THE ROAD TO RUIN

I don’t believe a large proportion of Americans are bad people. I have met many in my long lifetime (I am 70 now) and almost all of them were far from bad. Many of them were among the best humans I’ve ever met.

Americans, in my experience tend to be very pleasant and affable people, they have large personalities in general and can be extremely friendly, curious, idealistic and interested in issues, place and people around them.

So why is there a problem?

If you are an American reading this you are likely one that has woken up to the problem.

Sadly it appears many have not.

The idealism that many Americans feel is, believe it or not, a large part of the problem. They feel for people in trouble, they want to see justice done. They want to see bad guys stopped and jailed.

What could possibly be wrong with this?

The problem lies with the cultural ethos of the USA. That ethos is composed of many parts but they all tend to end in the same place. And that place tends to remain as is no matter how many incidents are pointing to flaws in the makeup of that place.

The flaw is the simplicity of that place. It’s a place where there is right and there’s wrong and not much in between.

Let’s represent it as a stage in a theater.

On that stage are quite fixed features built from the long cultural history of all Americans.

There are too many features to enumerate in full but let us try to name the most important of them.

There is the general feeling Americans have about their country. They feel they are special due to their history. This feature is pride and it is not totally unfounded. Despite beginning in genocide and slavery Americans look elsewhere for a starting place from which to draw pride. This tends to be The Founding Fathers and the Constitution they created for their nation. You will no doubt know it well and that it contains copious amounts of idealism and determination to nurture and preserve many freedoms. This feature without doubt represents the most powerful influence on Americans and imbues them with a sense, rightly or wrongly, of belonging to the most noble nation on the planet. This feature is SO robust that it can withstand all contrary facts and also negate almost to non-existence even horrendous events caused, whether through intent or not, by their elites.

It can forgive a multitude of sins in other words.

Because The Founding Fathers were apparently thoroughly good men (though slave owners) somehow their goodness is seen reflected in every member of America’s political and military elites ever since.

Never discount what an influence this is. It is almost insurmountable by mere facts. Even the deaths of one hundred thousand Iraqis who died due to lies told by those elites hardly make even a metaphorical scratch on this part of the ethos.

And of course it acts as a strong motivator to be involved anywhere in the world where there is a perceived lack of those features The Founding Fathers bequeathed the citizens of the USA in perpetuity. This gives Americans their strong sense of mission and determination to bring good on the global stage and vanquish all those who would put barriers in the way of those freedoms they enjoy.

Another feature on the stage is the reinforcement which comes from almost every angle right through their lives of their goodness and good intent. In the past hundred years, while their elites have been engaged in endless dirty dealings, in Latin America and elsewhere they have been inundated by a mass media that has endlessly reinforced their sense of righteousness and idealism. The USA has Hollywood and the effect of Hollywood, especially in the years since movies began, has been to reinforce the notion of good versus evil and good always prevailing in the end.

Then we have the relative remoteness of the USA from most of the rest of the world. Few Americans can afford to travel beyond their frontiers, the vast majority live and die in the USA and so are totally saturated in the mutually reinforcing mythologies which over time are almost as impermeable to contrary facts as the mythology around The Founding Fathers and the Hollywood reality that good will always overcome evil.

On top of all this and interwoven within it is Christianity, one of the most fundamental varieties of Christianity to be found anywhere. This adds hugely to the sense of being special, to the sense of mission and the conviction that good will always triumph over evil and that it is their duty (as idealistic Americans) to get between the bad guys and the innocents and no national boundaries will stop them.

These are the four primary features on our metaphorical stage. They lock precisely with each other into an unassailable conviction of rightness and goodness.

And this is what their elites use time and time again to achieve their goals in regard to intervention in faraway lands. And more so now than at any other time in U.S. history.

There was a time relatively recently when voices spoke of events that contradicted the features above, especially those which gave the sense of always-rightness, the sanctity of elite intent and act, the notion of goodness being applied and prevailing. This was most evident during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. Returning soldiers were contradicting the ‘primary features, reporters on the battlefield were too and a protest movement rose in numbers at home that did so also. The war ended just as much due to these contrary voices as it did due to the successes of the Viet Cong.

Mainstream media at this time was also much more diverse and there were many working within that media who were free to speak out and contradict the official narratives of their political and military elites.

If you were born after the Vietnam War you may not know these facts and find a truly free press and media hard to imagine now. You will know of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, of Watergate, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. These were investigative reporters who were able through the support of others to shine a light into areas America’s elites would rather have kept dark.

No such people exist now. Not in mainstream media. And if figures providing this insight appear, those such as Julian Assange or Edward Snowden do emerge, they are dealt with ferociously and without mercy. Now the ‘primary features’ need fear no contradiction. American mass media now feeds those features back untarnished, unquestioned and full of the power to create consent and minimize to almost nothing any responsibility of the U.S. state to hold itself to moral and ethical codes. Now it can do almost anything and its acts, no matter how many hundreds of thousands die and their nations destroyed... mainstream media will reflect no self-doubt, there will be no questioning as there was before during the Vietnam War of whether some act was right or wrong, if it was done by America it was right, or if not exactly right then an unintentional mistake of some kind. End of story.

Five corporations now control almost all of U.S. mainstream media. The Military Industrial Complex (warned of by Eisenhower) Big Pharma and the oil and Gas industries plus the giants of consumption, Wallmart etc. have most influence upon politicians, not the U.S. population. The U.S. population are expected to be a compliant and dormant metaphorical doormat, always providing consent to whatever its corporate, political and military elites want.

Of course there IS dissent. You are seeing it daily on your laptops and TV screens. A sizeable number of Americans have woken to the conditioning they have been subjected to by some means or other. But the vast majority are still asleep, still nodding in agreement with the mythologies of the ‘primary features’. And these are the ones we must all fear. For they provide the consent their elites require. They support the mission. They desire U.S. global influence to do “good”. They will support that all their lives and with their lives if necessary in the case of sending their kids to join the U.S. military. They will fly their flag, swear by the Bible and stand by their country right or wrong.

And all their good intentions, if they prevail... will lead us all to ruin.