Oprah Winfrey &

The Dumbing Down of America

The deaths of soldiers slain by a disturbed officer at Fort Hood, as well as those killed in Afghanistan, are being exploited in an attempt to intimidate mass antiwar sentiment and support a military escalation that will lead to many more deaths.

?The stories of those at Fort Hood reaffirm the core values that we are fighting for.? [Our troops] ?served tour after tour of duty in distant places to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.?

Friedman’s ideological indoctrination reflects the line of the NYT, which has relentlessly campaigned for the prosecution and expansion of the war in Afghanistan. It underscores the further march to the right of the American liberal establishment.

Conventional wisdom holds that propaganda and indoctrination are the main instruments for social control employed within totalitarian regimes while citizens of democratic societies are free to make up their own minds. The opposite is in fact true.

Paul Wolfowitz was one of the main architects of the Iraq war and a leading purveyor of the false intelligence used to prepare it. This fanatic, who should be indicted and tried for war crimes, is now recycled as an expert on the Iranian ?threat.?

'They' indoctrinate the masses with fear and hatred, always creating monsters [the Other] as the enemy. The general apathy, ignorance and exploitation add to the ease with which the people can be kept blind and deaf to what is going on around them.

Ahmadinejad is the latest in a long line of western bogeymen: Libya's Colonel Gadafy, Panama's Manuel Noriega, Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, to name but a few. You can rely on the media to pump up the volume.

From the timing of its apparent discovery, the airline plot has been pursued not so much as a criminal matter, much less as a means of ensuring the safety of the travelling public, but as a propaganda tool in London and Washington’s “war on terror”.

Contrary to the prevailing myths, this wasn't a war of democracy versus fascism. It was an imperialist war waged by the capitalist great powers—“democratic” and fascist alike—for the division of the world and its resources in the interests of profit.

The media bow down before a self-created holy creed, never tiring of trumpeting supposed virtues, holding them up as the highest good. They are blind to their glaring inadequacies and mounting irrelevance. In a time cultural change, they are dying.

Hollywood has been an essential weapon the arsenal of American imperialism, especially leading up to and after World War II. It played nearly as important a role as military and economic forces in bringing about allied victory during World War II.

For some time the spin masters for war have been directing a well-orchestrated campaign of demonization against Iran, which is literally surrounded by U.S. military bases and warships. It reached a crescendo when Iran held its national elections.

After the election on June 12, it"s certain that many of Iran's more affluent, urban-activist and technologically savvy youth had concluded that they could achieve their political objectives best by using their protests as propaganda in the West.

American propaganda accused Iran in 2002 of being a member of the "Axis of Evil". It was [and is] condemned for pursuing weapons of mass destruction and exporting terrorism, "while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom."

Obama tells essentially the same lies as his predecessors, but does it better. His deceptions are aided enormously by the willed receptivity of the desperately hopeful ? and none are more eager to believe than Africans and African Americans.

An Israeli attack on Iran is likely to produce retaliation, which Washington will use to enter the conflict. Have the personal ambitions of Rafsanjani and Mousavi, and the naive youthful upper class Iranian protesters, set Iran up for destruction?

Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government's line on the Middle East conflict. They surf 24 hours a day.

The British establishment and media are waging a propaganda campaign to exploit the wave of combat deaths to manufacture popular support for stepping up the Aghan war. Growing unemployment will force more young men to become cannon fodder.

Cronkite’s life was as valuable as a used car salesman. As an old deceitful con man he was obviously proud of all the falsehoods he spread as a news anchor. He was a a primary disseminator of American 'values.' His was the voice of 'decency.'

All week politicians, media and the military have strained every nerve to turn public sympathy over the deaths of British squaddies into support for the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. The killing of 15 soldiers in 10 days has triggered a barrage o

We see the decay of American "freedom" in the way its media line up behind phony “color revolutions” against "enemy" regimes but flagrantly ignores antidemocratic measures by regimes backed by the CIA, the military and the State Department.

It's become increasingly difficult to swallow the Washington Post every morning. What I notice most about this paper is its unabashed support for war and it twisted logic of empire. The paper still persists in promulgating the neoconservative line.

The political movement of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, named the “Green Wave," has striking parallels with the US-backed “color revolutions” in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

The mass media narrative of events unfolding in Iran has been set out for us as clear as a fairytale: an evil dictatorship has rigged elections and now violently suppresses its country's democrats, hysterically blaming foreign saboteurs.

There is a deeply ingrained tendency among politicians and the mass media to make unstated but easily discernible distinctions between "worthy" and "unworthy victims". One beautiful 26 year-old Persian woman is worth a hundred Afghan 'ragheads.'