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LETTERS / You Support American Crimes With Silence and Taxes

Dear Editor,

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” H.L. Mencken

American ‘consumers’ don’t learn about the world or from America’s constant meddling. This is partially due to their indoctrination called education. The victors write the history books but that important detail gets lost when you’re in school, leaving students, if they even pay attention, a partial understanding of the world. You take the officials word for truth in the face of their continual proven lies.

Overheard table-talk shows worry about Korean bombs or rampaging Iranians overwhelms ‘consumers’. If not for the helpful TV maps most ‘consumers’ couldn’t find those countries on a map. Most Americans have little idea of geography and history. They don’t know when, where or why most of our wars have been fought. There are countless YouTube interviews with ‘consumers’ showing how little they know about the world beyond what the TV tells them about popular culture. www.statista.com reveals lots of details about our reality where America isn’t number one except in your mind, people in prison, countries invaded and weapon sales. In most other categories we are number five or forty five in world ranking; freedom of press, health care, poverty, education, et.al.

America cons people into censoring themselves. We live in a dysfunctional society which sells war and aggression as strength: its 1984. ‘Consumers’ accept the notion that “our great country” goes on a violent military rampage regularly.

America’s legal process and ‘representatives’ are broken and corrupt, clearly seen by even Ray Charles. From local to national level laws are made and enforced with obvious prejudice depending upon who is acting upon whom and with what rationalization. It’s a leading cause of our current problems. Government is an untrained dog. When you ignore bad behavior, it grows.

We worry about Iran and forget about Iowa. ‘Consumers’ ignore reality in favor of distraction hoping reality will vanish. School teaches you to only accept what official sources present. We’re focusing our national attention on the rest of the world ignoring our increasingly fragmented homeland.

Immigration law began to be ignored under Bush the first and was at roaring speed by the arrival of Bush the second: its purpose, to divide and control ‘consumers’ along with low payroll costs for wealthy interests.

You support American crimes with silence and taxes. To escape the idea that America is somehow different than other countries, we’d have to stop acting like those we accuse of doing what Empire does. Political action in America is limited to bumper stickers and marching.

Paul Simon sang: “a man hears what he wants and disregards the rest”: true believers won’t accept facts that differ from what they choose: they refuse to look at any evidence. ‘Consumers’ speak as though mainstreams media and other information sources report reality even when they admit they don’t. When people are angry, they want a demon to blame. ‘Consumers’ choose positions on subjects with little research into the realities involved. They’re apathetic and distracted by shopping, how Americans express their patriotism, or hatred based upon the ‘official TV stories’ leaving those in power to act as they choose. Show us what voting really has changed. Monopoly is democracy we’re told as we’re given the choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledum.

‘Consumers’ are fools who need TV laugh tracks tell them something is funny. ‘Our’ politics reminds me of pro wrestling in the ways each ‘side’ attacks their opponent. The spotlight in this three-ring circus of perpetual offense, indignation, and alarm shifts from movie actress’s accusations, to other victimized groups displaying that at least half the country is a lynch mob every day. They can tell you everything about popular culture but nothing of real history or who the Empire is bombing today and with what excuse.

The social media giants and search platforms like Google are blocking independent media that don’t conform to the official mainstream narrative. While Facebook was censoring ‘Fake News’ last year, their agents met with Israel’s government to delete Facebook accounts of Palestinians saying they constituted “incitement”. Amazon removes books Israel doesn’t like: Freedom of speech and press? Yahoo, AOL and Gmail are blocking emails opposing the official fictions. The fake news barrage is, in part, a tool for increasing censorship.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Orwell, “1984.”

We see a constant barrage of ‘Russian interference’ claims which are never proven ignoring, at the same time, how America overthrows governments regularly. America’s reckless behavior has made enemies out of countries that wanted to be friends. This doesn’t get much attention from ‘our free press’. The military/security complex needs an enemy sufficient to justify its vast budget and power, and the Western media accommodates that treacherous need. We don’t bother proving we’re threatened but only say we feel so to have the whole mechanism support the accusation.

