Facing facts is not something we're very good at in America. In fact our entire society is based on the opposite principle, avoiding the truth in favor of an appealing fortress of contrived fantasy: Disneyland America, Leave it to Beaver America, the America on television, the one where everyone lives comfortable, privileged lives and no one is poor, homeless or insane. And no one ever goes to jail, loses their house, falls ill and goes bankrupt, goes to war or comes home in a body bag.
Former First Lady Barbara Bush said of the war in Iraq: "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
We, as a culture, are in such denial that it is both astonishing and alarming. History can be thought of as having two meanings, that which actually happened and the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. Those stories are often in stark contrast, and often intentionally so, to what actually took place. History is told by the victors to make themselves feel and look better. Our history is hopelessly bound up in our propaganda and mythology.
Columbus heroically 'discovered' America, rather than blundering into it and then savaging the natives.
We are the land of the free and the home of the brave. We opened the continent to European 'discovery.' We tamed the West. It was manifest destiny. And the slaves upon whose backs the nation was built were basically immigrant workers.
This is a graphic from an actual history textbook in the Texas public school system. Our standards have fallen shockingly low (with a little help from our billionaires).
Our manufactured history tends heavily toward the fanciful, misleading and willfully blind.
History is important. If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.
Howard Zinn
There has been a determined and deliberate dumbing down of the populace by the billionaire class going back decades and the average person doesn't have a clue.
Our brightest minds have warned us, but who listens to those guys? What's the point in listening to the smart people, right?
“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
We do not, in most cases, teach our children the unabridged truth about our actual history, only a sanitized and distorted version of it designed to make them feel good about who we are as a people. We don't dwell on the negatives or the controversial aspects of our history. We blithely skip over the true depth and horror of centuries of slavery. The impression often created, and there are always exceptions, is that slavery was a blip in our national time line, an unfortunate aberration where for some time some Americans were not so great. The depth, the nearly three-hundred-year duration, the ungodly inhumanity of it or the outrageous persistence of it is usually softened, often to the point of denial.
In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of them, 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 were transported directly from Africa to North America, as David Eltis, David Richardson and their colleagues have definitively established in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
Slavery, by the Numbers
Who learns in an American secondary education anything approaching the full story of the centuries-long struggle for workers' rights against cruel and violent robber barons? Who learns about how many people have been murdered in this country by the rich and powerful merely for standing up for their rights? How often is it taught that the first aerial bombardment in history was by the US government against striking West Virginia coal miners? How many high school students ever heard of General Smedley Butler or the attempted fascist coup by wealthy industrialists that he defeated by exposing it to the world? Or how none of those wealthy industrialists were arrested, charged with sedition, sanctioned or punished in any way. Or how little the nature and character of our rich and powerful has changed. The only difference is that they've now decided that if they can't overthrow the government, they'll just buy it.
The truth is that most Americans, not all but most, have a moderately to highly sanitized, naive and largely untrue conception of our history and who we are as a culture and a people. Most people's default reality is the one manufactured by Hollywood, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, the one concocted in corporate boardrooms and blasted at us 24/7 by the one-percent's wholly owned mainstream media. Most Americans dwell in some version of Kardashianland – where celebrities, sports, entertainment, vanity, money and status are all that matter. That and working your ass off and slaving your life away to make rich people richer while they trash the planet and murder people for profit.
So if you catch yourself gleefully participating in the national psychosis, check yourself. The closer your thinking is to conventional, the nearer you are to being insane.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Our true history and our true national character are very poorly understood by most of us. This is, in part, what allows us to sleep at night untroubled by the fact that American bombs are likely to be falling on innocent people somewhere in the world at virtually any time of day or night or that our wealthy and their corporations are destroying the rainforests, degrading the environment, exploiting the poor and dooming future members of our species to an uninhabitable planet. It's also what allows us to shrug off such things as torture, for-profit prisons, police killings of people of color, the loathsome practice of 'double-taps' and
an expensive and creepy drone program that kills mostly innocent people who have done us no harm whatsoever.
The rich and powerful piss on us and their media tell us it's raining.
