It was back in '66 the first time an impotant topic snuck up on me. It was history class, my senior year of High School. WWII was the topic, the assignment was to write a big paper on some important aspect of it. Back in those days everyones' lives, and those of their parents, were still very directly effected by the terrible losses of that war. There was tons of information on WWII everywhere, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor should have been an easy ride to a good mark. My goal in all school assignments back then.
Those times were tumultuous, JFK had been assissinated a few years earlier, the rumors of conspiracy and coverup were everywhere. Then came LBJ and the deaths caused his Gulf of Tonkin lies. Maybe it was the times, anyway, i started at my local library, then went to the Williams College library a few mles away, the sources all agreed, the whole story was in every public library.
What an eye-opener it turned out to be. Pearl Harbor was a setup. The US needed an excuse to get into the war. The leadership sacrificed thousands of innocent lives to achieve their political goals. My paper got written, the teacher, who'd lost a brother in the war, hated it, but the shitty mark was more than balanced in the long run by the glimpse i'd caught of how 'truth' was in the eye of the beholder, how we all wear cultural blinders and that 'believing is seeing'.
Now, 46 years later, the secret attack on Pearl Harbor is commonly called 'The Mother of all Conspiracies'. The JFK book in yesterday's blog is an eyeopener too. Both of them have the advantage of age, with the passing years more and more info has squeezed out, more researchers have had time to dig. It' also interesting to watch the present moment unfold into history through the different perspectives and spins of governments and media. The future of the Gaza strip barracade- 40km long, 9km wide, by Isreal will be interesting to watch unfold in the next little while. Try Aljazeera.net for a counter-balance to our MSM's tunnelvision, after all, two tunnelvisions are beter than one, perspective wise.
