Howard Zinn: Removing America's Blinders (Americans USUALLY Lied Into War)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/34984/

Removing America's Blinders
By Howard Zinn, The Progressive
Posted on April 24, 2006, Printed on April 24, 2006

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

- snip -

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell's presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his "evidence": satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled "Irrefutable" and declared that after Powell's talk "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior. If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives...

MORE AT LINK

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

[Douglas Carpenter]

1. sorry I guess we were thinking the same thing at the same time

didn't mean to dupe... :hi:



http://www.dontattackiran.org

[0007]

2. Howard Zinn is one of my very favorites.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson -- so often characterized in our history books as an "idealist" -- lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."
Everyone lied about Vietnam -- Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.[/div

[Hissyspit]

3. Thanks for that excerpt. The chewy factual core of his piece.

The common thread? We are USUALLY being lied into war.

The Korean conflict? Not so much, the best I can tell, but recently, it's the "babies being ripped out of their incubators/yellowcake from Niger" shit.

[yowzayowzayowza]

10. "Common Thread"

DemocracyNow is running a series of interviews on that very thread. Fridays first installment of three was excellent:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/21/132247

...looking fwd to the second installment this week. Mrs Yowza found it to be an enlightening historical overview of our foreign policy.

[aquart]

4. Not the best time to bring that up.

I really don't want to hear the "everybody does it so big deal" from the Republicans about this.

[Douglas Carpenter]

5. I think Americans need to learn to the skepticism about war that Europeans

only acquired after centuries of blood and gore.

I doubt there have been many or perhaps any wars in history (even the relatively just ones) that have not been sold to the public on packs of lies.

It's a very big deal no matter who does it.

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"

---Mohandas Gandhi



http://www.dontattackiran.org

[Mnemosyne]

6. .

:kick:

[Hissyspit]

7. kick

[BrklynLiberal]

8. This is a harsh truth that many Americans just do not want to face.

Our history books have cleaned up our history so that what is taught in our schools never tells the true stories of the wars we fought and why we fought them.

[AuntiBush]

9. Most Americans Still Assume they could trust their main press...

not anymore. People of all walks of like no longer trust our MSN tee-vee media.

And that is just plain, sad. No one trusts what they hear anymore - people are not as dumb as most would have you assume as such. It's just that many people gave-up voting a long, long time ago when that Reagenomic trickle-down affect effected their lives.

What the Dems need to do is instill hope back into their messages, which they do, but the MSN-Tee-Vee media need to bolster that. Will they? Stay-tuned...

[ChairmanAgnostic]

15. HEY! I believe Jon Stewart and Keith O. Doesn't that count for something?

[AX10]

11. The blinders are coming off.

We need full enlightenment come the fall elections.

[Hissyspit]

17. Yes, but they shouldn't have been on in the first place. n/t

[yurbud]

12. this kind of stuff should be taught in high school, we forced

mea culpas on Japan and Germany after WWII, then continue to pretend like our own shit doesn't stink.

And if the phony justification for a war or ethnic cleansing is too flimsy and transparent, we just ignore it, as we do the Mexican American War and the Trail of Tears.

[understandinglife]

13. K&R. Solid.

Never Forget: George W. Bush willfully violated National Security to cover-up his willful launch of a war of aggression and illegal occupation of Iraq.

[SlavesandBulldozers]

14. K&R - with notes.

the war in the Phillipines was a real eye-opener for me, I found out about that war about 3 months ago, and I'm in my late twenties, I found it only when I decided for myself to find out about what the entire Spanish/AMerican war was about.

The run-up to the Spanish American war is almost the W playbook verbatim. Remember the Maine?

Surprisingly Zinn didn't touch on 9-11 in all of this, i understand he basically knocked this article into the upper deck, but to not place 9-11 into all this seemed a little facile. I'm noy saying 9-11 Never Forget OMG Long Live Dale Earnhart USA USA! but to not place 9-11 into the historical milieu is a mistake. He missed an opportunity to make the Maine/WTC metaphor, if nothing more.

[Douglas Carpenter]

16. very important article --

http://www.dontattackiran.org

[katinmn]

18. Zinn is one of our very best truthtellers

:)

Thanks for posting.