‘Consumers’ continue to believe economic and foreign interventionism is a good thing, if executed by their preferred political party. Most people will continue to believe that victims of American invasions hate us for ‘our freedoms’. Americans have no attention span and love illusion.

‘Consumers’ evidently believe the state, however corrupt and oppressive, will protect us from chaos and prevent the strong from dominating the weak, but don’t notice the world around them in chaos and the strong control the weak.

The most popular mantra among ‘consumers’ involves thanking ‘our’ troops for protecting our rights and freedoms or, in American churches, asking for God’s protection for those who are making the “ultimate sacrifice” in the defense of our rights and freedoms. This is one of the most successful propaganda and indoctrination programs in history. No foreign regime is threatening to invade America which is how foreigners would take our rights and freedoms. ‘Our’ government is doing that without any external assistance aside from Israel’s involvement. Foreigners are killing American troops to resist the controlling presence of the Empire in their lands just as some of you would.

As the empire attacks people overseas, the threat of blowback increases, leading government to expand their control here, with things like mass surveillance, assaults on privacy, and travel restrictions. Empire abroad means destruction of liberty and privacy to keep us ‘safe’ here at home.

‘Consumers’ are filled with the idea that American troops abroad are protecting our “rights and freedoms” although it’s quite obvious that no one overseas is trying to take away our fast diminishing rights and freedoms. The wars America starts makes ‘our’ government an even greater threat to our “rights and freedoms” than it already is without the wars. The forever wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan constantly use up equipment, and supplies, which must be replaced and paid for, and all the supplies, equipment, salaries, foreign aid, needed to support and maintain ‘our’ government’s empire of military bases around the world. Our wars of choice make us all poorer for no reasonable purpose.

People don’t like being invaded, occupied, sanctioned, embargoed, kidnapped, assassinated, or dictated to. At some point, they retaliate.

America tells countries we don’t care what sort of government they have, as though that’s any of our business, as long as it’s an open government which, in practice, means open to our economic penetration and/or political control. Some citizens choose direct opposition refusing to take their place alongside of ‘good Germans’ we’ve been taught to despise even though Americans have become their equivalent.

Everything America does is infected by dishonesty, especially the news media, law, banking, government, military, and corporate commerce. We’re living in a culture of universal fraud, where authorities set up looting operations without restraint. If you claim this is your government then you must also accept the complicity that comes with it, in all of the crimes it commits to which you pay little attention. If Russia or China was guilty of what we’ve done around the world we’d be demanding war against them. America ignores all national and international law. Our problem isn’t containing other countries but containing America.

Our ‘freedom fighters’ have been fighting against freedom for a long time: fighting for the wealthy but carefully disguised. Trump is exposing America’s essence in ways satirists could only dream. Enjoy the show while it lasts because we won’t see performance art like this, on a scale this grand, for generations. Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated the obvious: “the United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. The fact that the authorities need to lie to ‘consumers’ to give moral coverage for the waging of war is acknowledgement that they understand that there’s enough humanity left in ‘consumers’ that they’d reject ‘our’ warmongering if it was recognized for what it is: advancing narrow national interests.

“…The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and thus clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary…” — H.L. Mencken

Americans never leave voluntarily; we’ve been in the Philippines since 1898, despite many demands to leave, Cuba in 1898, Germany and Japan since 1945 where only the puppets change, in South Korea since 1945. America occupied Afghanistan in 2001. America maintains about a thousand military bases worldwide.

‘America’s’ enemies list has nothing to do with freedom otherwise the Empire wouldn’t support dictators, fascists and human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Honduras, Haiti, and Ukraine, for example. American foreign policy is based on control, corporate interests, corruption and self-interests of the ‘elite’, not democracy and human rights.

‘Consumers’ are preoccupied with consumption and lack the moral courage to question what they’re sold by ‘official sources’. America spends our time, lives, reputation and money creating what Trump called “shitholes”, in part, because about fifty of ‘our representatives’ are citizens of Israel as well as America. Who do they represent? It’s remarkable how impervious the state religion is to mere factual evidence, especially after a hundred and twenty years of imperial aggression.

Craig Dudley