Barrett Anthology Thumbs Nose at Contradictory Orlando Narratives
full text of long review below the fold.
Barrie Zwicker
The speed is admirable. Barely seven weeks after the murky events of June 12th in Florida’s Pulse gay nightclub, Kevin Barrett’s latest instant false flag exposé is already providing valuable insights and perspectives. In fact, Orlando False Flag: The Clash of Histories has just gone up for sale at Amazon [as a CreateSpace paperback].
The speed is important because the urgency is great. False flag operations remain the prime drivers of the maximum illusion “war on terror” and ongoing aggressive actions against Russia, China, Syria and others by the imperial American Empire, its allies and vassals—all masked as “the West.” World War III is not out of the question. The path to unimaginable destruction is being paved with the most sophisticated and far-reaching fear campaign of all time, founded on the destabilizing delusion of the “extremist jihadist threat.”
As early as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, false flag events have unfailingly enabled “rule by crisis.” The pulpits of the Church of England were the media of that day, spreading the King James Version of the event. In his acceptance speech of July 21st Donald Trump followed history’s script. As the July 22nd headline in the Toronto Star reported: “For a United States ‘in crisis,’ Trump presents himself as the only solution.” He would have had a much harder time selling his odious self that way, without the “war on terror,” without Nice, without San Bernardino, without a “terror plot” uncovered at the Rio Olympics. And without Orlando.
In today’s infosphere it’s the combined electronic propaganda pulpits of the mainstream media that instantly reach and preach the false flag official narratives to gulled populations, even while diligently censoring suspicious anomalies and utterly failing to investigate—or even report.
Just one recent example: the North American media blackout of the incredibly arrogant demand by the French anti-terrorist branch (SDAT) for the erasure of footage from 140 of Nice’s 1,000 municipal video cameras, for a 24-hour period from before the beginning of the Nice “terrorist attack” the night of July 14—a demand unprecedented in French history.
As Craig McKee wrote here on August 1st in “Surreal Summer of ‘Terror:’ Fight to Destroy Nice Video, Creepy Orlando Musical Numbers, and a Killer Robot,” North American media he searched have been blatantly gatekeeping on that stunning kill-the-video development (covered, by the way, by Le Figaro, whose story headline translates to, “Nice attack: the city refuses to destroy 24 hours of CCTV images.” My own instant search the afternoon of 25 July of the websites of The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star likewise turned up nothing.
Le Figaro has in the past been used as a source quite a few times by these papers. Suddenly Le Figaro has become not quotable on a “man bites dog” development. The stench is overwhelming. It’s as if all the security and “anti-terror” police farted at once, and the media can’t smell a thing.
Because of Barrett’s timeliness, he’s been able to include Nice and the damning video destruction demand, in his Afterword, a masterful identification of false flag ops as history’s deadliest deceits and current blockers of human evolution. His further identification of Israel’s prime role in many false flag ops seems irrefutable.
The psychopathic perps behind the globalization of Operation Gladio are concussing the human mind, creating a false consciousness, an all-encompassing bogus reality.
This is taken for granted in Orlando False Flag: The Clash of Histories. As Barrett writes early on: “…cutting against the grain of mainstream propaganda in one way or another…is the most important intellectual task of our age.”
This is why it’s so important that the anomalies and absurdities and impossibilities of each latest one be revealed, somewhere, as early as possible. Barrett has undertaken this challenge. Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo events he published (in April 2015) We Are NOT Charlie Hebdo!: Free Thinkers Question the French 9/11. Then shortly after San Bernardino he published (in January 2016) ANOTHER French False Flag?: Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernardino.
The new book is divided into three parts. Part 1 is “What Really Happened in Orlando?” Part 2 is “Historical Context: Contesting the Narrative.” Part 3 is “Islam, homosexuality, and Cultural Politics.”
To me the strongest chapters in Orlando are the two longest ones. They’re long because both offer historical context, a somewhat global overview and much supporting evidence. The first, in Part 1, is Robert David Steele’s “The Orlando Mass Casualty Event: A False Flag Drama, Atrocity, or Hybrid?” The other, in Part 2, is Joachim Hagopian’s “Orlando’s Geopolitical Context: The Empire’s Post-9/11 Hegelian-Style Warfare Against Both the World and American Citizens.”
