Chapter 1c
Our Sons and Daughters Die in the Service of Outright Lies
Our 'free press', in the service of its own greed, has abdicated its social responsibility


In our generalized culture of selfishness and greed, we have allowed our nation to be led into wars of naked aggression based on outright lies. We have stood by and watched as the horrific events of these wars have belied every cherished principle that we have wanted to pretend that our nation stands for.

Unassailable proof of the keenly targeted and deliberate intent of these stark and outright lies has been widely acknowledged, yet even those in the supposedly ‘free’ press are motivated by their overriding concern for protecting their own positions of relative social comfort and privilege to abandon their social responsibility to pursue the truth through objective discipline. Their concern for their advantaged positions within the social hierarchy has led them to abandon their responsibility to the nation, to dig up and report the truth.

Instead, through the widespread behavior of self-censorship, which preserves the security of their jobs in corporate owned news organizations, they rationalize, and ultimately they placidly accept, without appropriate outrage, (indeed, with hardly a bare hint of objection), not only the very existence of these bald-faced lies that government tells ever more frequently, and with ever more impunity, to its citizens, but also the continued social and political legitimacy of those who tell them.

Within the lifetimes of many of us, it was once considered a shocking revelation, provoking general public outrage, when it was revealed and proven that our government had lied to us. Now, in this ‘brave new world’, where reality itself takes a back seat to greed and jealousy for power, lies told by our elected officials, even in pursuit of the vilest actions and intentions imaginable, have become so commonplace that they are placidly accepted as routine.

What madness is this that allows so many of us to imagine the agonized screams of those subjected to torture in our names, or to witness as innocent people dig the bodies of their loved ones from beneath piles of rubble created by bombs that our taxes have paid for and delivered, and still believe that America yet reflects the noble principles of Democracy, the principles of universal human equality and freedom, that rang out so bravely from Jefferson’s pen?

Democracy cannot exist without an active and energetic free press that will accept, and carry with gravely self-conscious discipline, the mantle of its responsibility as the society’s guardian of truth. Our once proud, but now cowered, free press bears the burden of responsibility to protect The People from government malfeasance and lies. We all can surely see that this once ‘free’ press has fallen under the power of the same forces of ‘special interest’ that have wrested control of our government to themselves, and we can see that those who hold positions within the once vaunted ‘fourth estate’ have largely renounced their responsibility to Democracy. Those who are charged, in a free and democratic society, with the responsibility of digging out the truth, to protect us from public malfeasance and lies, have fallen under the power of the very people who perpetrate the lies, and have abdicated their crucial responsibility that is a ‘mission critical’ determinant for maintaining a democratic society.

That our leaders told us outright lies to lead us into a war of naked aggression, whose objective was the control of another nation’s natural resources (oil), has been clearly proven, yet the nation as a whole fails to fully perceive the horrific implications of the facts that have been demonstrated. Well over a million human beings have died as a result of this war, yet those who told the lies remain unaccountable for their actions.

Our moral sensitivity seems to have been numbed by the constant cacophony of propaganda and lies that attack the simple truth with such unrelenting daily ferocity that many of our fellow citizens, (perhaps most), seem to have given up on any effort to know what is true and what is not.


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