This trick, this tactic of pretending that aggression and violence and a war are really being done for humanitarian reasons, is not unique to the United States. I mean, you can look at Napoleon and the invaders of the early 20th century and, as I said, al-Qaeda and Gaddafi and a whole range of people. The writer Jonathan Schwarz has compiled a really long list of some of the worst warmongers in history, who have used identical humanitarian explanations as the one the U.S. government gives. And I think one big reason is that because no population, no country, likes to think of itself as an aggressor, as an empire, as warmongers. We all like to think that we’re good people. And so, one of the ways that you get a population to acquiesce to a permanent state of warfare, which is obviously what the United States government is in, and has been in for decades—how do you convince the population to continue to acquiesce to the continuous slaughter of people around the world, to the bombing of multiple countries, in a way that no other country would contemplate? Really, the only way that you can do that is by continuously telling them that it’s being done because you’re benevolent, because we just love humanity and love freedom and love democracy so much that we constantly bomb people in pursuit of those goals. And I think the combination of how adept this propaganda is, when it’s done by the U.S. government and U.S. media jointly, combined with the desire that we all as human beings have to think good things about ourselves, makes it so that, even contrary to all evidence as it is—Glen Greenwald!
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 19:48:55 +0000
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