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Celebrating (Mourning) a Culture of Lies
Tomorrow, March 29th, marks the thirty-seventh anniversary of America's withdrawal from Vietnam. You won't hear it celebrated in any mainstream media, though it should be. Or more precisely, it should be mourned. Vietnam is the first war America ever lost.
It should be remembered so that we might learn the lessons of that loss. They are many, they are profound, and they could inform so many of our policy decisions today: that withdrawal from immoral wars doesn't mean the end of civilization as we know it; that even America's seemingly limitless resources are, in fact, limited; that masses of engaged, moral individuals can constrain the reckless, destructive folly of renegade elites.
Perhaps the most important lesson of Vietnam is that policies based on lies will ultimately fail, for in an open society it is the consent of the governed that is required to sustain major policy initiatives. A government can either earn that consent, or it must forfeit the essence of its democracy. If lying becomes its essential modus operandi, a nation ceases to be a democracy. Rather, it becomes a criminal conspiracy of self-interested insiders donning the trappings of democracy in order to gull the credulous.
If Vietnam was anything, it was a fetid cesspool of a policy of lies. The intelligence agencies lied about the threat to our country from a nation of pre-industrial age rice farmers who just wanted to be left alone. The Pentagon was steeped in lies, from field level body counts to the success of strategic bombing to the basic question of whether the war could even be won. The State Department lied about the prolonged, illegal bombings of Laos and Cambodia.
Multiple presidents lied about their plans to end the War because none wanted to be the first American president to ever lose a war. Congress lied about our ability to finance both a major foreign war and a Great Society, all without raising taxes. The people lied about the War's essential goodness, all the while shunting off its fighting to a Black and Latino underclass. Once middle class white boys began coming home in body bags, the War ended quickly.
It was this vast and entangled web of lies that, once unmasked in the humiliation of defeat, caused shame among the nation's people and revulsion from the rest of the world. And rightly so. For it is one of the most basic of moral precepts, one of the first lessons that all people of all cultures teach their children, that if you have to lie about something it is wrong. This is so elemental an admonition it is enshrined in one of the sacramental narratives of America's founding: George Washington and the cherry tree. "I cannot tell a lie."
The overt tragedies of Vietnam are that the U.S., the greatest military power in the history of the world, lost its first war to a rag-tag bunch of peasants who believed in the simple truth that it was not their fate to submit to foreign domination; that 58,000 Americans and 3 million Asians were killed; that our application of 21 million gallons of Agent Orange left the country the greatest man-made environmental catastrophe in the history of the world; that it wrecked the U.S. economy; that it gravely damaged America's moral standing in the world; and that it grievously undermined Americans' faith in their own government and, indeed, in themselves.
But all of those tragedies are compounded again and again in the fact that we didn't learn the most important lesson of the War: that when democratic nations found major policies on lies, either those policies will fail when the lies are disclosed, or the nation will forfeit its essential nature and accept its status as a phony, a nation of liars, led by a cabal of con men playing dress-up for the TV.
We are saturated today with lies in number and magnitude easily equal to the lies of Vietnam. In fact, it is difficult to find a major policy arena in the U.S where the essential policy is not based on lies.
The stratospheric debt we've run up over the past thirty years was all premised on the seductive lie that there would not be a day of reckoning when it would have to be paid back. That lie gave rise to enfeebling personal gluttony and debilitating cultural decadence. Of course, the debt is patently unsustainable and when the bills come due we will either debauch the currency as they did in Weimar Germany (giving rise to Hitler) or we will surrender title to much of our nation's wealth in favor of the foreigners who have funded our childish, improvident binge.
The invasion of Iraq is now a case study in the use of lies to goad a nation into an illegal and immoral war. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was never involved in 9/11. He had nothing to do with al Qaeda. None of that mattered, and it still doesn't matter seven years later, today. The elites wanted their war because it made them richer by raising the price of oil, increasing the national debt, and inducing an orgy of weapons-buying. So they lied the country into it. They're still lying but we have become anaesthetized to it, inured to the degradation it signals for all of us, and so we accept it, mumbling servile rationalizations in a futile attempt to assuage our consciences and balm our battered dignity.
