In some respects, this essay could be seen as a sort of autopsy on the death of America. And death certificates are required to state the cause of death, these are some of those causes in my opinion.
I have recently been re-watching the excellent series, “Band of Brothers,” & the episode I watched last night made me think of some parallels to the present state of affairs in the United States. The episode was the one showing the American soldiers’ shock when they came upon one of Hitler’s extermination camps.
The “concentration camp” or “death camp” was located just outside a German village or small town & the German residents claimed to have had no idea of what was going on in the camp. Yeah, the flakes of human skin from the crematorium that rained down on the village never raised their suspicions or caused them to be curious.
This is a class of ignorance that can only be referred to as willful ignorance. In other words, when people are either too afraid to face the truth or they’re simply apathetic & indifferent to mass slaughter like what was going on a few kilometers from their homes.
There’s a special place in Hell reserved for these sorts of people whether they be German or American or any other nationality or race. And this leads to my first bit of evidence in my case that supports my argument that ignorance is killing, has killed, & will continue to kill unless & until people are brave enough to speak the truth!
Back around the mid-1990s, I heard that roughly a third of Americans don’t believe the Holocaust even happened & I was dumbfounded? Could this possibly be true? So, I did a little research & found Deborah Lipstadt’s book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” and much to my dismay, I discovered that it is indeed true.
Let this sink in for a few moments if you will because this is deadly serious. Imagine, if the white supremacists can persuade a third of America that the Holocaust never happened & several million Jews as well as five million gays, artists, intellectuals, gypsies, etc., weren’t murdered, what’s next? Will we wake from our national stupor to find that almost overnight, our Democracy has been banished & we now live under a dictatorship & are effectively back in the age of feudalism with no rights whatsoever?
Some argue & posit that Trump’s assault on our government has effectively turned back the clock considerably. But as my hero, Noam Chomsky & others have pointed out, Trump is just too damn stupid to have made it a reality though he clearly wanted to become the de facto authoritarian “leader” for life like several of the dictators around the world that he admires i.e., Putin, Bolsanaro, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Erdogan, Duterte, etc. Trump has no ideology; he only lives for his insatiable greed. But Trump’s destruction will take years, if not decades to repair & with the wholesale prostitution of the GOP’s “leadership,” it may prove impossible to ever repair the damage? Moreover, if another Trump, but someone with a brain takes over the White House, we can kiss the last vestiges of Democracy goodbye forever!
And speaking of goodbyes, we are on the Highway to Hell to borrow a song title by Chris Rea, because a handful of billionaires like the Koch brothers & oil companies have spent millions in spreading disinformation & propaganda that denies Global Warming—which should be called Climate Destruction!
Are you beginning to see the pattern illustrating Death by Ignorance? Let’s see, will the White Supremacist fascists cave our heads in or shoot us or will Mother Nature roll over & die and we live what time we have left in a wasteland not fit for humans or animals? Where all water supplies are toxic as well as what food sources are available, & we all need to wear oxygen masks because the very air we need to breathe, will kill us?
Yes, I know this is very morbid & depressing but if you can’t even contemplate my words or ideas, what’s your option? Bury your head in the sand, buy a better entertainment system & pray that I’m just a nut-job and none of these depressing ideas will ever come true or stand a chance of happening.
And since I’m on a roll, here’s another bit of cheerful news, Germany was considered one of the most enlightened, sophisticated, & cultured nations pre-Hitler. Yep! I shit you not! Don’t look to me for all the answers, I’m trying to simply inform people & hopefully spur them to thought & discussion with others in the hope that if we work together, perhaps we can find the necessary solutions to save humanity from its own self-destructive impulses?
But one thing I do know for sure is that a third of America believing that the election was stolen from Trump is a very dangerous warning sign! We could be a lot farther down the road to fascism than we realize? Bear in mind that it was fascism that we fought to destroy in WWII & the goddamn Nazis came really close to winning. Moreover, if it weren’t for Russia losing 20 million of its citizens fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front, we definitely would’ve lost WWII!
This is a good point to insert a critically important theory of mine which no, I can’t prove it, that’s why I said “theory.” But have you ever asked yourself why it is that our government & corporate business “leaders” feed us the same pack of lies in public school about our history?
Now this is a subject that is worthy of an entire essay or book by itself, but so I don’t roam too far afield, I believe that if the truth about America’s history was taught in public schools i.e., the near total genocide of the indigenous Native Americans, the fact that slavery created much of the wealth that got the U.S. on its feet so-to-speak in terms of our economy. Cotton in those early years was like oil today in terms of the wealth it generated.
These two facts alone are just the tip of the iceberg of America’s hidden history & could turn a lot of America’s young people away from joining the military. Who would fight the never-ending wars the politicians & corporate business leaders keep coming up with? You see, bottom-line, all these wars are about profits for the transnational corporations who really don’t give a fuck about American workers i.e., NAFTA. Need I say more on this subject?
If we could take a few steps back & enlarge our worldview through a historical lens, it is clear that throughout recorded history & probably even before it began to be written down, two forces have struggled against one another & sometimes they have united, in trying to control the people, the peasants, their citizens, organized religion (the official church of each nation) & the state i.e., the government which is owned & told what it can & can’t do by the megalithic corporations!
