In the past year or two, we in the liberty movement seem to have made a lot of progress in getting across the ideas of freedom and peace to a larger group of people. Live and Let Live is not totally dead yet.
Ron Paul’s 2012 Presidential campaign and his subsequent college campus appearances have very much reached the younger people.
Nevertheless, it seems like an exercise in futility to try to get the people to understand that the one main impediment to their freedom, prosperity and their future is the State.
The militarized NFL and the way football fans act at games, and the Watertown sheeple’s approval of the cops’ unconstitutional door-to-door searches to find one lone teenage terrorist suspect, are not good signs.
Sadly, it seems as though most people just feel comfortable deferring responsibility for their lives to the State. They don’t seem to mind putting the agents of the State on a pedestal, no matter how corrupt, no matter how criminally such government employees behave.[amazon asin=1494399806&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Until the crimes are so egregious and continually exposed, then the people wake up and start to make a fuss. (e.g. the NSA spy scandal, ObamaCare, etc.)
Mainly out of ignorance and fear, most people are naively trusting of those who wield legal and coercive powers over them. How can we reach those people? How can we convince them that the one true enemy of peace and freedom is the State?
One good example of how deferential people are to the State is the JFK assassination. We just passed the 50-year mark of that tragic event. Yet, despite all the evidence and witness testimony to the contrary, the mainstream news media continue to feed the masses with the government’s own “lone gunman” conspiracy theory.
Even Dallas city officials attempted to physically prevent Warren Commission critics from exercising their free speech rights.
For some reason many people are not open to hearing about all the evidence and witness testimony which weren’t included in the Warren Commission’s report. It is difficult to challenge those who are blindly faithful in the government’s official explanation of things. So the faithful continue to dismiss the challengers as “conspiratorial” and so on.
Many people just don’t want to believe that employees of their own government would kill their President. Yet plenty of evidence points to that, and there was plentyof motivation for the national security state to get JFK out of the way in implementing their agenda to escalate hostilities and grow Leviathan much larger than it already was. Such an agenda didn’t exactly start after 9/11, by the way.
Those who are skeptical can read this list of articles on the subject, as well as Jacob Hornberger’s articles on the Kennedy autopsy and the Kennedy casket conspiracy, and Dr. Donald Miller’s own recounting of his associations with doctors involved at the Dallas hospital where Kennedy was taken when he was shot, and the book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James Douglass.[amazon asin=1439193886&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Iran is another example of how a majority of the people naively enable their ruling bureaucrats to deceive them.
How are public office holders and their media and pundit stenographers so easily able to bamboozle so many millions of people? They did it with Iraq in 1990, and with Afghanistan in 2001, and again with Iraq in 2003.
With Iran, the issue at hand is preventing the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. The Israelis themselves won’t acknowledge their own many nuclear weapons, and they refuse to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which Iran has signed.
But here is the main motivation underlying the fear-mongering: the former President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, and several Ayatollahs have allegedly stated their desire to “wipe Israel off the map.” The allegation is that Iran has been threatening to commit “mass genocide” of the Jews in Israel.
But if people did some fact-checking, they would see that Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah Khomeini whom he was quoting in 2005 were not referring to killing people, but referring to the “regime” or the government of Israel.
The U.K. Guardian stated in this 2007 article: “A more literal translation of the statement (Ahmadinejad) made in 2005, at The World without Zionism conference in Tehran, is ‘the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time’.”
So really they are talking about the ruling “regime” in Israel.
Now, as an anguished Jewish American, I am sad to report that many people are misinformed about Israel and the Western governments’ exploitation of the earlier plights of Jews in Europe. There is a lot of history that apparently most Americans don’t know about, and that Christians in particular should know.
If interested, readers can also check out Murray Rothbard’s article on the subject.
Regarding how Jews are actually treated within Iran, you can read this 1998 article on Iranian Jews who actually are tolerated by “the regime” there, or this more recent account by the New York Times‘s Roger Cohen who visited Iran and spoke to Jews there.
Some other points of propaganda the U.S. government militarists and their talk radio stenographers bring up, besides the “wipe Israel off the map” misquote, include how the “crazy” Iranian leaders and Ayatollahs have been funding and arming terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
But what do the media pundits ever say about U.S. government bureaucrats accepting financial payments by and publicly advocating on behalf of a designated terrorist organization the Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK)? (Oh wait, it seems that embarrassed U.S. government officials removed the MeK from their list of designated terrorist organizations once the officials’ providing “material support” for the MeK was revealed.)
And it seemed that the mainstream media wouldn’t inform the public about the U.S. government’s backing of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations until recently, at least regarding Syria. But the neocons and talk radio crowd are worried about Iran, not U.S. government knuckleheads.
