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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/most-of-us-americans-are-willingly

https://theduran.com/most-of-us-americans-are-willingly-fooled-by-our-government-and-news-media/

Most of us Americans are willingly fooled by our Government and ‘news’-media.

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

To be fooled time and time again and never learn, is to be willingly fooled, and Americans were fooled into invading and militarily occupying Vietnam on the basis of a phony “falling dominoes” theory that was ‘anti-communist’ but really was simply imperialistic to expand the number of the U.S. Government’s colonies (which are lyingly called ‘allies’) so as to become ultimately the first-ever dictatorship over the entire world (“hegemony”). And Americans were also willingly fooled both before and after that war against Vietnam, such as when, starting almost immediately after the end of WW2, the U.S. Government perpetrated its many dozens of coups, overthrowing and replacing democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, etc., and installing U.S.-backed dictatorships there, and most recently in Ukraine, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and all of these U.S. coups and U.S.-installed dictatorships were presented to the American public as being instead either a ‘democratic revolution’ such as in Ukraine and Bangladesh, or else a domestic coup, such as in Pakistan. And also there were many lie-based U.S. military invasions such as against Iraq. So, most of us Americans are actually serial fools — fools who keep coming back to believe yet more lies from the same lying sources: the U.S. Government and its ‘news’-media.

The master-lie behind all of it this is that the U.S. Government and ‘news’-media are a ‘democracy’ instead of the aristocracy that they actually are. Because this lie enables the regime to ‘justify’ its overthrows or “regime-changees” as being good for the residents in the newly created American colony, because that country’s prior Government was supposedy a dictatorship ruled by an “autocrat” who had less of a concern for the welfare of the people there than the ‘democratic’ U.S. Government that subsequently took over control in that new ‘ally’ (U.S. colony) does.

The authentic confessional book by John Perkins, who had been an international operative for the U.S. regime, titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, described a number of these operations that he had personally participated in, south of the U.S. border. So, it’s not as-if the secret that the U.S. Government is an imperialistic regime instead of being an authentic democracy, hasn’t yet leaked out. A willing fool simply doesn’t seek it out. Instead, that fool has voted happily (again and again) for such figureheads as George W. Bush or Barack Obama or John Mccain or Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Of course, it’s okay for a person to vote for such evil individuals if one is no fool and so knows that it’s a forced choice between two evils in order to decide which one of them is the lesser evil. That’s to be trying to limit the harm of the dictatorship. It’s an intelligent and well-motivated thing to do in any such ‘democratic’ dictatorship. However, a willing fool is the person who willingly votes for (i.e., actually supports) such agents of the U.S. billionaire-class — i.e., of the U.S. Deep State — thinking that it’s a democracy instead of the aristocracy it actually is.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the ‘news’-media agents of the U.S. regime (throughout its empire), which have lied the American people and the residents in America’s colonies, into being fools:

Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, Guardian, Telegraph, Globe and Mail, The Hill, Common Dreams, Vox, Reason, CBS, Daily Mail, Truthout, Salon, Financial Times, Jacobin, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Globe Business Insider, Foreign Policy, Independent, N.Y. Post, Newsweek, The Week, TIME, Spiegel, Bild, USA Today, Fox News, New Yorker, The New Republic, National Review, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Blacklisted News, Modern Diplomacy, Zero Hedge, Yahoo News, The Nation, and many more. 

The way that they are controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires is via the direct and indirect pay-offs by those billionaires to the ‘news’-medium itself (advertisements in it, or investments in it, etc., direct and indirect), and by their punishments against non-cooperative media, such as is done by Google demonetizing their ads, or by NewsGuard or FactCheck services that threaten the market-value of uncooperative media, or etc.

Where there is a will there is a way, for any billionaire to be “heard” — and obeyed — in the halls of political power, in any capitalist country. Capitalism=corruption. It is one-dollar-one-vote rule, not one-person-one-vote rule — not democracy, but rule-by-and-for the wealthiest. In a capitalist country, such as America, more money means more power. In the final analysis, capitalism is inconsistent with democracy because capitalism produces instead aristocracy — rule by the rich. And rule by the rich is inevitably rule for the rich. And this is what happened to America starting immediately after WW2: it became actually a dictatorship by its super-rich.