Obviously, the better educated the people are, the more difficult it is to “control” them. By-the-way, Ed Snowden didn’t belabor the point, but I believe it was his central or key warning to us, the spying the government, military, intelligence agencies, etc. does against us is about Control! Mull that over for a while if you will?
Returning to our current state of affairs, you may have noticed Trump & his zombie cult of the walking dead have all but declared war on Science, Facts, Truth, & Reality. This is the key danger of Personality Cults, their leaders can tell their followers to not believe even what their own eyes, ears, & common sense tells them & the true believers won’t trust their own senses, but they will trust the Master’s “truths.” Note Jim Jones influence was so powerful over his flock that most of them willingly drank the Kool-Aid he had laced with poison.
“Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
In his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
We’re accustomed to politicians peddling falsehoods to the public and hoping to get away with it. What we’re seeing with Trump, however, is qualitatively different. This is what Rachel described on the show last night as “deliberate trafficking in unreality.”
As regular readers know, it’s become a staple of the Trump presidency. The White House hasn’t exactly been subtle about its vision: Don’t trust news organizations. Don’t trust the courts. Don’t trust pollsters. Don’t trust U.S. intelligence agencies. Don’t trust unemployment numbers. Don’t even trust election results.
And who can forget Trump’s former, most trusted adviser & campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway’s world-famous knee-slapper that had the world rolling on the floor with laughter:
Most infamous was Conway’s explanation that Trump’s advisers have “alternative facts.” Conway used the phrase to explain then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s utterly false and easily disprovable claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd — comments clearly meant to bolster Trump’s own false claims and ego.
Trump and his Happy Meal followers’ open war on science, fact, truth, & reality isn’t just a modern or recent phenomenon, and if this subject intrigues you half as much as it did me, you’re bound to be fascinated by the classic, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” by Richard Hofstadter. I read this book twice & with a fine-tooth comb so-to-speak because I used it as a framework for a book of mine on the subject of anti-intellectualism.
Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”[6]
Also, he described the term as a view that “intellectuals…are pretentious, conceited… and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive …
Oh, the joy of finding things so appropriate when doing a bit of research on a topic I’m interested in;
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/30/anti-intellectualism-is-back–because-it-never-went-away-and-
Of course, I might as well be speaking Martian to those who sit on the edge of their seats in rapture when their holy man, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan speaks because my thoughts & words are alien to their ears. To illustrate how far down the rabbit-hole we have fallen, it used to be illegal to scream “fire” in a crowded theater if it weren’t true, but not anymore.
Nope! Not in George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatives” America. Donald the Dick has repeatedly gotten away with screaming “Liar!” when America’s top medical experts have tried to warn us about the deadly serious consequences of our not wearing masks, social distancing, testing, getting vaccinated, etc. and you can be sure that the numbers of Americans who have died from the COVID virus are far higher than the government or the corporate-owned media have stated. And not only is the President of Trump University not held to account for the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, he isn’t even publicly chastised for this unconscionable behavior let alone driven from office?
Death by Ignorance again & again & again! I keep asking myself, what’s it going to take for the Trump cult followers to wake-up? A nuclear attack on New York & L.A.? Seriously, just how stupid can we be? It might interest you to know that again, roughly a third of the American population is illiterate. Try to put yourself in their shoes for a day, they’re not able to read street signs so their world is limited to the close by & the familiar. They can’t read menus, so they order the standard fare of a hamburger or steak probably? They can’t read the danger warning signs on medicines, toxic chemicals they may use, etc. etc. etc. To say nothing of how easily lying, con artists like Trump can manipulate them into voting against their own self-interests.
Moreover, speaking of manipulation, an area that has me especially concerned is the so-called, “social media.” And you may dismiss it as fear mongering, but I believe it’s not too far of a reach to conclude that the supposed “social media,” which has come to play such a significant role in peoples’ lives have “radicalized” some of the mentally unstable who went on to commit deadly mass shootings!
Here is a link to a video in which a professor calmly & rationally informs us about how the “social media” is de facto, “Toxic by Design.”
https://youtu.be/wpvv_ooqJik And for the record, I too was seduced into becoming a Facebook user & what a massive waste of time, energy, & emotions it turned out to be. I think my “vacation from reality” on Facebook lasted a good five years or better? Furthermore, I didn’t quit Facebook for any of the reasons I share in this essay, no, it was basically out of frustration/aggravation at “Friends” apathy & intellectual laziness.
In a nutshell, Facebook & most of the other “social media” does far more harm than good in terms of spreading fear, hatred, & violence which have one overriding common denominator, and that is ignorance!
“Racism is a symptom of psychological disorder. It is a sign of a lack of self-esteem and insecurity. People who are psychologically healthy have a stable sense of self and have no need to bolster their sense of self through group identity. They have no need to define themselves in contrast to and in conflict with others. America’s racist structure is no accident. It was deliberately created to gain power and keep power….
