The Disrespect for Truth has Brought a New Dark Age, by Paul Craig Roberts

[babylonsister]

http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=10239

The Disrespect for Truth has Brought a New Dark Age
by Paul Craig Roberts

snip//

Every week another apologist for President Bush compares "Bush’s fight for Iraqi freedom" to Abraham Lincoln’s "fight to free the slaves." The American civil war was not fought to "free the slaves," as Thomas DiLorenzo and other scholars have thoroughly documented, any more than the purpose of Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq was to "bring freedom to Iraqis." The freedom excuse was invented after it became impossible to maintain the fictions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connections to Osama bin Laden. Bush has yet to tell the real reason he invaded Iraq.

In the US today, demonization and propaganda substitute for facts and analysis. Professors and journalists are quick to lend their names and voices to the untruths that rule our lives. Just as Hitler’s foreign policy was based in propaganda, so is Bush’s and Blair’s.

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America’s wars have created hysteria that endanger our freedom. Abraham Lincoln shut down the freedom of the press and arrested editors and state legislators. Woodrow Wilson arrested war critics. Franklin Roosevelt interred American citizens of Japanese descent. George W. Bush has destroyed most of the Bill of Rights. In 2006 Congress appropriated funds for building concentration camps in the US.

Recently, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, said that freedom of speech is inconsistent with "the war on terror." If it takes a police state to fight terror, the country is lost even if Muslim terrorists are defeated. Americans have far more to fear from a homeland police state than from terrorists.

The vast majority of the world’s terrorists are the recent creations of Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and brutality toward the Palestinians. Bush is simultaneously creating terrorists and a police state. It serves no one but the police to make their power unaccountable.

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The challenges that America faces are not terrorism and oil supply. The challenges that we face are the police state that Bush has created and the disrespect for truth that is endemic in government, the universities, and the media. The US has entered a dark age of dogmas and unaccountable power.

[illinoisprogressive]

1. I disagree about the Civil War comparison

All I ever hear is the chickenhawks trying to make this another WWII. They and the administration use all kinds of WWII buzzwords. They want that soooooooo bad. Jr. even tries to compare himself with Churchill and Truman.

[shrike]

2. Re: Allende

Roberts should have pointed out that the Chilean congress was controlled by the opposition party, Allende's bitterest enemies, at the time they "called out" for a military coup. Then again, I am aware there are space limitations in a column such as his. Also, Allende got the highest vote total in 1970, but it was only 32 percent.

[gulliver]

3. Roosevelt "interred American citizens of Japanese descent"

I see nothing wrong with that as long as they were dead. Most American citizens who die are interred. Roosevelt interned American citizens of Japanese descent too -- which is a lot worse, IMO.