Governments Lie

This is the history lesson I was taught only the hazy outlines of in high school and college. And Howard Zinn doesn't even go as far as he should--say, including the goading of the nation into war with Japan and Afghanistan. But he goes plenty far enough for anyone who learns the shadowy, largely untaught history of America's undemocratic, sickening foreign policy, esp. in the post-WWII period, to know that the executive branch is never to be believed in matters of foreign policy. No government should ever be believed on that score without reams of documentary evidence and cross-checking. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

What's sad is that everyone doesn't already know this. I was a history major and learned of plenty of horrors perpetrated by plenty of governments up until around the time of my birth. But until recently I didn't begin to appreciate the depth and breadth of what governments have been and are still doing to the majority of poor miserable bastards on this earth. And among them America is chief. Pray that China and India never develop militaries as powerful as ours, lest they use them as we do to devastating, unconscionable effect.

Really, nobody needs to make things any worse.

Nota Bene: On a completely unrelated note, listen to the cadence of Zinn's speech. It's almost the same as Christopher Walken's. (Their accents are similar but not nearly as similar as their cadences. Zinn is from Brooklyn; Walken is from Queens.)