>Make no mistake, much of this is puppetry in the same way that the cold war, or terrorism, or the reds etc was used as a mechanism to gain political power in t

>Make no mistake, much of this is puppetry in the same way that the cold war, or terrorism, or the reds etc was used as a mechanism to gain political power in the US. It turns out that protecting people from their enemies is (sometimes) good politics. It's very much a desired quality of a democracy, that politicians pursuing their own self-interests will be driven to pursue the interests of the people. Unfortunately, it can also work when the enemies are imagined or exaggerated. Again, we can only look to the particular circumstances for the answer. I take strong issue with your particular implication that the Cold War threat from the Soviet Union was in any sense overstated. If anything, McCarthy was more right about Soviet infiltration than he was ever given credit for until recently. That doesn't justify blacklists and the horrifying HUAC sessions; those are the self-defeating measures I was talking about. >So I show the political leaders saying that they want to kill us and I get more power. I show all the repressive state tactics of the Americans on their own people, I get more power. "Look", I say "Even at their sports games, the evil Americans treat their own citizens like they are in a prison!" There's a lot of clever propaganda against the US, but I can't imagine this being a big winner. And anyway, the ability of demagogues to twist our actions for their propaganda purposes cannot be an overriding consideration. The US is very rich and very powerful, so people will hate us no matter what we do. And if they can't find any facts to base it on, they'll just make some up. Defending 50,000 people's lives from an attack has to be the primary consideration.