The Real Battlefront

War inside my head
War inside my head
War inside my head
War inside my head

War inside my head ain't a pretty sight
But I don't want no sympathy
It's happened a thousand times before
It's just a harsh reality

[CHORUS]

War inside my head - can you sense it
War inside my head - can you see it
War inside my head - can you feel it
War inside my head

Can you hear the-pain
Can you see the-pain
Can you sense the-pain
Can you feel the-pain
Can you help the-pain
Can you fix the-pain
Can you hear the war inside my head

The only thing real is the way I feel
And that's the pain that's deep inside
The battle from within is gonna begin
And there ain't nowhere to hide

[CHORUS]

War inside my head every night and day
I never get no piece of mind
It ought to be a sin, I just can't win
And pure hell is all I find

War Inside My Head
Suicidal Tendencies
JOIN THE ARMY (1987)

The Real First Casualty of War

by John Pilger
April 20, 2006

During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."

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Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as "democracy," "liberation," "freedom," and "reform" have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed. How many people know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on Sept. 11, 2001, up to 20,000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?

In reclaiming the honor of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to "us," and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by dehumanizing them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that country were an abstraction, not a human society. Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is currently being softened up on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks ago, Channel 4 news carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the U.S. State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the program's Washington correspondent, presented Chávez as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin ways disguised a man "in danger of joining a rogues' gallery of dictators and despots – Washington's latest Latin nightmare." In contrast, Condoleezza Rice was given gravitas and Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to compare Chávez to Hitler.

Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from Washington, and only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where Chávez enjoys 80 percent popularity. That he had won nine democratic elections and referendums – a world record – was omitted. In crude Soviet flick style, he was shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, though these brief encounters had to do with OPEC and oil only. According to Rugman, Venezuela under Chávez is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity. People watching would have no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in the world to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They would have no idea of spectacular developments in health, education, literacy; no idea that Venezuela has no political jails – unlike the United States.

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Read it all.

Because that, my friends, is what we fight day in, day out: The most gargantuan, insidious, efficient system of propaganda the world has ever seen. That is the true "Long War." The battleground - the prize - is human consciousness.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.