The recent financial bubble and collapse was similarly drenched in lies, from start to finish, top to bottom, inside and out. Legions of busboys, gardeners, and bartenders lied about their incomes to buy homes they could never hope to be able to afford. Phalanxes of appraisers, realtors, and mortgage brokers collaborated in the lies to consummate the contracts and clinch the commissions. Armies of Gucci-clad investment bankers bundled the garbage and called it gold, selling Collateralized Debt Obligations to hordes of greedy buyers around the world who lied to themselves that prices never went down. Bond rating agencies lied to everybody that the turds were treasures, again, to land the lush fees that larded their lavish lifestyles.
When the bubble burst, politicians, bankers on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve, and cabinet members at Treasury lied that the only way to save the country was to transfer trillions of dollars of money from small taxpayers to the richest people in the world, no strings attached. They lied that this was to save the economy rather than replace the vaporized capital of the reckless bankers who gambled it away pursuing more and ever more sociopathically obscene profits.
The recent health care "reform" bill was sold as a policy to help the American people. In fact, its purpose is to earn the Democratic party a sustained funding stream from the insurance industry by forcing tens of millions of American citizens to buy the industry's intentionally defective products. This is the same reason the majority Democratic party WILL not enact meaningful financial reform, WILL not reduce greenhouse emissions, and WILL not constrain the expansion of illegal wars: all three policies earn them sustained funding streams from wealthy corporate interests: banks; oil and coal companies; and weapons makers. This is the essential political enterprise of our time: playing the greater whore to corporate money so that it will re-install you in the demonstrable certainty that you will continue to sell your country and its people down the river, all the while mouthing unctuous lies about serving the public.
We have lied to ourselves as a nation about our innate righteousness and our Providentially anointed superiority. Yet much of our wealth has been stolen from people in the developing world, laundered through our international rogue's gallery of complicit and obeisant thugs: the Shah of Iran, Marcos of the Philippines, Pinochet of Chile, Diem in Vietnam, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Sukarno in Indonesia, Zia in Pakistan, Rhee and Park in Korea, Saddam in Iraq, Duarte in El Salvador, the Sauds in Arabia. These are just a few of the headliners in a cast of thousands whose role in the geo-political food chain has been to enslave their people and ship out their national treasures to the U.S. in exchange for a piece of the action discreetly banked in Switzerland.
We carry on today the cataclysmic lie that we can continue our predation on the environment without paying the consequences. We can destroy vast ecosystems like rainforests, coral reefs, and oceans, boil the atmosphere in carbon, melt the polar ice caps, punch continental-sized holes in the ozone layer, wipe out dozens of species a day, and our magical economic system, a product of out innately superior civilization, will just keep producing more and more and more so that we needn't ever have to imagine living within limits, regulating our appetites, or constraining our irrepressible glandular impulses.
We could go on and on and on. A media whose purpose is not to inform and empower but to occlude and pacify; a puerile civic sphere where hate, venom, and tantrums get far more air time than do thought, dialogue, and compromise; a pervasive and astonishingly vapid entertainment culture in which more people believe in the Immaculate Conception than believe in evolution; educational "reform," much like health care "reform," whose real purpose is to destroy public education so that the half trillion dollars a year we spend on it can be turned over to private corporations running franchised charter schools; an encroaching police state that tells us that in order to be safe we must give up our civil liberties. Need we go on?
The compulsion to lie about public policy has become inescapable because so many of our nation's policies, while advancing the interests of a small, plutocratic elite, are so hostile to the fundamental interests of the American people. But what kind of country is it that can only be managed through pervasive lying? What kind of people is it that can only stomach its own policies by dressing them up in flattering fantasies? Why is it that we have to lie so often to ourselves about ourselves in order to live with ourselves?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian who led underground resistance to the Nazis in World War II, wrote once, "In a time of pervasive lying, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." Isn't it true? This is why the truth tellers in the run-up to Iraq were so viciously mocked and ruthlessly scorned. Bonhoeffer went on to write of the German people, "We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of one another and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and made us cynical. Are we still of any use?"
"Are we still of any use?"
That is the question, isn't it. That is the question on which hangs today not only the fate of our nation but the salvation of our souls. If we are to be of any use to any body, it is time we begin decrying the lying. It is time to put aside the flattering but childish illusions of existential goodness and eternal innocence and recognize and begin to atone for the venality and naked selfishness of much of what we do and what we've become.
