Red Pill, Blue Pill

"[It is a shock] to learn that in every nation where we now have terrorism, the USA had first done terrible things. We've overthrown their governments, installed dictators, undermined their economies - all to strengthen our business interests. The terror attacks are retaliation for what we've done to their countries.
Chomsky [an author] shows how our corporate media have created an image of fiendish terrorists who 'hate us for our freedom.' But they really hate us for dominating them. Since we started the aggression, the attacks, detestable as they are, son't end until we change our policies.

The most pathetic thing is that we Americans still believe it's 'our' country, when it and both political parties are firmly in the hands of the corporations.
This view went against everything [we] have been raised to believe. We've all been subjected as children to patriotic rituals that caused us to connect the nation we live in with our family and then with God - the founding fathers, our own father, and the Heavenly Father all joined in patriarchy. Because of this emotional identification, we react to criticism of the country as an attack on our family. This hurts our feelings on a deep personal level, so we reject it, convinced it can't be true. It's too threatening to us. We tune it out and often resent the people making it."

"Western propaganda uses this to whip up war fever. The media in Europe and North America have seared all sorts of atrocity stories- some of them true, some of them not - into people's minds to justify invading the country and bombing the people.
The Taliban are bad guys, no doubt about it. I'm not fond of them at all. They killed hundreds of people, including friends of mine. They would've killed me if I had stayed.
But the USA has killed fifty thousand Afghans just in this current war... and more every day. They're devastating the country. They make the Taliban look like boy scouts."

- two excerpts from Radical Peace: People Refusing War

It's when you've learned enough to "take the red pill" that the above comments make sense.

I think what finally put me over the edge was Walter Wink's The Powers that Be. While reading that book, all the other biblical and extra-biblical study I'd been doing all came together.

Here are some other red pill-esque quotes.

"One of the most persistent ambiguities that we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal. However, it does not take sharpest-eyed sophistication to discern that while everybody talks about peace, peace has become practically nobody's business among the power-wielders. Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace." - MLK Jr.

"Naturally the common people don't want war... That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or not voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering