Wearing Old Glory lapel pins on ten-thousand-dollar suits does not make these crimes okay. Neither does a complicit media.
The mood I have been in lately is exasperation. Our population is awash with information tools, yet far more ignorant of world affairs than any but the most crude societies.
As the rulers dance on the edge of world destruction, knowledge of the most inane trivia counts as being informed.
The headline link takes you to the whole article. The first three paragraphs is all I am posting here.
Willing Slaves
Eric Zuesse
Willing believers in lies are willing slaves, because lies are coercion of the mind, as opposed to coercion of the body (slavery by physical violence instead of by mental violence, which is called “lies”); and anyone who willingly complies with any type of coercion when escape from that coercion is available (and this is precisely the situation when the lie has been disproven and exposed and when the truth has already been clearly demonstrated) is a willing slave, of the mental type — a mental slave, instead of a physical slave; and a willing slave, to-boot, a participant in his or her own suckerdom.
For example, members of the U.S.-and allied armed forces are willing slaves after the outright lie, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2002, became exposed and no such WMD were found in Iraq by the forces of the lying invading governments, the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. and its allies were clear war-criminals. Anyone who — after such clear-cut proof that the U.S. and its allies are aggressors on the basis of lying and deceiving their followers to invade and destroy nations that (like Iraq) had never invaded nor even threatened to invade the U.S. — continues, nonetheless, to consider the U.S. and its allies to be anything other than international war-criminals who endanger the entire world by invasions that are based on lies, is simply and clearly a willing slave. Plenty of them exist, not only as warriors for the U.S. regime, but as many other types of mental slaves, around the world.
In that instance, of Iraq 2003, no question remains: the U.S. was clearly and unequivocally an international war-criminal. A crucial date was 7 September 2002, when George W. Bush and Tony Blair both said that a new report had just been issued by the IAEA saying that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon. The IAEA promptly denied that it had issued any such “new report” at all, and the ‘news’ media simply ignored the denial, which the IAEA then repeated weeks later, and it again was ignored; so, the false impression, that such an IAEA report had been issued, remained in the publics’ minds, and they consequently favored invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein before there would be, as Condoleezza Rice warned the next day following Bush-Blair, on September 8th, a “mushroom cloud”. It was all just lies — lies that were believed by the public, at the time, and even believed by many for a long time after we invaded.