It is time to grow out of our materialistic fetishes and begin cultivating the personal and civic maturity we like to fancy we possess, but which we don't. It is time to grow up and accept the burdens of mature citizenship, among the most important of which are a capacity and a willingness to tell the truth, letting go the comforting but corrosive lies in the confidence that courage mustered now will yield not only greater self respect today but a more sane, a more decent, and a safer society in the future.
It is important that we commemorate Vietnam, both to mourn the objective horror of what it was, but also to redeem our capacity to tell the truth, to ourselves, about ourselves. Only in that way can we begin to reclaim the country and the people we want to imagine ourselves to be.
114 Comments so far
Show AllWell-said. Failure to learn from mistakes leads to repetition.
Conversely our rulers have learned how to control us little people very well and use those
methods over and over again..
You might ask your selves if the rulers in France learned any thing from the French revolution..
and compare that to the lessens learned by the rulers of the Amerika who are not held accountable for anything.. THe obomber says it is time to move forwards and not prosecute these people..I don't think future Amerikan leaders are too scared of pushing forward with the same old lies..Hell they can do anything, write a book and laugh at how dumb the people are.
Robert, thank you!
These days it's encouraging to know the answer is Yes! to0 the question: Is anybody out there?
Not achieving your entire set of objectives is not the same as "losing".
Brian Brademeyer,
In regards to Viet Nam it was and in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan it will be.
OYE
Yes, I have trouble with the widely used terms winning and losing in association with Vietnam (as well as with our current wars). If the Vietnamese people "won" their victory was a Pyrrhic one. Their country was destroyed, an economy based on agriculture, where the land was poisoned by US biological and chemical warfare. Where is communist Vietnam now? Embracing capitalism at every turn. Who, really won; who really lost, or is it just another layer of lies?
In conventional terms, the US lost the Vietnam war. It's goal was establishment and maintenance of quisling government(s) in S. Vietnam. In the end, it failed militarily and politically. The Vietnamese finally won their country after many decades of European colonization, with a period of the Japanese rule and with the US as the final European power. The classic Pyrrhic victory is one in which the battle is one at such cost the winner can't continue. The Vietnamese continued, at great cost, but they continued and won. The details of the economic systems are irrelevant; Vietnam is not run by the US government or various international corporations. Ironically, by now the US has lost almost completely, as its government is run largely by international corporations and one foreign country.
A good response, but I cannot agree that the "details of the economic systems are irrelevant." The whole war was about the economic system. The US wanted to crush the possibility of an alternative to the capitalist system.
RE: Ironically, by now the US has lost almost completely, as its government is run largely by international corporations and one foreign country.
I don't think General Smedley Butler would have agreed with you:
"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." “I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."
This is possibly the most lucid and relevant article I have ever read on CD. Freeman hits the every point perfectly and powerfully.
Unfortunately, while speaking the truth may be a revolutionary act (like the growing legions joining the quest for the truth about 9-11), in a culture of lives in which people have become dependent on their illusions of a normal world, it's just as easy to point to the truth and call it a lie, and more convenient.
People will not embrace the truth until it becomes more convenient than the lie, until the house of cards that is our political and economic system collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Just as physics dictates that a skyscraper collapsing uniformly into its own footprint and freefall speeds caused by non-uniform light structural damage is essentially impossible, physics will also dictate that an economy cannot expand infinitely upon a base of finite resources.
Thank you, Mr. Freeman, for this moment of sanity.
A most excellent article - nails the Oligarchy to the wall mercilessly. I have read few better Articles stating, simply, "how we got there from here". It is the "history of American Geopolitics from my baby-boomer birth in 1948, to where we - as a Country -are now. And, it ain't pretty.
"Why is it that we have to lie so often to ourselves about ourselves in order to live with ourselves?"
Soul-searching can be a difficult and painful process which most people will avoid at any cost. If they lie to themselves long enough, they eventually believe those lies to be truth.
Speaking of a lie... If it is true that 'Vietnam is the first war America ever lost' why then am I and millions of other people Canadians, and not citizens of the usa?
I point this out as an example of lies that are told, and have been told, for generations. I don't disagree with the rest of the article, but that first lie did bother me.
"... why then am I and millions of other people Canadians, and not citizens of the usa?"
Because citizenship for U.S. imperial subjects, unlike Rome's, isn't permitted. Just imagine the chaos if they could all vote.
RV, I think you missed the point.
