From the great book, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840. As you can see, here it is, 170 years later, and we haven’t changed one bit. We are just as sheeplike, grasping, conformist, warmongering and intellectually monocultural as ever.
I guess we are basically hopeless.
You know, the Brainwash Media really has a lot to do with it. I know a lot of educated people whose view of US foreign policy is simply whatever the media is promoting at that time, and the US media is remarkably uniform when it comes to US foreign policy. US foreign policy is always rightwing under either Democrats or Republicans, yet nearly every liberal I have ever known supports US rightwing foreign policy to the hilt. Why? I assume they must be utterly brainwashed. Even on domestic policy, most liberals I know formulate their opinions from the media, including rightwing magazines like Time and Newsweek, which most liberals consider to the be “liberal publications.”
There really is not a whole lot of diversity of opinion on either US domestic or especially foreign policy in the US. There is a narrow band of acceptable opinion, and anyone who steps outside of that is treated like a lunatic, someone who speaks a foreign language, or a pariah. I know because I have been outside of this idiotic narrow window most of my life.
Guess who sets up that narrow window? You guessed it – the media.
I am able to do this because I do not care about being ostracized and I usually do not believe the lying US media. Anything the US media tells me, I make sure to go and check it out against independent sources before I believe it. Most people do not have the time or inclination to do that.
When you think of it, a country with only a narrow band of acceptable opinion is basically an intellectually totalitarian country.
In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
