by Allan J. Feifer, American Thinker:
In time, we’ll learn how our country’s political foibles play out. Will the United States retain even a semblance of the greatness it once possessed, or not? Measured from our peak to where we are now, there’s a Grand Canyon’s breadth of difference.
There was a time when we led the world into the greatest prosperity ever achieved. American productivity and genius had the world marveling and trying to imitate everything from our arts and sciences to our culture. Whether I was working in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Senegal, Israel, Europe, or wherever else, all you had to do to see and feel America’s influence was to read the local t-shirts or listen to the local music.
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Walk down any foreign street, and there would be a Coca-Cola sign or a Kentucky Fried Chicken eatery. America’s influence was everywhere. People wanted what we had, and they wanted to be American. (Many still do, because they implicitly understand what native-born Americans either no longer believe or never learned from their pampered daily lives.)
American generosity is legendary. We ship millions of tons of food and grain annually. I remember proudly seeing warehouses full of 200-pound sacks of wheat emblazoned with the “A gift from the American People” logo. On occasion, in the 1990s, I sometimes saw those bags relabeled, thanking some dictator or warlord for his beneficence. The grain would often be sold by the despots, or withheld to starve populations into submission. American officials knew, yet allowed such abuse.
No nation on earth has been as generous, but damned simultaneously for that generosity. Why do so many believe America to be permanently tarnished? How can this possibly be?
Let’s first unpack how public opinions are formed. (Remember, agendas to politically influence the average citizen using a false narrative falls under the broad topic of propaganda.)
To start, they come for the children — as Lenin purportedly said, “Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”
My fight against lies and misinformation began at a young age. I remember being in the first grade and being asked at Christmas to collect money for a United Nations agency called UNICEF — ostensibly, the organization existed to supply food for children in underdeveloped nations. My dad then showed me an article reporting that Cuba was trading our donated grains to a third-party to buy military vehicles — a manufactured food shortage — and I immediately understood that I was initially sold a lie. I began distrusting the government and the UN, although I did not yet understand the imperative role that propaganda played in order to elicit loyalty to a central government as its agents starved their own people. I did not understand how some could behave so inhumanely.
Sadly, I learned to distrust much of what my friends and their parents believed — which was how I came to understand groupthink. I turned in my donation box to my teacher and told her why. I can’t exactly remember how she took it; but not well. My dad however was pleased, and bought me a subscription to Human Events, a well-known weekly conservative newspaper.
Secondly, they wage a cultural war against everything that made America great.
Our country has been filled with America-haters for generations. The world’s emigrating intelligentsia, escaping places that either no longer wanted them or were actively trying to kill them, found a home in the melting pot of America. Think asylum-seekers (well-versed in Marxism) from Franco’s Spain, or communists of all stripes and persuasions coming to our welcoming shores with ideologies that would undermine the country that provided for their safety. Our idle rich sponsored those who wished to turn our country into some revolutionary dictatorship like the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. The most productive and upward-moving country in the world, built by freedom and capitalism, coveted worldwide, was lost on those revolutionaries who came here.
The American middle class was born in April 1939 at the World’s Fair in New York, where Westinghouse began selling the concept of a middle-class lifestyle. Although we didn’t create the idea of middle-class life, we became the world’s most outstanding example of what capitalism and economic freedom could achieve. All this was without the oppressive hand of government tinkering with Adam Smith’s masterwork…the Invisible Hand.
Today, the middle class is under attack, in America and around the world: outright government interference, and less-obviously, Woke policies that are intentionally designed to dismantle what Marx and Engels call the bourgeoisie. I pound my drum, warning everyone who will listen about the enemy within, excited at how much they’ve changed thus far.
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