The post about Vietnam not being the first defeat refers to the War of 1812, in which the Canadian provinces remained part of the British Empire and most First Nations there were spared the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, etc.
The U.S. capitol and the White House were burned and the government was forced to flee D.C. and the US forces were unable to hold Canadian territory.
We might also consider the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate and the withdrawal of US troops from the North, followed by a devastating revenge bombing campaign that left northern cities and towns demolished and who knows how contaminated by ordnance and possibly toxic substances they included as a "bonus" of vindictiveness. That peace treaty is yet to be signed, and North Korea insists that the war be declared officially over before it agrees to nuclear disarmament (while the US has nuclear weapons close to North Korea).(Macarthur's solution for not being able to subject the Communists by conventional means was to propose nuking them.)
It's also significant that the US entered the Spanish-Cuban war when the Cuban patriots had worn down the Spanish and were on the verge of victory, and also in both WW I and WWII when the opposing sides were at a stalemate and even though the US action was decisive, one might wonder about their ultimate role,particularly in WWII, when the USSR was able to regroup and chase the German armies back to Berlin and take their capital. Of course the vicious and vindictive carpetbombing of civilian populations in Germany by the allies (the "heroes" from the UK, Canada and the US who dropped thousands of incendiary bombs and explosives,killing as many people in Germany as the US did in Japan) helped soften the way for the Red Army...
Just some further thoughts on Vietnam. Perhaps one defining factor, besides the white middle-class boys in body bags, was the fact that this was the first war where the nasty images made Americans back home shudder and doubt the jingoistic messages they were fed by the M.I.C.
I didn't actually miss the original point, but I apologise if my somewhat facetious reply detracted from it.
Yes, American memories and historical records of the glorious past do tend to be quite selective about victories and defeats, and about much else as well. It also tends to put a very bright polish on its motivations for wars amongst other things.
From a different perspective, the US has lost ALL the wars it's been in -- just that some it lost less than who we were fighting. It is attributed to Jeannette Rankin, and it's very wise: you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Wars can indeed be won. But only if you don't fight them in the first place...
Unless I'm mistaken, the war of 1812 wasn't about us trying to take Canada from the Brits. I've never heard that put forth as a reason for the war, in fact, at least not in this country. I do understand that some Canadians think that it was the point, however there isn't anything specific that any of them could ever tell me that would lead them to think that.
The war, from everything I've ever read, was about the impressment of Americans into the British Navy, the Brit's support of the "Indians" who were against our taking over their lands, and the Brit's attempts to keep us from trading around the world. I've never read anything that says that we lost that one, either.
Some weird ideas of history show up here.
"I've never heard that put forth as a reason for the war, in fact, at least not in this country."
But that's precisely the problem. Try examining some non-U.S. sources and perpectives. Just as an example, try this extract from a Canadian site:
__
Although peaceful conditions existed between the United States and Great Britain after the American Revolution (1775-1783) there were a number of Americans who still harboured ill will towards the former mother country. There were even some who believed that all of British North America properly belonged with the new nation. They felt that Canada should have been conquered during the Revolution and added to the United States.
__
Source: http://www.warof1812.ca/
The naval impressment may have been the false flag routinely used to stir up war fervor.
(And no, having your newly-built Capitol destroyed doesn't really rank as losing.)
[Unless I'm mistaken, the war of 1812 wasn't about us trying to take Canada from the Brits.]
Not entirely, but there was some truth to that goal. Washington and the other revolutionaries looked towards Canada as the possible 14th colony to rebel against British rule in the 1770s, part of that desire survived and was voiced again by politicians and pundits in the early 19th century. When you declare war against someone, you have to invade some of their territory, and the only accessible territory was Canada.
[The war, from everything I've ever read, was about the impressment of Americans into the British Navy,]
Well, the Brits didn't recognise that those people were citizens of the usa.
[ and the Brit's attempts to keep us from trading around the world.]
Mostly they wanted to control the trade with the French. That's how they were paying for the fight against Napoleon, by smuggling goods to them through their own blockade.
{ I've never read anything that says that we lost that one, either.}
Given that the war ended with a 'status quo ante bellum' it certainly wasn't won by you, or the British for that matter. Canadians think we won, mostly because without that invasion we'd probably have become citizens of the usa sometime in the late 19th century. (or at least, that's one of our historical myths.)