In the end, racism is ignorance. It is an ignorance that becomes fear, and that fear becomes hatred. It is evil. White Americans are not only ignorant of racism but are also ignorant of their own ignorance. They don’t know that they don’t know. They have no idea why ghettos still remain and are indifferent to them. They are ignorant of the tenacity of racism because this ignorance serves their psychological and material interests.”
https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2020/12/28/22198159/letter-racism-is-both-ignorance-and-insecurity
For most of my life, this has basically been my view of racism, but I wasn’t nearly as eloquent & succinct as this author. There are those that argue that many racists are well-educated, I say Bullshit! If a person is truly “well-educated,” they understand that all humanity is connected & we all want basically the same few things. To provide for our families a decent home, quality health care, & a meaningful job in a nutshell. And we don’t need organized religion to tell us we should be good to one another; common sense tells us that.
May I remind you that many, if not most “good Germans” saw the rising tide of fascism as Hitler slowly came to power, but they dismissed it as a relatively small percentage of Germans who were nut-jobs not unlike the White supremacy groups that have steadily been growing in America over the past few decades. Go ahead, dismiss me as just another fear monger but my trying to warn Americans by showing the parallels in history isn’t meant to simply get attention. No, my goals are always the same, to inspire people to inform & empower themselves and ideally to unite & organize against the true monsters like Trump.
Pursuing this further, connections between racism & ignorance help shed light on the growing phenomenon of the rise in belief in conspiracy theories especially since the rise of Trump. Consider how popular & wealthy Alex Jones for example has become. His secret? Spread conspiracy theories. His passionate appeals to his viewers & listeners complete with tears, convinced his followers he was the real deal or genuine. And again, the less educated are far more vulnerable to manipulation than others simply because they aren’t aware of the common tactics used by the unscrupulous to suck them into their world view i.e., the Jews are coming, the liberals are coming, the homosexuals are coming etc. Here in brief is why conspiracy theories are so popular:
- The desire for understanding and certainty
- The desire for control and security
- The desire to maintain a positive self-image
I’m not going to delve into this subject here because it’d only make my essay longer & people want brevity so they can get back to the more important things in life i.e., “reality t.v.,” sports, making more money, “social media,” etc. but note if you will, that behind many, if not most of the dark chapters in world history, there was a conspiracy theory. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, & the attempted genocide of the Jews in WWII, to name just a few.
Some of you may think that I’m just weaving my own conspiracy theory when I claim that the 1% want us ignorant & only intelligent enough to run the machines in their factories & etc.? Here’s a personal anecdote & a quote regarding this;
Many years ago, I was in an interview & the manager told me that he was president of the local school district, ABC Unified School District (Paramount, CA). He seemed like an open-minded person, so I asked him why we were continually lied to regarding the so-called “Winning of the West,” and he replied in a matter-of-fact manner, not the least apologetic; “Most students don’t go on to higher education & the government wants students to leave high school with a positive feeling about their country.”
Do you recall my theory that the government & our corporate rulers know or fear that if the truth were told about America’s history, it might be very difficult to find enough recruits for the military?
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” (President Woodrow Wilson, from 1913 to 1921 who ran for office promising he’d keep us out of war but then led us into WWI)
In my defense against possible accusations of being a hypocrite, I have been a perpetual student & voracious reader all my life. I worked in the public education field for over 20 years & although it’s hard to quantify something like education & I may be accused of being one of those dreaded elitist snobs, I shall try to quantify my area of expertise. Ha! Ha!
In terms of my formal education, I went up to having earned a B.A. in English literature. Yet, it took me 14 years to earn that four-year degree because I dropped out of community college courses many times, sometimes half or even three-quarters of the way through a semester. Just because I didn’t receive the college credits for those classes I dropped out of, I still learned while I was in them.
Above all, I am most proud of my personal library which I have been collecting for over half a century. Approximately 10,000 books and no, I haven’t read them all, but I have made copious notes in several hundred of them. I use those notes often in essays I’ve written or books I am in the process of writing. Finally, if I had to guesstimate, I’d conservatively say that I’ve spent 50,000 hours or more in studying, writing, listening to & watching documentaries, etc. in the area of political science in particular. If this makes me an elitist, then yeah, I’m a goddamn elitist intellectual & I earned it, I paid my dues and I continue to pay my dues.
Why is it that people idolize & have such great respect for people who have become obscenely wealthy, but disrespect & dismiss people like myself? I’ll leave that to you to reflect upon. Consider Trump, who even knows what his true net worth is, he’s been lying about it his entire life. To all but the willfully ignorant, Trump is a moron of gargantuan proportions! This is a person to respect, trust, & believe?
We’ve all seen & heard the age-old maxim, “Ignorance is Bliss,” well if this is how you prefer to go through life, more power to you & you will continue to be shocked & wonder why each personal & national crisis happens. I’ll end by bringing it back full circle to the willful ignorance of the Holocaust deniers & what happened as a result of the “Good Germans,” who denied the rising tide of fascism in pre-WWII Germany;
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— Pastor Martin Niemoller
(a public critic of Hitler who spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in a concentration camp)
— Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, Oregon June 6, 2022