we're required to stand where the 'authorities' tell us to and believe what their tv broadcasts. critical independent thinking isn't allowed. hornberger speaks about some of the results of that in this piece centered on iran. just about all of  the empire's history of mucking about in iran isn't known by the majority of americans but if you do some research, you'll discover we've been horrible and they've been defending themselves;

When Hannah Arendt wrote about the concept that she called “the banality of evil,” she was referring to people who are engaged in evil but who actually believe that are engaged in good. They aren’t evil people, Arendt said, just good people who are unwittingly engaged in evil.

You couldn’t find a better term to describe American interventionists who support the U.S. government’s economic sanctions on Iran, especially given how the coronavirus is ravaging the Iranian people.

Defending the continuation of the sanctions under these dire circumstances, sanctions supporters say that the responsibility for excess deaths arising from the sanctions lies with the Iranian regime, not with the U.S. bureaucrats who are dutifully enforcing the sanctions. As soon as Iranian officials capitulate to the demands of U.S. officials or abdicate in favor of a pro-U.S. puppet regime, sanctions supporters say, the sanctions will be lifted.

I have written about this banality of evil long before the coronavirus crisis. See, for example, my articles “The Banality of Evil” (January 2018) and “America’s Banality of Evil” (September 2019). For years, the U.S. government has been inflicting as much pain and suffering on the Iranian people as possible through sanctions. Combined with Iran’s socialist, centrally planned economy, the sanctions have succeeded in wreaking a massive destruction of Iran’s economy.

The aim of inflicting all this devastation and suffering? To squeeze the life out of the Iranian people as a way to secure either regime change or obedience to U.S. orders on the part of the current Iranian regime............read more............