Thanks very much for your response, and to everyone else, who did as well. I've just chosen yours to respond to.
I wasn't clear when I said that we didn't lose the war of 1812. It was essentially called as a draw, so you are much more accurate in your statement that the Brits didn't win, either. As all wars are, a waste of human lives and fortune for the many, and a source of profits for the few.
I have relatives in Canada, and they say it's true that the real winners of the war of 1812 was Canada. It gave Canadians a sense of being other than either the Brits or the US.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, and it was said much better than I in my previous post. Every story has (at least) two sides, and as they say, the victor writes the history. When it's a draw, everyone gets their say.
Now, that being said, I have to wonder if the ones at the time who advocated taking over Canada were like the Bolton's of today, who say that kind of thing. No one takes them seriously, but they get a lot of press, so it seems like they are more important than they are. Just a thought.
[I have to wonder if the ones at the time who advocated taking over Canada were like the Bolton's of today]
One of those people was named George Washington, I think he was elected to be your first president...
I'm sure some of them were almost as nutty as the Bolton's of today, but I'd rather think that the Bolton's are a new breed of nuttyness.
Initially the US was deliberating declaring war on Britain to halt impressment and the stopping of US Vessels at sea by the British Navy. The British were also stopping ships enroute to France with which they were at war.
The American Government demanded these trepidations stop.
The other cause was the Americans believed the British were trying to arm the Native tribes in the west as a counter to US expansion into those territories.
Now heres the thing. The British Government AGREED that they would stop doing such .
They acceeded to virtualy every demand.
The US Government saw this as a sign of weakness and as an opportunity to drive the British entirely off the Continent . They declared war and then tried to seize Canada. They had their "casus belli" , the British were at war with Napolean and exhibited weakness when they agreed to US demands...so why NOT take Canada?
The biggest losers in that war were the Native tribes in Americas west. The only battle of any significance the US won was the Battle of New orleans which was fought after the war ended.
At wars end all British territory was free of US troops while british troops occupied US Territory.
At wars end the British demanded reparations while none were made by the Americans as the Americans knew they had lost.
Good point about the images. Our leaders have learned that if we don't actually see what we are doing, then we will support these wars indefinitely.
Hey Robert, your article is one of the most cogent, succinct and accurate perspectives on the current american culture that I have read on any news site period! It would appear that the phenomenal dumbing down of the american people, through the instruments of a corrupted media and political culture, have left most of them incapable of comprehending the urgent relevance of your insights! Keep up the great work of educating and holding up the light of truth in spite of the massive spiral into oblivion that marks the current direction of the american dream!
Really excellent article. Freeman focuses on a societal pathology (an indifference to reality and increasingly an intolerance towards those that are not) that has become so ubiquitous and yet, because of what it is, so rarely discussed.
When reality requires us to step outside of our comfort zone and to act to prevent further disaster, we find ways to either ignore or attack the messenger. Welcome to Plato's cave.
The only people who learned the lessons of Vietnam were the elites. Just look at the ongoing quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's just as bad but the people are numbed into ignorance while the soldiers and contractors are poorly trained to actually defend themselves and their own health yet very well brainwashed into believing shoot first ask later as "victory". Obama just did to health care what LBJ did to Vietnam and Dubya did to Iraq. They all messed up but their supporters never tire of lying about "progress".
Some of us who survived Vietnam learned our lessons usually the hard way. But with the elites' newer strategies on making it harder to learn those lessons, people have been brainwashed into blaming the wrong culprits. The Vietnamization of public education through Bush's NCLB is causing more schools to fail and close but few people are aware of NCLB. The Vietnamization of our economy through the Bush tax cuts, more tax cuts for the wealthy, and bailing out the corporations are leaving more people in debt, public services being privatized, and desperate attempts to survive the economic collapse but still few people are willing to call for repealing tax cuts for the wealthy and stopping the bailouts to the corporations. The Vietnamization of health care that has been going on has recently been finalized and yet most people still don't take on the insurance companies for fraud but will blame it on trial lawyers or that the patient lacked personal responsibility. The pattern is clear. Shoot first and ask as later as possible so as to avoid exposing the shooter but in the meantime pin the blame on the victim.
It is even worse than that. Everything is going regressive and yet some people still have the nerve to call it "progress". Add that as another lesson that the elites learned from Vietnam.
Very unfortunately, your comment seems to be true!