The biggest and cruelest scam pulled on us by the rich and powerful is illegitimate war for profit. Wars serve a series of important purposes for the rich and powerful. They provide an opportunity to take from others by force of arms while creating a lucrative market for armaments and war materiel on both sides of the 'conflict.' Wars also create huge lending opportunities for central banks. It is a highly efficient way of extracting wealth from the national coffers, that is to say, from the people, and depositing it in the pockets of the well-connected few. Wars also keep the common people fighting and killing each other and not those who have imposed such horrid conditions for nefarious, selfish and Machiavellian gain.
James Risen Says War Profiteering Is Out Of Control And Driving The "War On Terror"
For those of you with a little more time to spare or greater curiosity, the following documentary is an exceptionally sober and responsible treatment of the subject of modern warfare. I highly recommend it.
BBC Documentary 2015 | BBC4 Storyville - Why We Fight ( Full Documentary )
Shame on our perfidious national 'leaders' for using our economic might to increase human suffering, not relieve it. This is a direct contradiction of our values as a people and only serves the greedy and heartless profiteers who have gained such enormous power, politically and socially, that they can make us commit atrocities.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire
It's funny how the conservative mind reacts to truth that contradicts their false and fabricated world view. It's an attack, it's hating America, it's radical. The truth hurts and the more conservative the person, the worse is the pain. Introspection comes hard to them, change or personal growth even harder. I suppose the same is true to a lesser extent and on a sliding scale for less conservative minds. For example, we make a lot of fuss at this site about working class republicans who vote against their own interests but are much less clear about the democrats who do a very similar thing when they back the plutocracy, the neo-liberals and the establishment, even when they finally have a clear alternative.
The scariest thing that could happen now is the continuation of the status quo. If a corporate-backed establishment politician wins the presidency, nothing big is going to change, all the campaign rhetoric in the world notwithstanding. You know those fuckers lie to us to get what they want, right? If the establishment gets their way, fake and immoral wars that cause ungodly human suffering will still be our best friends for life.
I know Bernie recently endorsed Obama's plan to extend our involvement in Afghanistan, which is a position I disagree with, but I still believe he has, by far, the most rational views on war and the military-industrial-complex.
But I am very concerned about a lot of the war talk that I'm hearing from my Republican colleagues, who apparently have forgotten the cost of war and the errors made in Afghanistan and Iraq. And what I believe, very much, is that the most powerful military on Earth, the United States of America, that our government should do everything that we can to resolve international conflict in a way that does not require war.
Bernie Sanders
In this speech from 1992, Bernie shows that his priorities are in admirable order:
I want to live in a just society and I want legitimate reasons to be proud of my country - or at least to not be so fucking ashamed of it. And I want to feel that we have done absolutely everything in our power to ensure that future generations will inherit an ecologically viable world that is at peace and within which they can thrive. No more phony wars, no more trashing the planet, no more torture, no more for-profit prisons, no more trickle down bullshit, no more wealth inequality, no more tax cuts for billionaires, no more racism and no more climate change denial or do-nothingism. It's time for a change.
Don't we all know that by now?
If we are ever going to do the right thing, if we are ever going to stand up to the rich and powerful and begin to right the many terrible wrongs that persist in our nation, the time is now.
It starts with facing facts.
”The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Here's a fact that we all need to face.
"Iraq is the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country."
Bernie Sanders
'I made a mistake,' is simply not good enough with respect to the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of our country. Not from someone who wants to lead us into a tricky and conflict-ridden future. We need better judgment than that from our president.
We need a president we can trust.
“Brothers and Sisters, Now is not the time for thinking small.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders
Right on, Senator. Right on.
"Revolution soon come" may seem a fantasy. But Sanders' view that nothing will change unless people rise up, demand change, go to the polls in large numbers and hold their representatives accountable is compelling. And by not raising money from millionaires and billionaires, by not setting up a super PAC, by raising stunning sums in small donations (over $2 million in the hours after the Democratic debate), he isn't just calling for a popular movement, he is helping to build it.
The Strategy for Change: Sanders v. Clinton