This video is called Iraq WMD Lies: the words of mass deception.
When is a quote by Thomas Jefferson not really by Jefferson? See here.
From British weekly Socialist Worker:
Dan Hind on Kant, the “war on terror” and Enlightenment valuesThe kidnapping of South Koreans in Afghanistan: here.Enlightenment values of truth and rationality have been hijacked and wrongly used to justify the “war on terror”, argues Dan Hind
In 1784 a German magazine asked its readers to answer the question, “What is Enlightenment?” Among those who replied was the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
He wrote, “Have the courage to use your own reason! That is the motto of Enlightenment.”
Generations of columnists have reduced Kant’s remarks to a series of clichés and impressive sounding phrases that do little more than corroborate liberal conventional wisdom.
Thinkers associated with the 18th century Enlightenment movement such as Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson and David Hume are enlisted to give a kind of grandeur to this theme.
It is in the politics of Western military aggression that this model of Enlightenment has had the most pernicious influence.
The idea that the values of the Enlightenment such as secularism and modernity were under attack gained ground in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
By October 2001 conservative commentators in the US were calling for “enlightened” intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Meanwhile many liberals accepted that only the US army could be relied on to bring the values of tolerance and personal freedom – the West’s enlightened inheritance – to the poor benighted countries of the Middle East.
The propaganda campaign for the invasion of Iraq included many, sometimes contradictory, themes. The appeal to the ideas of the conventional model of Enlightenment played an important part in reconciling some opinion to the need for war.
