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A Nation of Jerks? Culpably Accepting of Basic Dishonesty and of Unscrupulous Big Shots

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Jay Janson
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That the people's responsibility for our foreign policy choices is seldom mentioned is strange.  ... in the context of foreign policy debates public opinion is relegated to the shadows, as if it were almost irrelevant.

... what is not said is that the American people are associated with the policies [of their government].

When The People are doing bad things—as when they are allowing their leaders to adopt unsavory foreign policies—they are largely invisible [in liberal and progressive journalism].

That ordinary people allowed themselves to be bamboozled by the president ...  I do not mean to suggest that ordinary people should have been able to pierce through LBJ’s lies—and they were lies, as we now know—about the events that transpired in the Tonkin Gulf.  But their attitude was passive.  Whatever the president said they believed.  This was not LBJ’s fault.  This was their fault."

Shenkman notes 

"the responsibility of ordinary Americans for our friendship with Saddam."

"To be sure Rumsfeld was a hypocrite, shamelessly capable of pirouetting from support to hostility in an instant, as circumstances dictated, without regard to questions of morality.  But was not the American public’s shameless switch also of interest?  It is a peculiarity of our culture and the inadequacy of the Left’s approach that we could acknowledge Rumsfeld’s hypocrisy but not our own. ...

In A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,  Samantha Power clearly writes of the American public’s complicity or at the least indifference to Saddam’s many crimes against humanity.  ... Americans have greeted [Power's] revelations of genocide with apathy.  ... both our leaders and our people preferred to respond—maybe this is too harsh—with a yawn. Power herself indicts the public along with its leaders for their insouciance.  

... the New York Times book review ... headline, “Turning a Blind Eye/A human rights expert surveys a century of American policy toward mass killings,”  as if the problem were with our leaders’ policy and not ourselves, ... not a single sentence to ... question of the American public’s culpability?

... it is easier to indict specific policymakers than it is to survey the response—or non-response, as it were—of the general public.  ... The public’s indifference is now so taken for granted on the Left that few seize the opportunity to comment on it."

As a youngster, yours truly was brought up on an entertainment diet of World War Two motion pictures that pictured the Germans and Japanese as all to willing to go along with reasons for invasions of their neighbors and their soldiers even more willing to commit orders that consisted of war crimes and atrocities, be it the Holocaust or the Nanking massacre.

Since Americans never totally accepted the innocence of the Germans claiming ignorance of what was done in their name, beyond watching their Jewish friends and neighbors being beaten and hauled off to camps, how naive that Americans expect world opinion to see Americans as innocent of the wanton taking of millions of Third World lives in brutal wars and CIA overthrows of popular governments.

Elementary school assignments included making posters showing Uncle Sam kicking the butts of Mussolini, Hitler and Tojo. We kids firmly believed that the United States would never attack another nation first. So it is only natural that this old man has difficulty understanding his brethren accepting both corporate media and progressive writers depicting Americans as innocent of complicity in the crimes against humanity committed by their sterling moral-fibered military always portrayed as out to 'do good' in foreign lands even to U.S. military putting themselves in harms way in the process of carrying out 'noble' orders in other people's lands.

Of far lesser consequence is the acceptance of the immoral behavior of stuffed-shirt 'big shots' playing games with the serious toil of their countrymen and women dedicated mainly to the needs of their children and their communities.

But legalized theft and economic terrorism is, after all, part of the long black history of centuries of human  suffering that includes the two horrifically devastating capitalist world wars that gave birth to corrective humanitarian attempts at socialist reform and of communist revolt. 

The country's psyche thrives on multi channel media ' bread and circus' product advertising's featured diet of sports, violent mass death and military hero movies, celebrity sex scandals, the glamour of the rich, money making quiz shows and the spectacular once every four years snake-oil, hype and hogwash of a pretended cure-all hope generating, media managed, maximum leader election choice between one of two capitalist party candidates.

Intended or not, seems that stressing the individual over society is  programed to keep everyone focused on one's own private problems and successes in disregard of anyone minding the store itself, assured that it shall be well taken care of by lawyers working for Wall Street and corporate governance led by the military-industrial-complex.

The nation is TV dis-educated to disdain the political critiques of the likes of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr. and economist Thorstein Veblen as idealists or 'eggheads' ('Eggheads' being a real media coined 'Americanism' that exposes corporate media inculcating suspicion and distrust of scholars and our most eminent world teachers, at the same time slyly favoring trust and confidence in busy 'practical' and successful businessmen).

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Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Dissident (more...)
 

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