Speaking of a culture of lies, I posted this elsewhere, but it seems to fit very well here too. I can NOT vouch for its accuracy, but the following is taken from what purports to be a leaked CIA document:
__
The fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of European support for the NATO-led ISAF mission. Some NATO states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission, but indifference might turn into active hostility if spring and summer fighting results in an upsurge in military or Afghan civilian casualties and if a Dutchstyle debate spills over into other states contributing troops.
[...]
The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
[...]
Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.
__
Source: http://wikileaks.org/
Note in particular the part about so-called "democratic" governments disregarding popular opinion. That, of course, is the really BIG lie about democracy and "manufacturing consent" in general.
I remember when conservatives would go out on a limb to make it look like there was "progress" going on in Iraq after invading and destroying it. I notice a similar pattern on health care. Here we have a very regressive scam that just passed where even the touted benefits are not guaranteed while only the benefits for for Big Insurance and Pharma are but the risks and losses against the taxpayers are guaranteed. Despite the obvious, the bill's apologists call it "progress". Now riddle me this. Tell us what you would prefer:
A. A simple 30 page single payer plans with a few good but guaranteed steps forward
B. A monstrous 2700 page mess with a few good but not guaranteed steps forward muddled with thousands of steps backward
When someone has to ask "What is the Matter With America?", the answer is simple. Americans are used to lying to themselves about progress. It somehow the norm to attack people who call for genuine reform as "purists" and yet defend severely regressive measures as "progressive" and "practical".
What's wrong with America is not that we are lying to ourselves---but that our media is lying to us constantly. Too many of our citizens are badly informed on the truth of the loss of our democracy. So many of us still believe the crap we were taught in our failing schools about our great nation always doing good all over the world and our great progress becoming the one world super power.
We are surrounded by propaganda 24/7 and we believe it. Talk about 1984 and Brave New World, we are here. The horrors have become ordinary. The endless wars go on. The eco systems of the earth are destroyed by greed---that same greed that we learned was good by Ronald Raygun. We are no longer able to take care of number one. Americans have learned to be selfish individuals to the point that we no longer care about our children, our elders, our neighbors or any living creature on earth. Kill them all to make a profit! That's all that is important....profits! And corporations are people, and the little 'recesssion' is ending.
NO. Our nation is in a state of collapse. I really don't see any hope of getting out of this horrible situation. One last chance could be to attempt to get some democracy -- where the government works for the people and to protect our planet Earth. Only way to do that is to gut the Congress and the Senate. The people there may call each other 'honorable' but that is one of our biggest lies. They are in fact corrupt to the bone. Kick them all out and replace them with people with ethics and a sence of empathy for life. Do not vote for any candidate who takes one penny from any of those business arrangements that the Supremos just declared to be people. Those type of 'people' need to be put under control and restricted from harming any form of life.
I do agree with what you are saying I can't argue with the fact that the media is lying to us but on top of that, look at how the apologists for regressive actions and policies are acting and it is not just on this site. The media is lying to us and most people are falling for it.
I just saw "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers". It made me weep to see how the lessons weren't learned and how craven our media has become. Back then the NYT and Washington Post, and 19 other newspapers took a stand for freedom of the press and speech.
One of the filmmakers, Judith Ehrlich, was at the screening and she said that in some formerly classified material, we have learned that the US didn't use nuclear weapon/s in North Vietnam because of the Moratorium to End the War in late 1969. Although the White House claimed not to have been bothered by the protest/s, apparently they were bothered enough that this bombing plan was scrapped. We never knew at the time that we had made such a difference.
So maybe demonstrations do matter as do truth tellers such as the filmmakers, Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith, the author of this article, and Daniel Ellsberg.
To quote a very fitting expression: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." has a strong, strong element of truth to it.
From article:
"The recent health care "reform" bill was sold as a policy to help the American people. In fact, its purpose is to earn the Democratic party a sustained funding stream from the insurance industry by forcing tens of millions of American citizens to buy the industry's intentionally defective products. This is the same reason the majority Democratic party WILL not enact meaningful financial reform, WILL not reduce greenhouse emissions, and WILL not constrain the expansion of illegal wars: all three policies earn them sustained funding streams from wealthy corporate interests: banks; oil and coal companies; and weapons makers. This is the essential political enterprise of our time: playing the greater whore to corporate money so that it will re-install you in the demonstrable certainty that you will continue to sell your country and its people down the river, all the while mouthing unctuous lies about serving the public."
