Truth over comfortable lies

People are programmed by parents, teachers, and professors throughout the formative years of their lives, when they trust adults and have ability to understand, criticize, or check what they're told. Deprogramming oneself after schooling is a long and difficult process- -and for most people who start the process, death comes before it's completed. To deprogram oneself requires a love of the truth that is greater than one's love of one's country, the opinion of others, one's career, etc.

It's easier to believe the worst about a foreign country than about your own government. So Americans can more easily grasp the criminality of Israel than of their own government, but even this small step takes a lot of time, effort, and courage.

Now for those who do grasp that their own country has done and is doing terrible things, it's harder still to admit that their own government is so criminal, so dangerous to others that it belongs in a class with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa as deserving full sanctions!

To take this step requires being able to admit that your own government has become criminal and evil. This is very hard for Americans to grasp. America may make mistakes, but it cannot be so evil that it should be shunned by the rest of the world. America leads the world!

Americans have been programmed to believe that they have a democratic society and that they can always change their government by demonstrating and voting the bastards out in the next elections! So Americans tell themselves that no matter what our government does, it's doing so as a result of democracy and we can always undo the damage and change things for the better and everything will be all right. We're not Nazis or Huns after all, are we! We're the richest, most advanced, most enlightened, most powerful nation on Earth! Surely that means we're a better people and better society than all the others! How dare they impose sanctions on us! This attitude obviously permeates those of the left as well as those of the right.

Admitting that one's government is actually on par with the ultimate boogeyman, Nazi Germany; that the American Indian, Mexican, Phillipino, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iraqi Holocausts were all just as racist, evil, and unnecessary as the Jewish Holocaust; and that one's own leaders should be arrested as war criminals, tried, and punished, these are steps that very, very few people can take; as the evidence indicates.