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(32,139 posts)Here is part of the beginning:
Well, do you get the feeling sometime that youre living in an occupied country? Very often thats a feeling I get when I wake up in the morning. I think, "Im living in an occupied country. A small group of aliens have taken over the country and are trying to do with it what they will, you know, and really are." I mean, they are alien to me. I mean, those people who are coming across the border from Mexico, they are not alien to me, you see. You know, Muslims who come to this country to live, they are not alien to me, you see. These demonstrations, these wonderful demonstrations that we have seen very recently on behalf of immigrant rights, say, and youve seen those signs saying, you know, "No human being is alien." And I think thats true. Except for the people in Washington, you see.
Theyve taken over the country. Theyve taken over the policy. Theyve driven us into two disastrous wars, disastrous for our country and even more disastrous for people in the Middle East. And they have sucked up the wealth of this country and given it to the rich, and given it to the multinationals, given it to Halliburton, given it to the makers of weapons. Theyre ruining the environment. And theyre holding on to 10,000 nuclear weapons, while they want us to worry about the fact that Iran may, in ten years, get one nuclear weapon. You see, really, how mad can you be?
And the question is, how has this been allowed to happen? How have they gotten away with it? Theyre not following the will of the people. I mean, they manufactured a will of the people for a very short time right after the war started, as governments are able to do right after the beginning of an armed conflict, in order to able to create an atmosphere of war hysteria. And so for a short time, they captivated the minds of the American people. Thats not true anymore. The American people have begun to understand what is going on and have turned against the policies in Washington, but of course they are still there. They are still in power. The question is, you know, how did they get away with that?
So, in trying to answer the question, I looked a little at the history of Nazi Germany. No, its not that we are Nazi Germany, but you can learn lessons from everybody and from anybodys history. In this case, I was interested in the ideas of Hermann Göring, who, you may know, was second in command to Hitler, head of the Luftwaffe. And at the end of World War II, when the Nazi leaders were put on trial in Nuremberg, Hermann Göring was in prison along with other of the leaders of the Nazi regime. And he was visited in prison by a psychologist who was given the job of interviewing the defendants at Nuremberg....
oberliner
(58,724 posts)It seems like there are more instructive ones to choose in this case.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)That talking point expired a long time ago.
oberliner
(58,724 posts)What talking point has expired?
Just saying that there are better analogies to use than Nazi Germany.
OxQQme
(2,550 posts)<snip>
But the question is, how did they get away with it? What about the press? What about the media? Isnt it the job of the press, isnt it the job of the media, isnt it the job of journalism to expose what governments do? Dont journalists learn from I.F. Stone, who said, "Just remember two words," he said to young people who were studying journalism, he said, "Just remember two words: governments lie"? Well, but the media have not picked up on that. The media have gone along, and they embraced the idea of weapons of mass destruction. You remember when Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations just before the onset of the Iraq war and laid out to the UN this litany of weaponry that Iraq possessed, according to him, and gave great details in how many canisters of this and how many tons of this, and so on and so forth. And the next day, the press was just aglow with praise. They didnt do their job of questioning. They didnt do their job of asking, "Where? What is your evidence? Where did you get this intelligence? Who did you talk to? What are your sources?"