Steele, a veteran of the CIA who outgrew it to become a leading proponent of an “open source world,” lists 70 Orlando anomalies. Like most if not all lists, his includes some overlappings and a couple that IMHO don’t belong.
But 65 or so keepers nail Orlando as fake. For instance: no abandoned cars at the club, no ambulances, non-existent doctors, the laughing winking cop, the high fives, and crisis actors taking “victims” toward, rather than away, from the nightclub. The surreal fakery being determined, the remaining questions suggested in his chapter’s title, are large.
One of the most intriguing ideas for me is in his point 18: “Media-Based Evidence of Complicity & Cover-Up?” He suggests the mantra “love is stronger than hate”—highlighted just three days after the events by the biggest names in Broadway—may be one appropriated to serve the NWO agenda: essentially “Don’t rebel, stay submissive.” Steele urges viewing the video.
Hagopian at the outset offers, as his prime analytical tool, Hegel’s formula of problem-reaction-solution, successfully exploited repeatedly by typically deceptive rulers to consolidate power. He reintroduces the formula at the beginning of his insightful and heavily footnoted analyses of, for instance, “9/11 Enemy Islam,” “Enemy Senator Paul Wellstone,” “Enemy Russia,” “Enemy China,” “Enemy Iran,” and “Enemy the American People.” (Full disclosure: Barrett sent me a pdf file of the next-to-last version of the book, asking me for a blurb. After reading the book I obliged and then suggested to Craig McKee that I write this review. Barrett then asked me to provide an opinion on the Hagopian chapter. A colleague of his had recommended killing it. I found the colleague’s objections unfair and suggested Hagopian’s chapter might well lead off the book.)
The Hegelian formula, while a powerful template, is not a be-all and end-all. Especially it becomes shaky when outcomes are confused with “solutions.” Hagopian falls prey to this confusion.
Nevertheless the sweep and detail of the context for Orlando that he provides is like a “Worldview for Dummies” that can be applied to all the major false flag ops mounted by the Anglo-American-Israeli nexus starting with 9/11.
Worthy of special mention:
—The last two pages of Feroze Mithiborwala’s “Orlando: A False Flag Attack on Muhammad Ali’s Islam?” He writes: “The Orlando terror attack once again lays bare the imperial neo-conservative strategy of ‘controlled chaos,’ leading to a perpetual state of fear, confusions, visceral hatred and divisions, whereby the masses are more pliant to control under the unchallengeable slogan of ‘national security.’”
Mithiborwala is the only author who poses and answers the difficult but exceedingly important question: What to do? He answers it this way:
A slow-motion World War III is unfolding before our very eyes. Even as the world hurtles towards a precipice, more people than ever before are aware of the nefarious plots of the globalist cabal and the challenges that confront us. But how do we resist and expose this gargantuan monster?
The answer lies in reaching out to each other as human beings, across religions and cultures, across nations, sharing information and insights, speaking out with courage, asking questions, seeking answers. We must continue stating the truth in accordance with our individual conscience, in the “still small voice” that Mahatma Gandhi referred to as our best hope in times of great distress, holding fast to belief in our collective humanity and the common destiny that awaits us all.
—James Petras’s “Massacres: Where Have All the Islamists Gone?” for his homing in on the history and meaning of the “distinctly US phenomenon” of mass shootings.
— Christopher Black’s “Terrorism: A Matrix of Lies and Deceit” for his sharp focus on the absolute centrality of language.
—Rafik’s “Tell the Government the Gay Community is Nobody’s Psy-Op Pawn: The Petition I Didn’t Receive After the Orlando Attack” for his critique of “well-intentioned” organizations ostensibly on the left, including gay ones, for their fatal acceptance of the official Orlando narrative. “None of their [communications] reflect the false flag history,” he writes.
Best quotes include:
“I have finally understood that we live in a two-party tyranny that works for Wall Street, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and Organized Crime, in that order.”—Robert David Steele
“Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations—69 countries—have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism: they have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as ‘sanctions.”—John Pilger quoted by Hagopian.
”The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”—Theodore Hook.
