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Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility. — Professor Neil Postman
If there are two spectacles that are almost guaranteed to render Americans passive viewers, incapable of doing little more than cheering on their respective teams, it’s football and politics—specifically, the Super Bowl and the quadrennial presidential election.
Both football and politics encourage zealous devotion among their followers, both create manufactured divisions that alienate one group of devotees from another, and both result in a strange sort of tunnel vision that leaves the viewer oblivious to anything ...
In my blog post of yesterday, “Civil Rights and Peace: JFK’s Two Most Dangerous Speeches,” I pointed out that the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA — vehemently disagreed with President Kennedy’s policies regarding the Cold War, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and communism. For his part, Kennedy perceived his detractors to be nut balls.
Of course, defenders and promoters of the federal government’s conversion to a national-security state after World War II would say, “But Jacob, it was Lee Harvey Oswald, who was supposedly a devout communist, who killed Kennedy, not the U.S. national-security establishment”
In actuality, however, that position has never made any sense. Since Kennedy was the communist sympathizer that right-wing conservatives, the Pentagon, and the CIA perceived him to be, then why would a supposed American communist want to kill him, especially since he would be replaced by a conservative vice-president who was philosophically aligned with the Cold War mindsets of the rightwing ...
On consecutive days in June 1963, John F. Kennedy delivered two of the most dangerous speeches ever delivered by a U.S. president.
The first speech was delivered on June 10 at American University. It has become known as the “Peace Speech.” In that speech, the president called for a dramatic shift in the foreign policy of the United States. The speech called for an end to the Cold War and for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union.
It is impossible today to overstate how radical — and how dangerous — that speech was. It flew in the face of the anti-communist mindset that had come to characterize Americans conservatives, the Pentagon, and the CIA. It also threatened the existence of the entire Cold War apparatus, which Kennedy’s predecessor, President Eisenhower, had called the “military-industrial complex.”
Before World War II was even over, U.S. military officials were planning strategy against their wartime partner and ally, the Soviet Union.
In all previous wars, the large ...
