Anybody who is American and is over the age of say 35, 35 has lived through an extraordinary amount of war propaganda.

Obviously, beginning with the propaganda and manipulations that led Americans to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq, even though they had nothing to do with 9-11 and the claims about why we had to do it, all proved false, going into the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished

nothing, the war in Libya that destroyed that country, the war in Syria that devastated it for many years.

Obviously, you can put the bombing of ships off the coast of Venezuela and the endless arming

and funding of the war in Ukraine.

And if you're over 65 or 70, you certainly can add a major example to the list, which is

the war in Vietnam or the government not only lied us into that war, but lied continuously throughout

about how we were on the verge of winning, even though as the Pentagon paper showed, they knew

internally they couldn't. This is one of the most extraordinary things of American War propaganda

is that the script, the propagandistic

script never changes. And I could go on for hours about all the components of that propagandistic

script that are so blatantly, transparently false and deceitful. But it's effective because it's geared

toward our psyche. It's been studied and developed over decades, in fact, centuries to instigate our most primal instincts of tribalism and wars and a lot of other primal emotions that all of us have, including the claims of benevolent intent that we have to free the peoples of the world from their repression and to save them from all the horrific things their governments are doing, even though the governments which we've installed and support and align with and finance to this very day are some of the most savage journeys on the planet.

And of all the different claims that genuinely shocked me in terms of their efficacy,

despite how many times they've been debunked at the top of the list,

is the willingness of some Americans.

Increasingly, many are being extremely skeptical, as the poll shows now,

but many Americans still are willing to believe or pretend to believe

that the reason we go to war, such as the war in Iran, is because we're going there to liberate

the people, to bring them freedom and democracy or save them from all sorts of repression.

And that was obviously what the whole bit about pretending to care so much about the protesters,

the Iranian protesters, gun down in the street, or the Iranian girls in their hair.

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