When I was a kid there was something called a Cold War going on. As a result, we used to have regular air-raid drills at our schools. This meant going to the floor, squatting, wrapping arms around legs, and putting heads down on knees to protect our pretty little faces. Never mind that if an atomic bomb had actually exploded, we might as well have been kissing our asses goodbye.
The politics of fear is nothing new. It's been around since somebody decided he should be in charge of somebody else. During the Cold War, our leadership was able to convince us that the Soviets had so many nuclear weapons that we just had to keep pace, bomb by bomb, until we could've destroyed a hundred worlds over. And it was all one lie after another, just as the justifications for our current war are all just lies.
The Vietnam War was also based on a lie, the lie that one of our naval vessels had been attacked by the Communists in the Gulf of Tonkin. And off we went for over a decade of killing and the loss of over 55,000 Americans. The lies fed to the public during the Vietnam War were even more egregious than the lie that got us into it; it's a list too long for this brief commentary.
Finally, the lie that got us into Iraq was simply another example of political fear-mongering: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; better to attack Iraq now than to awaken to a mushroom cloud, a lie quite similar to the one used all those years ago to fuel the Cold War. And it's probably the lie that will be used in the future as an excuse to murder people of color around the world and to keep our local body bag industry afloat. But are the body bags even made in America anymore?
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