Just as, in a corporation, there is one-share-one-vote rule over the organization; so, too, there is, in any capitalist (or, as Mussolini called it, “corporationist”=“fascist”) Government, one-dollar-(or-other-currency-unit)-rule: only the rich actually rule there. For a fascism, a unit of its currency is a unit of ownership in the Government, just like a share is a unit of ownership in a corporation. Fascism=libertarianism=neoliberalism provides as the model for how a country should be run, the way that a corporation is run. A capitalist economy produces a fascist Government.

After WW2, since “fascism” had become in ill-repute for having lost that war, a new term was invented for fascism in America: “libertarianism.” In Europe, it became instead called “neo-liberalism.” Today’s leading advocate for it in the U.S. Senate is Dr. Rand Paul. Chapter 20 of his 2019 book The Case Against Socialism is titled “Hitler Was a Socialist.” Chapter 22 is “The Nazis Didn’t Believe in Private Property.” Rand Paul displays there that he is ignorant of history and thus arrogantly writes falsehoods about it. The name Germa Bel isn’t even referred-to in that 354-page book. But as that great social scientist and economic historian has documented in his two classic papers, Mussolini carried out the first-ever privatization of governmental assets; and Hitler carried out the second one. So, the fascists actually invented privatization (which is a core objective of libertarianism=neoliberalism). But Dr. Paul alleges that “The Nazis didn’t believe in private property.” Furthermore, Tom Perrett, on 23 October 2019 the same year as Dr. Paul’s book, headlined “From Hayek to Hitler: An analysis of the Libertarian to Fascist Pipeline”, and he showed that privatization was hardly an anomaly, because fascism and libertarianism are actually the same, and only the name was changed after WW2 in order to continue on without the opprobrium of “fascism.” That name for it, “libertarianism,” was merely a PR trick, to convey the false impression that their “liberty” refers to everyone’s liberty instead of to ONLY to the liberty of the rich, but the oppression of everybody else. However, Dr. Paul (bad though he is) is nonetheless perhaps the best person in the entire U.S. Senate, because whereas virtually all of the other U.S. Senators are neoconservatives — advocates to further expand the U.S. empire — he happens to be a libertarian more in the vein of Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco than of Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito: he’s not an internationalist fascist (aiming for creation and expansion of an empire), but purely a nationalist fascist (aiming to rule for the benefit of his country’s aristocracy: one-dollar-one-vote ‘democracy’.

As regards Rand Paul’s “Hitler Was a Socialist.”: This is like saying that because the U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama had promised that his health-insurance plan would include a “public option,” he actually supported a public option, which he never actually did: he actively opposed it as soon as he won. Hitler likewise promised to his voters a number of authentically socialist, and some outright Marxist dictatorial-communistic, provisions, including that “12. … We demand therefore the ruthless confiscation of all war profits. 13. We demand the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts).” In this sense, he was like Obama and most other successful U.S. politicians today: the only promises they keep are the secret ones they make to their megadonors. What is important isn’t what the campaigning politician promises publicly to the voters, but what that person has actually done in power as a public official (which is instead to serve the interests of his/her megadonors). Often that’s the opposite of what was promised to the public, though (again like both Hitler and Obama) very much in accord with what the politician had secretly promised to his/her megadonors. As a Governmental official, Hitler was the extreme opposite of a democratic socialist: he was instead a dictatorial capitalist. He was, indeed, far-right, as is assumed by everyone but far-rightwingers (who say things like “Hitler was a socialist”).

Even the 16,000-word book review by the socialist Nathan J. Robinson in the socialist magazine Current Affairs, against Dr. Paul’s book, ignored Paul’s falsehood that “The Nazis didn’t believe in private property.” That’s a pretty huge omission in an otherwise remarkably detailed review of Paul’s book; and it goes to show that even socialists routinely misunderstand fascism. The reason for this failure is that throughout academia, the very topic of ideology is just a mess: the topic is still in a pre-scientific state amongst political ‘scientists’.

In any case, the post-WW2 U.S. Government is both libertarian and imperialistic. It rules for its super-rich in order to expand their empire internationally. This is the secret that the imperialistic regime constantly aims to hide from its public — and which, apparently, the public don’t even want to know. Most Americans are satisfied to be doing lesser-of-two-evils voting, and to accept this as being a “democracy.” This encourages them to be libertarians, because it denigrates government itself, and simultaneously places onto a pedestal “the free market” (fascism) — as-if governments should be run the way that corporations are run (which was first publicly advocated by Mussolini): top-down, by-and-for the wealthiest.

This is how deep the lies go.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.