You dont allow youself to be duped.

A favorite quote:

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”– Voltaire

Sadly, he died of a heart attack at age 53.

We was an idealist and a firm believer in the American dream, and his movie “Four Friends” underscored his love affair with this country. He won the Oscar for “Breaking Away,” which was listed by the American Film Institute as one of the most inspirational movies of all time.

His idealism was cut short, however, during the first Gulf War when he saw through the propagnda and lies. The propaganda re Yugoslavia filled him with rage, as did the media’s refusal to print his pieces, which refuted those lies.

I stumbled across his writing by accident, though I was a fan of his films.

If I read him in 1993, I would have thought he was bonky. But Gulf War II propaganda – and the vilification of truth-tellers — made me appreciate him all the more.

He saw it coming, that’s for sure.

Some of the points he made, back in in 1993:

“In the age of opinions the man of facts is seen as inconvenient at best or even as potentially a sinister figure.”

“What keeps us from wanting to know the truth? Has it become too hard for us to keep it in focus? Is it much easier to simply divide the world in our minds, as we once divided it in fact, into ths simplistic notions of good guys and bad guys? ”

“What Hanna Arendt never envisioned is that you can have a totalitarian atmosphere without totalitarian regimes where truth, philosophical and factual, is no longer suppressed but simply doesn’t matter anymore.”

It is totally corrosive.

One of the fienst moments in modern television was when Jon Stewart told the hacks at “Crossfire” to “Stop Hurting America.”

Hackery rules the day, however, and seems to be getting worse.

During the military action in Kosovo, screenwriter and Yugoslavia native Steve Tesich addressed this trend in a letter to the New York Times.

Money quote:

“Events in the world are no longer judged by hard evidence or impartiality to the true causes which gave rise to them. Even the normal journalistic standards of trying, merely trying, to get the whole story have been discarded as too cumbersome, too demanding. What has replaced the tradition of truth seeking, both philosophical and factual, is a kind of lazy drama critic’s response to the events on the world stage. In this new way of doing things, events themselves have no intrinsic value in determining who is right or who is wrong, who is guilty or who is innocent. It’s all much simpler than that. It’s all a matter of who in our opinion seems right. Who moves us.”

http://www.srpska-mreza.com/authors/Tesich/to-nyt.htm

CIA covert actions remain declassified for quite some time. And you can’t be sure the US was involved with any of them until files become declassifed.

For YEARS the CIA denied involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile, until declassifed documents proved otherwise.

Every human being has a point of view. That can’t be avoided. You can however, investigate what the U.S did in Iran, Iraq, Chile, etc., but, in most cases, ony decades after the fact.

Most Americans dont realize that Osama bin aden and Saddam Hussein were once CIA assets. And you’re not going to hear about any of it on the nightly news.