There’s nothing new under the sun

I recall a conversation I had with my dad in which he reflected on his experience in school as a child. He vividly remembers the school administration in the early 1960’s conducting drills in which he and his classmates would practice crouching down under their desks in the event of a nuclear blast.

The timeline of my dad’s recollections made sense to me. Not long after the conclusion of World War II, the American public developed an intense fear of political subversion, cultural erosion — even complete atomic destruction by the USSR. National leaders launched decadeslong witch hunts for Soviet operatives and sympathizers in a fit of terror collectively called the Red Scare. Anyone deemed un-American faced trial before an unconstitutional investigative group called the House Un-American Activities Committee.

It’s easy to look back and think, “How could people live in such fear from such overt propaganda?” Hindsight is 20/20, and nationalism is a powerful drug. It’s also important to remember the many people of the Cold War era who risked their reputations and wrap sheets to combat the stream of disinformation which dominated the day.

So here’s my question for us in 2017: Is anybody really buying what media pundits are still droning on about concerning Russia? Yes Russia, that former Soviet state which hid in every American’s closet for at least a third of the last century, and now the nation which supposedly rigged the largest  election of a government with the most expensive national intelligence infrastructure in the world.

Ideally, we are supposed to be experiencing so much indignation against another country that we forget the content of the very emails Russia supposedly leaked: that Democratic National Committee staffers were actively working to rig the Democratic primary in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s favor.

We’re also supposed to forget the three men who were mysteriously found dead within three weeks of the leaks. These men were Seth Rich, a DNC staffer, Shawn Lucas, a filmmaker who filed a complaint of fraud on behalf of U.S. Sentor Bernie Sanders supporters and John Ashe, a former U.N. General Assembly president who was scheduled to lead meetings investigating a Clinton campaign donor’s financial records days before his death.  Nevertheless, some news networks have found that revamping the Cold War boosts ratings more than updating an old politician’s body count.

For almost six months now, I’ve felt like I stepped into a time machine set to the 50’s, where the recipe for public opinion had two main ingredients; bogeymen and sheer repetition from popular political and media figureheads. If only I could get back to the present where older people had learned from past decades and college students had learned from their advanced placement history classes that our beloved nation and her politicians have a horrendous track record of red herrings and straight-up lies, and that people who profit from fear and jingoism have taken pages from the same old dusty play book for almost a century. But as expected, many people are now calling for outright war with Russia, and it’s painfully ironic.

According to the LA Times, and Dov Levin, a political scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. has attempted to influence 81 foreign presidential elections in more than 20 nations between 1946 and 2000. Keep in mind, this doesn’t include non-presidential elections, military coups, overthrows of incumbent politicians, currency manipulations, embargoes, terror plots and the rest of our empire’s tactics to micro-manage the world. It also doesn’t include the propping up and subsequent overthrows of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak and other leaders of Middle Eastern countries since 2000.

Meanwhile, for most Americans just the thought of other nations doing to the U.S. what the U.S. does to the rest of the world on a regular basis is incomprehensible, and history is set to repeat itself.

According to some research, however, millennials are more intelligent, think more critically and are more skeptical of official narratives than past generations. I certainly hope so, because I envision a generation that won’t be duped by war criminals anymore. I envision a generation that refuses to crouch under their desks for no reason.