by Gustav Wynn from OpEd News.
Always, belatedly, we learn how the government (US) of the ruling class lied to us; and it is always carefully confined to a few mainstream outlets, and long after anyone can do anything about it.
When I was attending a university in the 1960s, I became acquainted with an Indian Sikh student who told me one day that he thought that Americans were the most naive people on earth. Well, I thought about that, didn't believe or disbelieve this observation, and filed it away in my mind. Over the many decades since then I have frequently pulled this memory out and looked at it to see how astoundingly correct he was.
In the 1950s I served in the Army and became acquainted with a fellow soldier who had grown up in Cuba and I heard from him the many tales of corruption of the Cuban government and the US support of that government. After leaving service I followed in alternative news sources the subsequent events in Cuba following their revolution in 1959. I contrasted what I knew with the outrageous lies I was getting from US mainstream media.
I participated in the Civil Rights Movement and witnessed the distorted coverage and lack of coverage in mainstream media about what was actually happening. I witnessed the Kennedy assassination and saw the cover-ups, the contrived tales to make the official reports fit a lone assassin theory, the many mysterious deaths of people who had been connected with the assassination, etc. This same experience occurred over and over again through the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the many US-CIA engineered events in Third World countries to overturn governments, occasionally outright invasions of these countries. And on and on up to the current war in Afghanistan (see this for a list of such events), with the real events always covered up and replaced with justifying lies from mainstream media. Frankly, I believe, along with a number of engineers and architects, that the 9/11 tragedy has been part of this same pattern of cover-up and lies. And most Americans always believe these lies! What has further astounded me is that I have had absolutely no influence even on close friends and relatives about questioning the official versions of these events.
There were times when I thought I was living in an open ward of a huge institution for the insane. I have always wondered how long this would go on, how many times could people be lied to, how bad things would have to become for ordinary working people before they would wake up! I am now beginning to see some signs that give me hope. As the mythology of the American dream turns increasingly into the nightmare of current realities, it appears to me that my fellow Americans will wake up, and wake up with quite a jolt. When they do, look out!