While I don't agree with everything here, I think he gets at some very good points that many other "progressives" are missing.
___________________________________________________
Why People Won't See
How Your Government
Gets Away With Murder
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
11-21-4
I receive 200-500 e-mails per day. Needless to say I can't read them all, never mind answer them all. But many of them are like this one, and these I always try to answer these even though I really don't have THE ANSWER when people ask me, "What can I do to stop this madness?"
"Hello, John. Thanks for the education. I am wondering, what is that makes most people "uneducable?" Fear? Denial? Upbringing?
"I have a friend who had opened up a bit to the idea that 9/11 was pure theatre, but now is sliding back to "I don't want to talk about it ... after saying to me, 'What are you trying to prove that the government is wrong? Why should people care?'
"I guess I must examine my own fears: the feeling I had when I first started e-mailing people - after learning just enough on 9/11 to be convinced it was an inside job. Maybe it's just the crowd mentality ....
"So I am asking you, what do you think is the main reason why people are uneducable?
"I'd appreciate your opinion.
"Craig R."
Craig, I think there is one overriding reason that prevents people from confronting the lies their government tells them, and it's the hardest one to realize. And by your phrasing, I can see you're already onto it.
Sure, you can blame a lot of the American public's indifferent and uninvolved behavior on a deliberately retarded school system that prioritizes regimentation as far more important than enlightenment, or our bozo media industry that reduces everything to lowest common denominator pandering to our baser instincts.
Or, you can suspect the mentally debilitating effects of fluoride, chemtrails, and food additives - not to mention the omnipresent radioactivity increasing in our atmosphere by the day, or the conscience-numbing aphasia of antidepressant drugs - as possible reasons for this detached malaise that causes many people to be completely disinterested in the vital processes that control and diminish their own lives.
But really, you hit it on the head when you speculated that you must examine your own fears.
I've said this before, and I'll never stop saying it.
The real opportunity for growth and learning when studying the events of 9/11 is this.
Once you realize that 9/11 was an inside job, conceived and carried out by members of the highest levels of the American government, a window opens in your mind that reveals the hypocritical and destructive nature of American behavior over time, and you begin to see that all these heroicized wars that have been conducted in the name of democracy and freedom were really something quite different.
At this point, it becomes a matter of do you have genuine integrity or don't you? As we all know, the first requirement of true integrity is admitting your own faults. I think there is no question in anyone's mind at this moment that America has no integrity (hell, you just need to look at the Indian treaties to realize that). Certainly the mainstream American media has absolutely no integrity, in that it's obvious to everyone the real stories about the Iraq war, depleted uranium, public corruption, fixed elections, and on and on ad infinitum are never mentioned by the hateful robots you see reading the "news" on TV).
But the larger question is: Do WE have integrity? I'm talking about you and me.
Are we willing to look at the truth as we perceive it and try to identify and admit our own complicity in all these atrocities, as the American government runs around the world shooting innocent women and children in the head over reasons we KNOW are lies. I mean, we're supposed to be fighting terrorists, right, but we KNOW these terrorists are not Muslim malcontents, and that most likely they are CIA/Mossad-contracted mercenaries assigned to kill Iraqi aid workers, behead innocents and blow up churches and mosques in order to inflame the situation to kindle support from the braindead public, who then mindlessly cheer the genocidal tactics of George W. Bush and pretend not to notice that not only did America CREATE the terrorists and start the war with phony evidence, we now continue the war as viciously as we can, continually murdering innocents and turning our own troops into raging psychopaths. Why? Increased profits for the military contractors, of course, which means increased under-the-table payments for our elected officials.
In a way, the easiest way to deal with that guilt is to pretend it's not really happening, which is what most Americans are doing right now.
But in the conversation between you and me, Craig, we both know that WE are partly responsible - not matter how small or unwilling a part - for the American mass murder in Iraq, because we know we are American citizens and as such have a responsibility for controlling what our government does, at least if we are to believe and endorse the fact that America is a participatory democracy in which the people are ultimately responsible for what their government does.
Of course on another level, we have absolutely no control over what our government does. The Congress and most elected officials throughout America are bought off by the financial powers-that-be, and they do what they want, ordinary people like you and me be damned. But again, if we have integrity, we can trace a small shard of responsibility back to ourselves, to some small event in our histories in which we did not stand for principle, but instead held back and let some innocuous hypocrisy pass us by unchallenged with the rationalization that "there's nothing we could have done about it" or "it didn't affect me that much."
Although these events seemed unimportant at the time, these small defeats, multiplied by the American population total - some 300 million - have combined to produce the situation we face today - an endless war aimed at stimulating hatred and conflicts for the ubiquitous and ever-present purpose of increasing profits for the goons who make and sell the weapons.
Why people try to hide in their own indifference is a very old question. So is why they are uneducable.
But beyond the political ramifications of this widespread indifference are the spiritual dimensions, the conversations each of us has with ourselves, either lying on a pillow in the dark late at night or taking that first hard glance in the mirror before shaving in the morning.
To a degree, you are right about the crowd mentality. Everybody wants to fit in. Our minds create and accept authority figures, and we try to live our lives according to these dictates we have accepted as legitimate to our own self-worth.
But a deeper reason exists with regard to what we choose to believe. And let me preface this by admitting I've been saying this for a long time, and haven't found all that many who agree with my opinion. But that doesn't stop me from repeating it.
I believe that religions are ultimately debilitating to the spirit, because they try to make us believe things that we know are not true, and in accepting the tenets of any religion, we leave ourselves open to a pattern of behavior that accepts things on faith, without examining them rationally. And this process habituates us to accepting lies as truth, as long as they emanate from an authority figure we have conditioned ourselves to respect.
Once you are willing to accept something that deep in your psyche you know goes against what you perceive to be rational truth - e.g., Jesus died for our sins and rose again from the dead - THEN YOU CAN BE MADE TO BELIEVE ANYTHING, whether it is true or not, as long as it comes from an authority figure to whom you have given credibility in your mind.
I believe this is a central component in the phenomenon of a majority of the American people believing the government's bogus story about 9/11, and in their willingness to accept the psychotic carnage in Iraq as being somehow relevant to their own well-being.
Thus, according to the tenets of the psychological process known as transference (in which we take the feelings of trust and dependence that we feel as children toward our parents and transfer them as adults to a relationship with an imaginary sky god to maintain our inner feelings of security), we want to accept what George W. Bush tells us because we have embedded ourselves in American society, and our whole meaning becomes challenged and distorted when we lose that focus by realizing that probably everything that has come out of Dubya's mouth in his whole life has been a cynical and sarcastic rich boy's lie.
Therefore, challenging his public statements can be disorienting to those who are not committed to their own integrity or trapped in the psychological prison of a fictitious belief system that can be proven false, should such believers suddenly develop the courage to confront the lies they are telling themselves.
In some cases, confronting these lies can totally shatter a person's sense of self, which is why the majority choose not to do that. Unfortunately, not confronting these lies is very likely to shatter our world into little radioactive bits, a profoundly ugly process we see happening - and accelerating - as we speak.
Thanks for writing, Craig.
John Kaminski is an Internet essayist whose writings can been seen on hundreds of websites around the world. They have been collected into two anthologies, the latest of which is titled "The Perfect Enemy." For information go to
http://www.johnkaminski.com/ http://rense.com/general59/whypeoplewontsee.htm
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