The best phrases new to me are “Radical West” and “Westernism.” They appear in Dr. Javid Jamil’s chapter entitled “Mr. Trump, the Radical West Has Given the Muslim World 10 Orlandos Every Day for the Last 15 Years.” Gordon Duff’s characterization, in “Terrrorism Privatized,” of the technicians behind false flag ops as being “event planners” is tellingly appropriate.
The trade mark of Orlando False Flag is instant variety—the variety of worldviews, viewpoints, opinions and disparate facts between the covers. The very instantaneity of any instant book carries a price, however. By its nature such a book does not feature “sober second thought.” Reading it reminded me of an East Indian friend’s comment that “too much hurry” is right up there with “too much worry” and “too much curry.”
Inadvertently the book illustrates how careful we must be in the matter of acceptance of “facts” we’re presented with by mainstream media (as well as so-called “alternative” media). A number of the contributors accept various (and contradictory) details in mainstream media accounts of June 12th. Their acceptance is confirmed by the lack of modifiers such as “alleged,” “apparently,” and “stated,” although there are a few instances of “we are told.”
So paradoxically, in a book founded on questioning, there still isn’t enough questioning—in the form of self-interrogation by some of the authors as to whether “facts” they report really are facts. Accordingly, the implied promise of the title of Part 1, “What Really Happened at Orlando?” cannot be fully delivered.
But the book as a whole resoundingly delivers an answer to a somewhat different question: “Can We Trust to the Tiniest Degree Any Official or Media Accounts of what Happened at Orlando?” A chapter with that title would be the shortest chapter in publishing history. It would consist of “No!”
There’s an important lesson for all of us in this paradox over facts. We should constantly practice the approach recommended by British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell who counseled “critical acceptance”—habitually practicing the trick of being genuinely open-minded while thinking critically. We may also chew gum if we wish.
Arguably Part 2, “Historical Context: Contesting the Narrative” doesn’t live up to the promise of its title either, in the sense that none of its chapters attempt to lay out the history of Islam and compare it to a history of Christianity or “Christian civilization,” as Samuel Huntington ostensibly did in his Clash of Civilizations tome. Granted this is a tall order.
Lawrence Davidson in “This Was Not About Islam: Getting it Wrong About the Orlando Massacre” does lay it out somewhat about the U.S. Christian right. And about associated double standards. Such as no one “[is expecting] the American Christian community to start taking responsibility for shooters coming from [its] ranks…” He continues: “After all, they account for most of these kinds of slaughters” and adds “What is truly bizarre is the attempt to conflate Mateen’s insanity with the entire religion of 1.6 billion mostly law-abiding Muslims.”
But this is not the same as saying “broadly ‘the West’ believes a, b and c, whereas broadly “Islam” believes e, f and g, and ‘These are the competing narratives we must deal with.’”
While variety is the spice of this book a surprisingly disappointing version of variety is Thierry Meyssan’s chapter entitled “ISIS and Homosexuality.” It’s cryptic and near indecipherable.
All this book’s shortcomings combined are, however, a small price to pay for a restless focus on false flag operations and the media’s crimes of informational complicity in covering up the growing body of blatant evidence that all of us are hostages. We’ve been trapped in a theatre that specializes in staging manipulations of the public mind.
James Tracy wrote in Global Research May 1st, 2014 that false flag operation is a rapidly spreading meme, especially in the Middle East “where journalists and the broader public routinely witness inexplicable terror attacks on civilian populations.”
The acceptance of “false flag” as a language tool, as a denoter of a concept and a history, reflects vital, even revolutionary, understandings by its users.
Tracy writes also that the phrase and the concept it encapsulates remains stillborn in “the West,” particularly the USA. He writes “…much like the taboo topic of ‘conspiracy theories,’ US news media broadly reject the subject of false flag terror as the stuff delusion or otherwise perceive it as being mainly restricted to fictional narratives.”
Orlando underscores the prices to be paid by blindly accepting official versions of “terror” events. The prices include more fear, fewer liberties, and the eventual loss of everything.
To again quote Robert David Steele: “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”
Barrie Zwicker is the author of Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11 (New Society Publishers, 2006). He was the first journalist in the world to deeply question the official story of 9/11 on national television. A writer, TV producer and host, and political and environmental activist, Zwicker was Director of the International Citizens’ Inquiry Into 9/11, Phase 2, at The University of Toronto on 2004. He is a regular contributor to Truth and Shadows.
