Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

There's a passage from a book by P.D. Ouspensky in which he relates a childhood memory of reading a book called Obvious Absurdities. In it were pictures of a man carrying a house on his back, a wagon with square wheels, and other such things. Ouspensky's dilemma was that the depictions seemed no less absurd than the things he saw in the world around him.

Talking politicians, newspapers, and television reports of what is going on in the world and their analysis of the "facts" confronts us with a similar paradox: Their interpretations differ from what our common sense indicates. For most, the absurdities are accepted out of convenience—they are the fallacious glue that tenuously holds our world together. Without these lies we would be bereft of our illusions about ourselves and the world we live in.

Let's take a look at some of the lies and inconsistencies that go largely unnoticed:

"We live in a democracy." This statement was barely true before the presidential election was stolen in 2000. Since then it has become a total fallacy. Now stealing elections is commonplace and easy. For 2004 the Bush cabal needed only to get the corporations that manufacture the voting machines—Diebold and ES&S (the CEOs of the two companies are brothers)—in their pockets, for as Joseph Stalin said "It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." Now there are no annoying hanging chads or recounts to contend with as there is no paper trail. There are only tens of thousands of registered (but ignored) irregularities of voter suppression, hundreds of anomalous results in which strongly Democratic-registered precincts came out Republican, and exit polls that showed a big victory for Kerry, only to have the areas delivered to Bush by a wide margin.

The stolen elections coupled with the lies, deceit, and blatant criminality of the domestic and foreign policies of the current administration demonstrate that the US is governed by a fascist regime. But the mainstream media ignores the incriminating evidence and celebrates the recent coronation as though it's valid. But how would we think and act differently in the recognition that representational government in this country is a thing of the past?

To place the Bush group on the ideological spectrum is this observation from Uri Avnery, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post: "The ideologues who govern the thoughts and deeds of Bush are called 'neo-conservatives,' but that is a misleading appellation. Actually they are a revolutionary group. Their aim is not to conserve but to overturn....They are the pupils of Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish professor with a Trotskyite past who ended up developing semi-fascist theories and propagating them at the University of Chicago. He illustrated his attitude towards democracy by citing the story of Gulliver: When a fire broke out in the city of the dwarfs, [Gulliver] put the fire out by urinating on them. This is the way, in his view, the small elite group of leaders must treat the ignorant and innocent public, which does not know what is good for them."

Here's another one: "The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere are to spread freedom and democracy." In the second inaugural address prepared for him by his speechwriters, Bush read, "We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right." And so I ask: Freedom for what, to die at the hands of the US military? Freedom to bear mutant children as a result of depleted-uranium poisoning? Freedom to live under a new US puppet dictator? Freedom to pump your country's oil into the tanks of American gas-guzzlers? If the "freedom" the Neocon plotters are shaping on US soil (i.e. total control of the media, suppression of dissident voices, preference and privilege granted to the very-rich, corporatization of collectively owned fiscal, natural, and cultural resources) is any indication of what is in store for other countries, then we can be assured it is a freedom they will fight against—aptly  demonstrated by the people of Iraq. Meanwhile, the most oppressive dictatorships remain US allies and therefore off the short list of upcoming conquests.

Again Avnery: "George Bush is a very simple, very violent person with very extreme views, as well as being very much an ignoramus. This is a very dangerous combination. Such people have caused many disasters in human history. Maximilian Robespierre, the French revolutionary who invented the reign of terror, has been called 'the Great Simplifier' because of the terrible simplicity of his views, which he tried to impose with the guillotine."

It is because we accept the lies within and about ourselves that we so easily swallow the lies that are foisted on us by others. We fail to be skeptical and discerning about our own internal processes. We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, justifying our own undermining and nefarious tendencies when we should view our thoughts and deeds more critically. Apply the dictum: Believe nothing, verify all. To do this we must be awake, and to be awake is everything.

—Jason Stern