OK, let's start with this: everything you have been told is a lie.

Where did you learn history? In school? It was a lie.

Where did you read current events? In Time Magazine? Anything Magazine? It was a lie.

Maybe a newspaper? New York Times? It was a lie. Maybe newspapers told the truth sometimes. Maybe Time and Life and Newsweek and the New York Times told the truth sometimes. But if they did, they did it in the imperial way. They told a lie while telling the truth

How does one do that? One tells the truth but slants it. This is a method of writing that was once called "Timespeak." That's not Times, that's Time. It referrs to the Luce (That's Harry Luce, as he liked to be called, although his name was Henry) publication Time. As you probably know, Luce also published Life and Fortune. Back in the day. It's all different, but the same, now.

There were obviously some points in which the official lie and the objective truth coincided. In fact, there were many points. In many cases all of the points are the same.

The whole difference comes in, sometimes, in terms of whether you call one of the actors in the drama a dissident or a terrorist. Is he a freedom fighter or he an insurgent? Is a country pluralistic or Communist?

George Orwell warned us well. His book was originally called 1948. By a clever act of Newspeak, it was retitled 1984.

When I was growing up, I didn't draw any connection between the idea of Newspeak and Time Magazine, which I read weekly. I didn't see any connection between the description of Contras as "freedom fighters" and the description of Ortega as a "Communist." And today, people don't see any connection between the use of "terrorist" to describe journalists detained at Guantonomo and the use of "freedom" by George W. Bush to describe what "terrorists" are jealous of.

Because we've accepted Newspeak, we can hardly disentangle ourselves from our appointed roles in empire. I, personally, have always bungled my Imperial roles, and you might call me, C. B. Coble, a big loser. I don't have a very reliable income, any money in the bank, although I do have a pot to piss in.

A winner--a "Master of the Universe"-- is someone who works for a bank. Even if they work for a company that produces something, they work for the bank.

It is possible to disentangle oneself from Newspeak. Actually, most of the truly educated people in this country are able to see through it. It is a diplomatic language, used by the elite to speak to the benighted. It's just a bit difficult for the benighted to shuck it. To shuck it, we must shuck out high school and college educations, our magazines, our television, our radio, and most of our websites of choice.

One of the difficult things about Newspeak and not speaking it-- is that it is too similar to English. When you speak with someone who thinks they speak English, but actually speaks Newspeak, you inevitibaly find yourself quibbling about minor issues, about which neither of you have any reliable information. Essentially these minor quibbles are actually issues of naming-- whether someone is an insurgent or a freedom fighter, a terrorist or a dissident, a psychopath or a maverick.

Essentially, eventually, all of these dissonances, dischorances, resolve into a story. Time, Newsweek, Fortune, People and Forbes-- to just kick off the list-- all are publications that were invented to tell this story. It is the story of the haves.

I don't believe anyone will argue with this: There are those that have, and they, for the most part, wish to keep what they have. There are those who have not, and they, for the most part, want to get.

The next step-- that those who have, organize their own resources in order to keep what they have-- is, for most of those who speak Newspeak, an unimaginable leap of fancy, a fantastic delusion, a conspiracy theory.

The nadir of the reliability of print media coincides with the advent and mushrooming growth of Internet media, whose tenuous if burgeoning cornucopia of pluralistic histories may only be a temporary means-- along with porn-- to entice us onto the electronic superhighway.

Once we're all on line, and the last paper newspaper has shut down, history will be utterly malleable.

This is a review of a number of books-- listed above-- which, taken together, and taken along with such historical facts as can still be gleaned by what's left of the so-called historical record--tells a much different story than our history books in school did, or than our televised media reliles upon.

What is a liberal? What is a conservative? Who is a fascist, who is a dissident, who is a terrorist?

The books above, taken together, suggest that we are just haves and have-nots; that radical Islamists and fundamentalists Christians, as we may have surmised, are people with identical problems set at each other's throats by their common enemy; that nationalism, religion, political party, economic class (at least between lower, lower-middle, middle, and lower-upper classes), race and gender identity are all regularly emphasized as issues in publications paid for by the .05% to keep the other 99.95% at each others' throats.

That this is an extremely complex and dangerous balancing act is suggested by the various mishaps that have occurred. Each of these mishaps is celebrated by the media to certain extent. They are examples. One can point to leaks, to Gary Powers, to the Church Commission, to Deep Throat, and say, if any shenanigans were going on, it would be reported. Look, all of these things were reported, and they were made a big deal of. You think they could get away with poisioning our water supply? With 9/11? With mind control? You think they could conceal saucer technology?

Which leads to the question: who are They? Who are They? This mysterious .05%? Public school educations are geared to tell us that there exist no such powerful minorities.

Whoever They are, we know pretty well who their representatives are. Their names dominate the history of Wall Street and of the State Department and the CIA. During the crucial years of WWII until the Eisenhower Administration especially, investment bankers jumped effortlessly between firms like Brown Brothers Harriman and J. P. Morgan and the OSS and its successor, the CIA. The effortlessness of this transition suggest that the two sorts of jobs, one ostensibly in the private sector, the other ostensibly in the public sector, were in fact the same job, undertaken with different means.

In any case, bankers have in fact proven quite good at keeping secrets. Keeping secrets is extremely important in banking.

Read these books and you'll get a dim glimpse into what the CIA is about. You'll see what liberalism is about, and what Time/Life is about, and why we don't have much good journalism anymore. It isn't easy to sum up. In Saunder's THE CULTURAL COLD WAR, she explains how the CIA, for example, was the driving force behind the promotion of Abstract Expressionism. That explains how Jackson Pollock got the massive Life Magazine spread that made his reputation. But why did the CIA promote Abstract Expressionism? Saunders suggests that it's because the Soviets hated it. That is, no doubt, part of the reason-- but I suspect there's much more to it, a combination of a bankrupt vision of progress, fragments of Manifest Destiny, some cowboy mythos, and a failure to respect the lessons of the past.

Saunder's book also follows up on some of the Cold Warriors and how their lives ended. One thing that's as true about the Cold Warriors, as a group, as it is about the stereotypical Russian-- they were big drinkers. Really, really bad alcoholics. Most of them died of it, or died bitter and alone, if they didn't die of suicide or mysterious causes.

A lot of what went wrong with these people and with America has to do, I think, with that drunken swagger, the machismo, the pride and the arrogance and denial that all go together and which go down so much better with a swig of whiskey.

The Declassified Eisenhower presents one of the fullest portraits I've seen of C. D. Jackson, the mysterious figure who was a student of Bernays and became the psychological warrior par excellence in America. My favorite quote of Jackson's is that psychological warfare is "the entire pose of the United States toward the entire world." Replace "United States" with "United Fruit" or "the financial elite" and you begin to get the picture. Jackson was publisher of Fortune magazine and a hierarch in the Luce machine. Luce= Lucifer, anyone?