This commentary is by John Steen of South Burlington, who, before he retired, was a teacher of philosophy, had a 20-year career in health planning, health regulation and public health, was a professor of health policy, and is immediate past president of the American Health Planning Association.
The war in Afghanistan ought to be the last nail in America’s coffin on the world stage. It won’t be — and for us that should be the greatest lesson coming out of this tragic debacle. It won’t be the lesson most needed by us, because we will remain blind to what we are really doing throughout the world, just as we remained blind after the truth came out about Vietnam and Iraq.
All that because we have never been educated well, and don’t read anything but mainstream news sources, if even that. They feed us news that comes well seasoned with propaganda to reinforce seeing the news in a strictly orthodox way. We must never be permitted to even perceive that there is — and since the end of World War II always has been — an American Empire.
In his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, President Barack Obama said that “our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Think Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, Grenada, Afghanistan. After 9/11, we had every good reason to seek out Osama Bin Laden for prosecution in an international court, but instead of negotiating with the Taliban to do that, we invaded Afghanistan and murdered Bin Laden. Haven’t you read that in all our news media?
The “news” we are fed by the plutocratic oligarchs in control of the country is made tasty for us, so we absorb it like dessert. And become addicted to it along with our other opiates, religion and patriotism. Faith in God and faith in America have much in common.
Idealist that I am, I’ve always looked to education to begin to create a better-thinking populace able to discriminate more intelligently among news sources. One of the problems in doing this is overcoming the most conservative groups who have set out to destroy public education.
I was fortunate to have gotten a fine public education in NYC in the 1950s, at Stuyvesant High School and NYU, and I started reading incisively truthful news and commentary in The Atlantic, The Village Voice, and The New York Review of Books as soon as I was in college. When I finished at NYU and began teaching philosophy, I found it important to advise students about where to find the news that would maintain the warranty on their education.
Today, I often do the same for colleagues in public health. The Times and The Post are not bad for keeping up with world news developments, but for a fuller understanding of the significance of those developments, I recommend the World Socialist Web Site and Democracy Now. The Guardian also provides good news, though without much explanation of what might be behind it.
Recently, we have come to see how racist our politics can be, but when might we be able to see how racist our exceptionalist foreign policy doctrines are? The establishment keeps much of the news hidden from public view because if the public truly saw and understood it, they would come to see all of the evil resulting from the promulgation of American imperial hegemony.
No, our national blindness must continue if America is to continue as a power on the world stage.
