Islam Times - Americans ‘propagandized’ and ‘badly educated’ on global matters

Islam Times - People in the United States are “thoroughly propagandized” and “badly educated” when it comes to matters of global importance, which is why they can be easily coerced into believing that war can be the only way possible for resolving issues of controversy, an American journalist and political commentator says.

Don DeBar, a commentator and radio host based in New York, made the comments after a poll showed more than a third of Americans would support a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea if the country tested a long-range missile capable of reaching the United States.

The survey of 3,000 Americans published this month in the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences found that over a third of Americans supported a preventive US military attack against Pyongyang if the North resumed testing long-range, nuclear-capable missiles that could reach the United States.

The respondents said they would even support a nuclear-first strike on the North "regardless of the civilian casualties such an attack would produce."

“The American people are so thoroughly propagandized and so badly educated in matters of global importance,” DeBar said
. “Just about anything can be sold to them and generally the only product, intellectual product, being sold to them is war.”

“It is so mostly beyond their conception that it is possible for the US government to take on any large enterprise under the military action,” he noted. “If this weren’t the case, then they would raise questions all the time about why don’t we healthcare, why don’t we have a national housing policy, why don’t we have better schools, etc.”

DeBar further said that the Americans believed the only thing the US government was competent to do was military action.

The poll also showed that the respondents were overly optimistic that the US military could destroy all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons in warfare, dropping bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and claiming around 200,000 lives.

The Trump-Kim summit failed after Pyongyang reportedly demanded that the US lift sanctions in exchange for denuclearization.

The survey was conducted in February before the breakdown of a summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi at the end of that month.

Washington has imposed several rounds of unilateral sanctions against Pyongyang since 2006 over its nuclear and missile programs
Since the diplomatic engagement with the South and the US started, North Korea has taken a number of goodwill measures, including suspending all nuclear and missile testing.

America has, however, reciprocated none of those measures and insisted that sanctions on the North must remain in place until it completely and irreversibly dismantles its nuclear program.

The two leaders briefly met at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas on Wednesday, promising to resume talks.