Now that sums it up in a nutshell, all those who believe that Demcracy Inc. represents your interests need to read this article.
Great article and quality analysis (contrast this one with Frank Rich's)
Good excerpt and, I agree, a great (and rare) article.
We "lost" the Korean War, too.
People need to turn off their TVs and go visit their neighbors to talk about the lies. These lies repeated in our culture are so pervasive the generation of War Protesters in the '60s often didn't know huge war protests had existed for WWI and WWII as well as for other deployments of U.S. troops.
Who is responsible for these omissions from our history: the schools and textbook publishers. Teachers who teach the truth about our TV propaganda machine are quickly pink slipped away. Textbook publishers, a tight group, influence or are the same business as test publishers. This has created a mechanistic evaluation system fit for factory products, not children.
Ask your children to name three negative things about war.
"The recent health care "reform" bill was sold as a policy to help the American people. In fact, its purpose is to earn the Democratic party a sustained funding stream from the insurance industry by forcing tens of millions of American citizens to buy the industry's intentionally defective products. This is the same reason the majority Democratic party WILL not enact meaningful financial reform, WILL not reduce greenhouse emissions, and WILL not constrain the expansion of illegal wars: all three policies earn them sustained funding streams from wealthy corporate interests: banks; oil and coal companies; and weapons makers."
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It deserves repeating. Although I join the consensus that the entire article is superlative.
I admit that I feel snakebitten enough that I tend to skim these kinds of essays rapidly, looking for familiar cracks and canards, e.g. validating Amerika's capitalism-based duopolistic sham and scam of a political process as fundamentally sound; sentimental or pseudo-pragmatic deference to Team Obama or the Democrats, including the puerile general insistence that they're "part of the solution".
It's most refreshing and gratifying that Freeman illuminated this paean to truth by telling it: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Robert Freeman says it all. "If lying become its essential modus operanti, a nation ceases to be a democracy. Rather, it becomes a criminal conspriracy of self interested insiders donning the trappings of democracy in order to gull the credulous."
that one jumped out at me too.
To me, too. It's concurrent with another one that jumped out at me from a recent Chris Hedges article.
Sheldon Wolin, who talks about our inverted totalitarianism, says,
"The US has become a showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed." This is what Mr. Freeman is talking about, too. Lies. Appearances. Diversions.
While this article is, at the least, sad, it's refreshing and empowering at the same time. As is reading these enlightened, mindful comments. It's great to know there are fellow travelers out there.
"The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." Martin Luther King, Jr.
PeaceTruthBeauty!
Jack Chase
Robert Freeman's essay is brilliantly concise,far-reaching, and thought provoking.
No USA political jackass has ever learned anything from Vietnam, including the supposedly "intelligent" Zobama.
Mordechai S.
One should also not forget how Obama had stated in the past his indifference, if not his contempt, for the values that had been put forth from the 1960s. Obama certainly did not wish to learn the lesson of Vietnam as that lesson would have totally undermined his reasons for leaving American forces and 500 lb. bombs and drone missiles in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One suspects that it is rather doubtful if Obama spends his nights listening to Pete Seeger singing about The Big Muddy while reminding his audience that the Big Fool said to to push on.
truth.
When it comes to recognizing the state of the world
we're living in, as Americans basically we are all
children left behind. Our willingness to question
our belief systems and personal self-image is hardly
apparent as a culture. Instead we gorge ourselves,
intent on fanatically procuring a bigger better version
of what we would like to be, want to have, and would want others to think of us. Think of a neatly packaged personal
profile on Facebook where people show of themselves only
what they would like others to see. Culturally we're caught
in a downward-spiraling food chain of lies. Excellent article
Mr. Freeman.
Show me a power elite in any country that is truthful with its population. Our democracy was supposed to prevent the creation of just such an elite; the founders warned repeatedly against its creation (they saw what the entrenchment of that elite had done to England).
Don't expect the lies to stop until the country is taken back from them. fixcongressfirst.org is a great place to start.
Thanks for fixcongressfirst.org I just signed up to help. I'll return the favor: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/ We need to weave together a network of people and organizations, eventually we may have a fighting chance to avert the catastrophes that are coming down the pike. At the very least we can go down fighting...