And I suppose we didn't go to the moon, either?: The Beatles, the Holocaust, and other mass illusions (Save the World, Resist the Empire )

We as a nation have lost our way. Those in power have become so obsessed with preserving and extending their control over the people that, having found it is easier to fake events than to bring them about, we are living in world of fantasy, where it may even take special backgrounds and ability to work our way through the illusion to discover the reality beneath.

Asked whether he would prefer a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, Thomas Jefferson expressed his preference for the latter over the former. But he was not contemplating a world in which the media was under the control of the government, which is the case today. Voltaire may have said it best but has many adherents today who likewise believe that history is a pack of lies that the living play upon the dead.

Today, it seems we encounter event after event, reports of which appear to be at least grossly distorted, if not completely fabricated. There are even reasons to believe that some of our most widely-held beliefs about the world in which we live may be no more than staged events. The Warren Report about the death of JFK and The 9/11 Commission Report are no doubt the most imposing for their voluminous detail in support of false depictions of our own history, but they are far from isolated instances.

We like to think —want to believe— that America is the exception: that we do not assassinate our leaders or arrange the mass death and destruction of our own citizens to promote a political agenda, but the indications that we are being lied to on a daily basis have become so strong that rationality demands reflection on the prospect that even the most noted events, such as landing on the Moon, taking out Saddam Hussein or killing bin Laden, may have been examples of political theater, designed to instill beliefs about ourselves and the world.