Focusing on the evil nature of the Russian regime or evil actions it commits will not resolve America’s problems. The same holds true for China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or any other official enemy, opponent, rival, or adversary of the United States.
In order to get our nation back on the right track, it is necessary for the American people to look inward and to focus on the evil nature of their own regime and the evil actions it commits. Until Americans are able and willing to do that, our nation will continue to be besieged by crises, chaos, and the destruction of our rights, liberty, and well-being.
On a private basis, it’s always easier to identify what’s wrong with other people and counsel them on what they need to do to straighten out their lives. What’s not so easy to do is to focus on one’s self, identify one’s own faults, and then go about the difficult task of fixing them.
It’s the same with evil. It is so easy to focus on the evil in foreign regimes. It’s not so easy to focus on the evil in one’s own regime.
The classic example is Nazi Germany. Every American can easily identify the evil of Nazi Germany.
But there is something important to note: Not every German could identify the evil within his own country.
The same applies to Americans. All too many of them can easily identify the evil in Nazi Germany but are unable to identify the evil within their own government, just as all too many Germans were unable to identify the evil within their own government.
Consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Most every American can easily identify the evil of that invasion. But notice something important: All too many Americans are still unable to identify the evil of their own government’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, they are unable to identify the evil of the Pentagon’s and CIA’s manipulation of NATO to produce the crisis in Ukraine.
Even though Americans can easily see the evil of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many of them are still unable to recognize the evil of the CIA’s invasion of Cuba in 1961. They are also unable to see the evil of the the pressure that the Pentagon and the CIA were putting on President Kennedy to initiate a full-scale invasion of Cuba after the CIA’S Bay of Pigs invasion failed. Indeed, they are unable to recognize the evil of the CIA’s repeated attempts to murder Cuban president Fidel Castro. And they still can’t see what’s wrong with the 60-year-old economic embargo that targets the Cuban people with death and impoverishment as a way to achieve regime change in Cuba.
Former U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright recently passed away. She was the one who infamously declared that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the U.S. sanctions on Iraq were “worth it.” Many Americans still can’t see the evil in either her statement or the actual deed. Imagine if Russia or China were killing hundreds of thousands of children. I’ll bet every American could easily recognize the evil of such action.
Consider the CIA. All too many Americans are still unable to understand why it was evil for the CIA to secretly hire Nazis at the end of World War II. That is, they can identify the evil of Nazi Germany but they can’t identify the evil of their own government’s hiring of officials who served the Nazi regime.
Or consider the CIA’s MKULTRA program, which involved drug experimentation on unsuspecting Americans. While easily being able to identify the evil of the Nazi regime’s medical experiment on unwilling people, many Americans are simply incapable of recognizing the evil of what the CIA did to people with MKULTRA — or, for that matter, the evil of the CIA’s intentional destruction of its MKULTRA records to prevent Americans from learning the details of what they did.
Consider dark-side activities such as state-sponsored assassinations and torture. When Russia, China, or North Korea engage in them, Americans can easily identify them as evil. When the U.S. national-security establishment does them, many Americans convince themselves that such actions are good because they supposedly protect “national security.”
The same holds true for such other dark-side activity as indefinite detention, mass secret surveillance, and initiating regime-change operations in other countries. When “they” do it, Americans recognize it as evil. When “we” do it, it’s considered good.
As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the root of the evil within our nation is the national-security branch of the federal government—i.e., the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA. The biggest mistake Americans ever made was to permit the federal government to be converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, which is a type of governmental system that is characteristic of communist, totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes, including Russia, China, and North Korea. That’s when dark-side policies and practices became official governmental policy within our country. That’s when the official lying began. That’s when individual consciences became stultified. That’s when we became like them. That’s when Americans became blinded to the evil within.