Posted by pancho from ? (63.164.145.161) on Saturday, November 16, 2002 at 11:45AM :
In Reply to: Re: Time for me to weigh in... posted by sankho from CPE-203-45-1-117.vic.bigpond.net.au (203.45.1.117) on Saturday, November 16, 2002 at 1:51AM :
: I like to keep life simple.
+++So do I. But there is a difference between simple and simplistic. I'd say it's simplistic to believe ANY government or agency you know damn well acts from self-interest. What is simple, is to admit that power corrupts...if history doesn't teach that...well then.
+++If I had told you in 1967 that I believed Vietnam would never attack a United States Battleship with a gunboat...that I believed the President of the United States was lying to get us into a war for profit for some and as a means of winning elections back home...maintaining the immesnsely profitable facade that Communism was coming to get us, acting "tough" on Communism as the Repubs had framed the issue (as they're doing now with Terrorism)...you would have said that was way too conspiracy oriented, that you are a simple guy who chooses the simplest way...to believe what you are told.
Years later we find out there was no attack, and that Johnson lied...we also find out that America couldn't "win" that war...and that it hated the soldiers it sent over there...except the safely dead 58,000 Americans...never mind the innocent three million Vietnamese, But...had the facts never surfaced...you would have gone on believing...it is indeed simple to be fooled.
The same simple reality was at work in Watergate as it was in these recent corporate scandals where we see plainly that corporations bought the media some years back, after changing the laws quietly, so they could report the electrifying "news" that the stock market was Boomtimes forever.
Doc...I own this little bridge in Brooklyn I can let you have cheap. It's simple...really.
-- pancho
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