So, while the Iranian leaders and clerics’ worst crime has been their inflammatory rhetoric, in America we have a President with an extra-judicial, due process-free “kill list,” and who claims the authority to have anyone he wants captured and detained indefinitely, even renditioned off to foreign territories for torture by foreign regimes, without charges or any evidence provided against the detained. And that President has his “finger on the button”!
And America has generals like the one who heads the NSA with his “Information Dominance Center” intentionally built in the fashion of the set from Star Trek, including sliding doors that make a “whoosh” sound. And we have a former U.S. President who is now on a crusade to convert Jews to the Christian faith. (Good luck with that one, Dubya.)
While it is sad that the current Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei stupidly continues to use inflammatory rhetoric against Israel, he nevertheless refers to the Israeli “regime” and not to harming the actual people of Israel.
In contrast, the ones who have been openly advocating the bombing and murdering of innocent people are the vicious American neocons and pundits who want to kill innocent Iranians (such as this former UN ambassador, this U.S. Congressman, this billionaire political fundraiser, and this TV pundit).
But unlike the “crazy Iranians” who spoke of getting rid of a “regime” and not referring to killing people or referring to nukes, these so-called Americans are referring to killing innocent people and using nukes in the manner of a Harry Truman.
And further, like the sanctions which devastated Iraq throughout the 1990s, the current sanctions imposed on Iranian civilians by the Obama Administration are having a devastating effect on innocent civilians in Iran.
Sadly, there are too many ignorant and propagandized Americans whose “leaders” have bamboozled them, exploiting their prejudices, to serve the Rulers’ hunger for coveting foreigners’ natural resources.
So I really don’t know how optimistic one should feel in hoping to reach those people. Can the propagandized and bamboozled ever be open to hearing the truth about the national security state which feeds off their hard labor’s earnings?
In any event, one final example of what seems to me to be an almost futile effort in reaching others with the message of peace and freedom is the Edward Snowden-Glenn Greenwald-NSA story.
Yes, they have accomplished a lot toward informing the public of the criminal actions by the U.S. government against its own people. However, in their overly controlled manner of releasing the information, Snowden and Greenwald have gotten the approval or at least tolerance of the political establishment, as mirrored by the establishments’ minions in the establishment media.
This is in contrast to Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea Manning) and WikiLeaks, who released multitudes of documents – many of them unredacted – for the public’s investigation and analysis.
With WikiLeaks, even a top U.S. military officer testified that no soldiers or intelligence operatives were harmed by Manning’s releases, nor was America’s security compromised. But those WikiLeaks releases sure did embarrass U.S. government officials, and that’s why the pols and their establishment media flunkies called for Julian Assange’s head on a platter!
And now as we have seen over these past several months, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald’s carefully controlled and timed releases of information seems, as Arthur Silber has noted in comparison to WikiLeaks, more to serve the interests of the State and not the American people.
How could Snowden and Greenwald possibly be serving the State’s interests?
With the WikiLeaks releases, which were massive document dumps, we were all given the opportunity to sift through the information, members of the media and the general population. We weren’t obligated to trust only specially chosen newspaper editors or reporters to decide for us which documents were in the “public’s interest,” or which could be considered “State secrets.”
These are “secrets,” by the way, to which thousands of government workers and private contractors with clearance, as well as now newspaper editors and journalists, may have access, but not the rest of us commoners.
Why is that an extremely questionable situation?
You see, unlike Snowden who said that he ” carefully evaluated every single document” to determine what was in the “public’s interest” and what was not, Manning stated that all the information regarding the government’s criminality and illicit acts are in the “public domain.” And he is correct. Manning also said that he wanted people to know the truth, ” because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”
Some people assert that only letting specially chosen people, and those with “clearance,” to access all the Snowden-released information is to protect “our spies” and other agents of the national security state.
No, the truth is that withholding or redacting some items of information is mainly to further sweep the government’s criminality under the rug, and that’s it.
And even if the released information is unredacted and could “harm” some of the agents of the State, so what? Those State agents know that what they are doing is very risky, and they voluntarily choose to engage in such State criminality. They are at their own risk.
The burden of “protecting” them should be on them, not us, for crying out loud!
The entire national security apparatus is a criminal operation, from the Rulers’starting wars of aggression for no good reason to their criminally spying on innocent people under color of law and the pretext of “protecting” their victims!
No one ought to be obligated to redact anything or omit any of the “secret” information to protect the national security state, the murder state, the indefinite detention state, the extraordinary rendition state, the torture state – on the contrary, as Silber astutely pointed out, it is we the people who need to be protected from them! They are the dangerous ones.
Unfortunately, convincing most people of these true facts of life seems almost impossible.S
o the Rulers have done a superb job in their propagandizing the American people, and, it seems to me, de-programming the propagandized will be an uphill battle. I hope that readers are more optimistic than I.
