointed the finger at a random adversary, North Korea, as it did against Iraq on many occasions in the past, the US government has no choice but to march the public off to war again based on a pack of lies before any of the facts are actually in, and it has had to stampede\u00a0all the actual security experts\u00a0out of the room\u00a0to do it. The government’s\u00a0foolish investigators have prematurely said this\u00a0was an attack by another country to feed the sensationalist media,\u00a0when it was\u00a0actually an attack by hackers in the United States<\/a>. However, it’s too late for the Obama administration to turn back from its mistake now. To admit that\u00a0an apparent attack from another state was actually\u00a0an attack by hackers within the US would be an image-cracking display of the regime’s own\u00a0incompetence\u00a0and a much-deserved humiliation for America’s presently backward and useless model of so-called “national” security.<\/p>\n When\u00a0Americans think they are laughing at North Korea’s alleged despotic behaviour and paranoia through a comedy film such as The Interview<\/em>, the perverse reality is that they are propagating their own crazy regime’s program of paranoia, the worship of government authority figures, and military parades. The fragile, image-conscious\u00a0American regime, much like North Korea, is desperate to point its finger at\u00a0foreign enemies. This may be because of its internal crisis: its own social cohesion is deteriorating, the authorities are increasingly hated and rejected by their own people, and the level of outright incompetence in the FBI and other US government agencies supposedly keeping Americans “safe” is so high that almost all US security thinking is oriented around correcting the mistakes\u00a0of its own staff. The failure to pinpoint responsibility for the attack on Sony and premature accusations against North Korea are yet another\u00a0example of the US government’s lack of expertise\u00a0and\u00a0hiccups of incompetence by poorly informed security officials becoming the very raison d’etre of a major US foreign policy shift.<\/p>\n The US government will be\u00a0as afraid to admit that it was mistaken when accusing North Korea of the Sony hack as it will be about\u00a0admitting it can be attacked from within and utterly fail to find the attackers. In that fear, it can be expected\u00a0to propagate\u00a0fairy tales about a heroic national struggle against foreign villains, hackers and subversives infiltrating its country and its computers. The so called\u00a0Code War – a term derived\u00a0from the old “Cold War” expression to refer to some kind of\u00a0long-term global cyber-war between opposing powers\u00a0– is\u00a0not actually being waged between nation-states as much of the media tries to portray it, but between states plus\u00a0other monolithic entities such as\u00a0Sony, and their own people searching for revenge.<\/p>\n Computers smash traditional hierarchical power structures, and create vulnerabilities for the powerful. These vulnerabilities lead to the humiliation of what appeared to be powerful corporations\u00a0and regimes, and the humiliation leads to cover-ups, lies, misinformation, and anything else that will let the monolithic organization or regime get back its image of strength. Fabrications\u00a0and fallacies presented to blame North Korea for the attack on Sony are an example of that subterfuge aiming save the US government’s crumbling public image. As happened after\u00a0the 9\/11 attacks, the US has a serious propaganda problem whenever it appears\u00a0to have been successfully\u00a0attacked by a tiny, ill-equipped adversary. Governments will lie to everyone,\u00a0so they can look like\u00a0the\u00a0victims of some kind of\u00a0big bully in the media, and that means always\u00a0exaggerating the\u00a0opponents’ strength and size. 19 hijackers become the world’s most formidable global terrorist organization; now a kid in his basement or a laid-off Sony employee becomes North Korea.<\/p>\n One might be reminded of how the US raised the alert level and scrambled its nuclear bombers after a lone gunman killed JFK, with media speculation\u00a0quickly\u00a0blaming Russia for the assassination as if deliberately\u00a0trying to push the world further towards nuclear war. Unfortunately, many Americans seem unable to\u00a0accept that their country\u00a0can be shaken\u00a0by one saboteur or assassin; they need there to be a conspiracy. It is in this spirit, too, that US senators try to depict Edward Snowden as a Russian double agent rather than a disillusioned individual who simply turned his\u00a0back on the\u00a0disgraced state and its secret police.<\/p>\n I believe all of this behaviour can only be the result of arrogance. If one\u00a0has an over-exaggerated sense of power and moral authority, one\u00a0will only believe\u00a0in the\u00a0most powerful and the most depraved enemies, and simply deny the existence of other forms of opposition. Both Sony and the US government\u00a0will deny\u00a0they have\u00a0enemies within, but they do.<\/p>\n
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