One "great" myth which
the establishment 1% forces on
the 99% citizenry, via
McTell News, is the myth that our national policies are wholly modern and civilized.
They tell us that all our cognition is modern because, as a nation, we learn from our experience, then move on to higher moral, civilized ground.
The reality, however, is that
the fundamental underpinnings of U.S. political intellectualism, civics education, perception of history, foreign policy, as well as economics, seems to have been in
very gross stagnation for quite some time.
Notice the following quote from a book,
published in 1944, commenting on U.S.
exceptional propaganda of that time, aptly describing the
McTell News generated perception and concept of a "national enemy":
The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.
(
As We Go Marching, by John T. Flynn, 1944, page 222). Some experts expect Iraq to "accidentally" become
the largest supplier of oil now, since we blundered "
accidentally into their oil wells".
From that same book it would appear that the U.S. economic propaganda of today seems to have also been aptly described in 1944:
ON THE night of October 22, 1929, one of America’s most widely known economists addressed a great banquet of credit men. Not only were Wall Street prices not too high, he told his delighted hearers, but we were really only on the threshold of the greatest boom in the nation’s history. The prophecy evoked a burst of applause. Next morning, a few minutes after the great bell announced the opening of trading on the Stock Exchange, the storm broke. The greatest economic depression in our history was formally ushered in — though it had been in progress for some time. From this point on, as the country slowly roused itself to a consciousness of the far-spreading crisis, leaders in politics and business repeated with invincible optimism that it was all just a wholesome corrective. After several years a waggish commentator published a little volume called Oh, Yeah! It was a sardonic recording of the persistent and unconquerable stream of promises of quickly returning health. There you will find recorded the statements of statesmen, financiers, university professors, leading economists, and editors assuring the people that it was all a blessing in disguise, a corrective phenomenon, that the broad highway to renewed prosperity lay just ahead. All of which proved quite conclusively that these men did not know what they were talking about because they had no understanding of the economic system under which they lived. Then came the collapse of 1933 on the grand scale — and a resumption of the bright prophecies of happy days.
(
ibid, page 166). If that sounds familiar (McCain 2008, 1 mo. prior to great economic collapse in US: "
what economic problems?") perhaps we are on a roll, perhaps we should take a look at another "
historical DNA similarity"?
If so, how about the historical fact that
we are the only nation to have burned alive hundreds of thousands of women and children of "barbaric enemies" with WMD in Japan, while at the same time putting Japanese Americans into concentration camps
here in the homeland?
That was then, but recently while "
blundering accidentally into their oil wells", we also "accidentally" used depleted uranium ammunition (WMD) again on women and children:
Alani's log of cases of birth defects amounts to a rate of 14.7 per cent of all babies born in Fallujah, more than 14 times the rate in the affected areas of Japan [Hiroshima, Nagasaki].
(
Fallujah Babies). The
sordid past and the sordid present witness against the notion that
MOMCOM operates with modern, civilized practices.
We can go back a generation prior to the time MOMCOM used WMD to kill, maim, and destroy hundreds of thousands of women and children, to a time when myth addiction began to become institutionalized in the USA:
"... One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.
And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control"
(
The Deceit Business). We can take a further gander into "
the family album" to see that the little tykes grew up in a mythical world of empire daze proportions:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act 
of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty [now 320] million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world ... It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice.
(
The Ways of Bernays). When
Bush II said "
childurns do learn", most likely he was not talking about our U.S. children, that is, unless radical changes are made to our world view so that we become civilized once again, then convey that civilized education to them.
The next post in this series is
here, the previous post in this series is
here.
The definition of "hermeneutics" is "the theory and practice of interpretation" (Hermeneutics).
