Webster’s dictionary defines ignorance as ‘ The Lack of knowledge or information’. Not in a mean or disparaging manner, this writer realizes just how ignorant many of my fellow citizens are. We can begin with the Vietnam (so called) War. The movers and shakers of this our Military Industrial Empire were foaming at the bit to get into battle and use their extensive killing machine from our tax dollars. It hadn’t been used since the early 1950s, and there were plenty of Commies to annihilate along with our own young soldiers. Hitler had a fake Polish attack at the border to justify his invasion and occupation of that nation. LBJ had the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 2, 1964, to justify our entry into combat operations in South Vietnam. (Of course years later, declassified intelligence reports dismissed the notion that North Vietnamese torpedo boats started the conflict). The War Machine went into full throttle, and you know the rest. Only two US Senators, Morse and Gruening, voted against the resolution that gave LBJ the war powers he needed. The full House of Representatives passed the resolution unanimously!  Looking back, it seems that the general public bought the lies hook line and sinker, with really no dissent. If the mainstream network news said it was so, then so be it.

We can dissect the 1983 US led invasion of Granada for regime change, using the excuse that US nationals were endangered there. We can also dissect the Dec ’89-Jan ’90 US invasion of Panama to depose Noriega that was really about keeping US control of the Panama Canal, which just coincidentally was returned to the Panamanians on January 1, 2000. Interesting, yes?  How many of my fellow citizens knew that Noriega was in the employ of our CIA during his entire time of being involved in the drug business? Which takes us to the mother of all our Military Industrial Empire’s endeavors, that being Iraq War 1 and Iraq War 2. One suspects that the overwhelming majority of Americans never knew that Saddam Hussein was actually orchestrated into power by our CIA. In 1979 we ‘ influenced’ him to war with Iran, which was our enemy once the Mullahs took control of that government in 1979. That war with Iran lasted almost 10 years, with US corporations making $ billions in weapons, equipment and logistics sales. We then goaded Hussein in 1991 to attack Kuwait (read the US ambassador April Glaspie’s meeting with Hussein before his attack) when that country was angle drilling Iraq oil, along with not helping to pay off Iraqi debt from the Iran war. Bush Sr. then made Saddam the next Hitler and orchestrated (along with the British) our first invasion of Iraq. The beauty of it all was that after his defeat we kept him in power so as to stifle the Kurds from getting their freedom, and of course to keep a tight lease on Iraqi oil sales. Which brings us to the second disgraceful act by our empire….

Iraq War 2. As it is, again the overwhelming majority of Americans remained ignorant of the real reasons for the 1st Iraq War. They had bought, with those ridiculous yellow ribbons, lock stock and barrel the lies that Bush Sr. and his cabal were selling. Less than 20 years later VP Tricky Dick Cheney, former CEO of Military contractor Halliburton, made sure that Junior Bush or ‘ W’ as they called this fool, initiated THE MOST heinous phony invasion and occupation of Iraq in March of 2003. We could tune into our boob tubes and see the myriad of media whores embedded into the lie of WMDs and Iraq = Al Qaeda. Take a guess who made out from that phony war: The corporations, the ones who donated to the Bush/Cheney Cabal campaign coffers, got the multibillion dollar contracts to rebuild what our missiles and bombs destroyed there. As the GI helicopter machine gunner stated to his passengers as he was wiping out Vietnamese civilians in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket: ” Ain’t war hell!?”

The cult of ignorance bleeds deep with the machinations of this Trump 2.0. He has his MAGA faithful believing that his high tariffs and drastic layoffs and cuts in safety net funding is to begin a new era of US domestic manufacturing. Wow! Sorry my MAGA neighbors and elected Trump Republican minions , the real truth is this: When you make drastic tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires you have LESS revenue coming into the Treasury. So, to balance this out you make us working stiffs pay for those high tariffs at the cash register to raise the needed funds… as you spend less of our tax money on the Safety Net (Duh like Medicaid and food stamps for low income MAGA supporters). There’s the cliff, lemmings, have a nice swim!