....supposedly democratic country, however, managed to conceal that its political wantonness and pride raise out of friendship hostile deeds in peace and led to either covert or widely known wars abroad, with thousands and thousands innocents lives sacrificed on the altar of U.S. interests.
While it took Odysseus only a year to wake up from Circe's spell, save his enswined companions, and finally sail toward his home, we were--including a whole world--under this dream's spell for a few decades at least. This unflattering analogy, nonetheless, suits us well. After all, for a long while our government's actions abroad were concealed under the thick veil of this dream. Ballads and songs should be made how [we] have troubled all mankind with shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure. Neither we, nor the global community could clearly see that under the pretence of building democracy and protecting freedom of peoples abroad, "our government is guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of sovereign states." Furthermore, as Harold Pinter pinned it down in his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech, "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
A list of these crimes has long been available for those who could see, read and hear. For many years a few perspicacious authors such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky exposed the illusion of the dream--or hypnosis, according to Pinter-- in their writings, but the majority of us were like those three monkeys, who hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. Let us not slip the occasion at least now to admit that our freedoms and rights have degenerated mostly into the freedom to consume and to the right to consent to our government's fairy tales. Let us recognize that the resemblance of the highest dream--where faith and reality remain not--is not the dream itself, and that we rather lived under the influence of the illusion that the dream came true.
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