This past week has been one that no American will forget. There is great fear here and abroad that the United States may be about to bring on World War III, in its vengeful rage. The near future may determine the long-term future, if there is one, of the human race. It largely depends on what the American people decide to do. These are easily the most terrifying times I have lived through, and what frightens me the most are my fellow Americans. The mainstream media has been performing its usual task of beating the war drums, providing more disinformation than useful information (see http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/lies.htm#big), and most people are consuming it by staring at the tube all day long. Pundits across America, as well as officials in Washington, are calling for dropping nuclear weapons on all manner of people. While the Left, like the Z Magazine crowd, are doing a heroic job of trying to educate Americans about what is happening, I regularly see them making excuses for the average American's ignorance of very basic issues regarding American foreign policy. Until recently, few Americans could even pick out Afghanistan on a map. Today, Afghanistan's citizens are a dire threat to the "free world," or the terrorists they harbor, and we are about to invade or bomb them, or, in the words of George Bush the Second, terminate their nationhood, as well as some other nations in the vicinity. This harkens back to the Great Powers' political dismantling of the very same region generations ago, imposing puppet nation statuses on lands of tribes. Now, the world's greatest power may revoke the national status of that region's nations.

While the history of that part of the world is truly ancient and vast, and few Americans have even a passing understanding of it, other issues much easier to digest still evade American understanding. What I have found, when dealing with Americans regarding my writings, is that the ignorance that they display today largely stems from a wish to remain ignorant. I disagree with the Left, as they excuse the naivete of average Americans, while chalking a great deal of it up to elite manipulation. Both those telling the lies and those believing them have a responsibility. People do not know, largely because they do not want to know. We play a game of avoiding responsibility both for our actions and the events in our lives. The game we play is giving our authority away, be it to religious, political, economic or scientific ideologies, flags and other talismans. The only way out of this situation, at least safely, is for people to wake up to what we helped to create. Portraying ourselves as the victim of "terrorists" only reinforces the games of denial that Americans play. Nobody needs to be punished. There is no need for "retaliatory" violence. What is needed is love, understanding and compassion for all people. I do not expect many in the Left to agree with me on this, being as enamored with rationalist philosophy as so many in those ranks are. We are creators, all of us. There are no victims, except to the extent that we victimize ourselves. That does not mean to not have compassion for the suffering, and try to assist them, but to also grant them their divine sovereignty. They also tread their divine path. Many times I have encountered people who thought that if that Americans just knew what was really happening in their name, they would not support it. My CIA pal Ralph McGehee (see http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/mcgehee.htm) believes so, as does Noam Chomsky. Ralph thinks that if those in the CIA really knew what we were doing to Southeast Asia in the 1960s, they would have helped end the Vietnam War. While I will not denigrate their awe-inspiring efforts, my experience has been something else.

For instance, the most irrational and strident critics of my work are my "peers" — white, educated, American men. Their reactions to my work have been by far the most brainless that I have encountered. Almost without exception, they are those who have committed the greatest fallacies of logic regarding my work (see http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/intro.htm#note). Often, their responses have been the adult equivalent of reciting fairy tales. Some of those critics have been friends of mine, highly intelligent ones, and they have responded to my work with some of the most mindless things I have ever heard. When they have come up against undeniable facts, they spin them in true Orwellian fashion, making parents with starving children in Guatemala and Indonesia beneficiaries of our benevolence, though their governments, with U.S. weaponry, slaughtered anybody who dared speak out against the system that made them virtual slaves. The truly scary thing is that they believe the transparent lies that issue from their mouths. How can they do that? Studying Orwell's work gives a pretty good idea how. Their mindlessness is willful, and at least partly conscious. They do not know what is really happening because they do not want to know what is really happening. Why? As far as I have seen, it is because they benefit from the current arrangement (at least in the short term), and denial helps protect their flickering consciences.

We are a nation that thrives on telling ourselves self-serving myths, lies and hero stories, as we justify our vast crimes and simultaneously pat ourselves on the back about how wonderful we are. If our "victims" are sovereign, can we really commit crimes? This reality is paradoxical, but in the end, our crimes are against ourselves (sowing and reaping, etc.). Here are some of the facts that we Americans generally do not know, largely because we do not want to know them:

1. The United States is an empire. It is not a recent occurrence, but it has always been an empire, from the days of empire-builders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It just goes by a different name, like how our War Department was renamed the Defense Department after World War II.

2. When military "aid" is subtracted from our foreign aid, as a percent of GNP, the United States is about the stingiest industrialized nation on earth.

3. The United States' military has directly murdered about eight million people over the past fifty years as it has pursued its imperial agenda worldwide, and has directly caused the misery of hundreds of millions of others. Empires have always been about controlling the populations and resources in the subject lands, and the United States is no different.

4. The United States is by far the world's largest arms dealer, arming the world to the hilt, and we were the instigators of the arms race with the Soviet Union, continually lying to ourselves about Soviet capabilities and intentions, and they bankrupted themselves trying to keep up, which crumbled their empire.

5. "Mad dogs" like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Manuel Noriega and others were in large measure our creation, as we used them to further our agendas. At this point, Americans often say, "I had nothing to do with that!" In one sense, they may be somewhat correct. Our leaders and their underlings did it, but the only power they have is what we gave them, which a rational, materialistic philosophy can have a hard time coming to grips with.

6. All those institutions that we have given our power away to — corporations, governments, churches, etc. — have largely enslaved us with our own power. The only path to true freedom is by reclaiming our power, responsibility and sovereignty, and doing it lovingly.

7. We do not even need oil or coal to produce our energy. Free energy has been suppressed for generations. We do not need to seek cancer cures, because dozens already exist, but have been suppressed in the name of power and profit. Most of our economy is totally worthless, with most Americans performing meaningless tasks for worthless industries and professions, all those worthless industries protecting themselves from the extinction they so richly deserve (see http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/home.htm).

These are just a few of the facts that we hide from so religiously in America. There are many others. Until we find the love that exists in us all, we will keep playing our games of denial, fear and abuse, and reaping harvests far more bitter than what happened on September 11, 2001. It does not have to be this way. If we do not begin waking up, and soon, the game, on planet earth at least, might be over. The choice truly is ours. Sleepy time is over.

For those who want to begin understanding their world, particularly Americans who want to understand what America's role in the Middle East has been for the past ten years, I have a 65-page essay, ten years in the making, at http://home1.gte.net/res0k62m/iraq.htm, which has a World Trade Center addendum. It might be helpful. Time is very short.

— Wade Frazier