Big Lies & Mass Hysteria

It was Adolf Hitler, the world's most notrious dictator, who told us that "The great mass of people ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.":http://www.bartleby.com/66/59/28359.html And it is in the vein that I will pass along the latest poll by MS-NBC, that has found that "70% of American people think Hussein and 9/11 are linked":www.msnbc.com/news/962627.asp?0cv=CB20. This is perhaps the biggest lie of my lifetime. I fear for the very soul of my nation, that so many of my fellow Americans would deny all evidence to allow themselves to go along with this myth. There has been no evidence of any connection. Most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, opposed to the U.S.-backed ruling Saudi family. Al Qaeda is a group of religious fundamentalists trained in part with CIA money who have always been opposed to the secular socialist regime of Saddam Hussein. There's no mystery who the hijackers were or why they chose the U.S. as their target. Conspiracy theories aren't needed to explain the events of two years ago. So why then do we believe Saddam blew up the World Trade Center towers? Maybe there are too many of us who love our lives of convenience, who love our big cars, our big homes, our opulent lifestyles and maybe we know that deep down our lifestyle is based on control of Middle east oil. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein has become the demon we pour all our worldly fears and guilt into, so that we think all the world's troubles must come from him. Whatever the reason, the results are a kind of mass hysteria. Seven our of ten Americans believe in a conspiracy theory so divorced from any evidence that history surely prepares to mock us. every so often I'll read of the outlandish conspiracy theories running through the Arab world--like the one that the planes were manned by Israelies and that all the Jews who worked in the towers were warned not to come to work--and I'll wonder how a people could live in such a state of unreality. But then I see American's myths: just as incredible, just as based on our own demons. We have based a war and a foreign policy on the boogie-men of our subconsciences. We have killed for our fears. What if we were to wake up to reality: could we still justify the war and occupation of Iraq with the imperiousness and surety that we've shown so far?