The propaganda methods perfected by the American Establishment for use on the reluctant American public to get them to back endless wars have been used ever since newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s “Remember the Maine!” campaign in 1898 to drum up public support for the Spanish-American war, America’s first imperialist land grab outside the western hemisphere.

The demonization of Germany in 1917 (“German Huns rape Belgian Nuns!”) along with the passage of the Espionage Act – which made it illegal to criticize the decision to enter WWI – are perfect examples of this paradigm. FDR’s outright treason created the conditions for America’s entry into WWII in 1941. The US had broken the Japanese military codes almost a year before the Pearl Harbor “sneak” attack. FDR knew the Japanese were going to bomb our bases in Hawaii and he did nothing to prevent it.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 was created by LBJ’s handlers in the aftermath of the ’63 coup. LBJ knew the North Vietnamese had not attacked any US vessel. The whole episode was concocted by the CIA as an excuse to start that war they so desperately needed. The one that Kennedy refused to start…

And then we had the testimony before US Congress by the daughter of a Kuwaiti “diplomat” (er…CIA) that Iraqi soldiers had ransacked Kuwaiti hospitals and removed newborn babies from incubators to leave them to die on the cold hospital floor. It was a completely fabricated story, but the MSM successfully demonized the Iraqi military, engendering overwhelming public support for our illegal invasion of Iraq and “Operation Desert Storm;” perhaps the greatest war crime in history. So far, at least.

What’s next, I wonder? The fake news about Syria’s President Assad gassing his own citizens apparently wasn’t enough to mobilize our already war-weary nation for another invasion.

For over a century the capitalist establishment has been cooking up enemies for Americans to hate in an effort to justify more imperialist wars. One can only hope it doesn’t happen again; this time with the nuclear armed nation like China or Russia.