Reply #10: Hey, Gregorian, you don't think that some of those 70+% of Americans who oppose [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

the war and want it ended have imagination and empathy? We must never forget the ways that the progressive American majority has been disempowered and disenfranchised. Some are callous, yes. Many are not. Many feel the wrongness of it. Many have shown amazing resistance to relentless, 24/7 war propaganda. Somehow they get informed. Somehow they think things through. Another stat, which went by us briefly, last summer, and I lost the url for: 84% of the American people oppose any U.S. participation in a widened Mideast war. 84%! I think the American people are better characterized as angry and mystified that democracy is not working. Not lacking in imagination. Not lacking in empathy. But bewildered as to what to do--how to move this political establishment to obey the will of the people.

Another fascinating stat--or two stats: 56% of the American people opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, Feb. '03, before the invasion, even before all of the Bush Junta's lies were exposed. 56%! (That would be a landslide in a presidential election--and, believe me, it was.) Now grown to over 70%. But back then, at the same time that 56% opposed the invasion, about 50% believed that Saddam had WMDs and/or had something to do with 9/11. What this means is that some portion of that 56% were struggling, trying to figure things out for themselves with these bits of disinformation rattling around in their heads, and were able to think it through and to conclude that the threat was exaggerated and that war was not the solution.

Beware of accepting the war profiteering corporate news monopolies' delusionary portrait of the American people, concocted of very narrow political spectrum (rightwing) "commentators" and news shaping. I think you are right that the carnage in the Middle East has been deliberately sanitized and "blackholed"--and the "arguments" about the war made into a farcical exercise in "talking heads" and political doublespeak. So true! But I don't believe that THIS is a reflection of the American people and their views--what they know, what they feel, what they want. The American people are not the problem--they are a THREAT to the war profiteers. And we need to help re-empower and re-enfranchise them, not slander them unfairly.

These war profiteers would like you to believe that you are all alone in imagining the horror of war and feeling empathy--that the majority are against you, and are merely callous, stupid consumers. That is their greatest--and maybe their only--propaganda success. I urge you to resist it.