On April 23rd, the U.S. mega-corporate and government-funded National Public Radio network, NPR, interviewed voters about their views on President Trump’s achievements so far; and a typical respondent, the 33-year-old Jamie Ruppert, of White Haven, Pennsylvania, said, “I don’t think he’s been terrible. I mean, he definitely stepped up when the people of Syria kind of needed some help”. She was referring actually to this, though she wasn’t even aware of it; she believed instead the U.S. government’s lies about Syria’s government, just like the Americans who had supported the lies that produced the destruction of Iraq by the psychopathic American government had done, back then in 2003.
Polls show that highly prejudiced (i.e., misinformed) Americans tend to be especially supportive of the jihadists’ war to overthrow and replace Syria’s secular Russian-backed government. (The jihadists in Syria are backed by the U.S. government, which however opposes ISIS jihadists, which are too extreme for even the rulers of Saudi Arabia to trust. But the U.S. and Saudi governments have been backing in Syria every jihadist group that accepts Al Qaeda’s leadership, because Al Qaeda was created to hate Russia, which fact was even captured on video at the time, but is effectively denied by U.S. ‘news’media, after-the-fact, and America’s ‘history’-books also generally hide the actual cause of what today’s U.S. President refers to as “radical Islamic terrorism”, a joint U.S.-Saudi operation. Such realities would be called ‘fake news’ by America’s ‘news’media, if they reported these truths at all, which their censors or ‘editors’ occasionally do — they occasionally slip-up, and allow such facts through, and some reporters and ‘news’room managers even lose their jobs for doing that.)
For example, the polls by ABC News and Washington Post have indicated that whereas Republicans strongly 
opposed the Democratic President, Barack Obama’s, bombing of Syria as a U.S. response to the U.S.-backed jihadists’ sarin gas attack in 2013, which the U.S. blamed against Bashar al-Assad‘s government (and Britain’s MI6 found that Obama was lying, so UK refused to join Obama’s planned invasion, and it was called-off), the similar set-up-job jihadist-produced gas-attack in Syria, occurring now under the Republican President Donald Trump, is overwhelmingly supported by Republicans, and mildly opposed by Democrats — indeed,
“The sharpest change has been among Republicans, among whom 22 percent supported missile strikes [in 2013] compared with 86 percent today”.
By contrast, among Democrats today, “37 percent support, while 59 percent are opposed”, to the Republican Trump’s bombing of Syria on April 7th. So: Party-affiliation is a big determinant of whether a given American citizen favors an American invasion of a foreign country. (America’s ‘independent’ voters tend to be between the two types of prejudice, but a few of them are simply unprejudiced. However, even a few Republicans and Democrats are also unprejudiced.)
The ABC-WP poll also found that (partly because of the incessant U.S. propaganda against Assad, in media such as NYT, WP, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, The Atlantic, etc.) there has been a great increase in the percentage of Americans who favor America’s invasions of Syria: as the WP says in that article,
“The slight majority support for missile strikes last week is markedly higher than in September 2013, when President Barack Obama urged Congress to approve a military operation in response to U.S. government conclusions that Assad used chemical weapons on his own citizens [Obama actually lied there]. A Post-ABC poll at the time found 61 percent [of all Americans] opposed to launching missile strikes, including 45 percent who opposed them ‘strongly’”.
However, the reason for that rise in support for invading Syria is more complex than simply because the American ‘news’media reflect their owners’ and advertisers’ widespread hatred and demonization of any sovereign and independent Russian government (and of any foreign leader such as Assad who allies with it) — oppose a country that’s not controlled by America’s billionaires — but is also a reflection of another fact: conservative voters (such as Republicans) tend to be exceptionally prejudiced, far more so than progressive voters are — and, whereas some progressive Democrats exist, no progressive Republicans still exist (though there are still some liberal Republicans).
This fact, of Democrats being less-partisan than Republicans are, was indicated, for example, in that same ABC-WP poll back on 28 August to 1 September 2013, showing Republicans and Democrats to be at that time both equally opposed to the Democratic President’s bombing Syria — each of the two electorates exhibited the same 12% net margin of overall opposition to it, at that time.
Whereas Republicans almost knee-jerk-support Republican leaders, Democrats are somewhat more skeptical about theirs. Ignorance and misinformation are far more common amongst conservatives than amongst progressives (that’s to say, conservatives are far easier to dupe), but each political party has a different ideological mix, and this varying degree of gullibility (high among Republicans, but only moderate among Democrats) will largely determine the extent to which a given party will be net-harmful, both to the given nation, and to the world-at-large. A nation’s aristocracy basically controls the beliefs of its conservative voters, but not of its progressive ones, who are the essential foundation for any authentic democracy that exists, anywhere — or even for democacy to exist, at all.
The U.S. government’s war to overthrow Syria’s government has been going on ever since in 1949 the CIA first tried to overthrow it for favoring the Soviet Union over Western imperialists. (The progressive Democratic President, FDR, who passionately opposed imperialism, was dead; Truman was now the U.S. President.) Then, after the U.S. under President George Herbert Walker Bush promised the Soviet, subsequently Russian, President, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1990, that if the USSR and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended, then NATO would not move “one inch to the east” — and then the Cold War quickly ended on the Russian side — the U.S. continued the Cold War by moving NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and now the U.S. continues trying to overthrow and replace any national head-of-state who is at all friendly towards Russia.
Thus, Saddam Hussein was murdered in 2003, and Muammar Gaddafi was murdered in 2011, and the U.S. regime continues trying to murder Bashar al-Assad, even while claiming that it’s “against radical Islamic terrorism”, which the U.S and Sauds actually started in 1979, under Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter, and escalated under Reagan — all first in order to conquer the USSR, and then, after 1991, to strip Russia of its allies and finally go in for the kill, perhaps to occur soon under Trump.
Americans who believe that the country that invaded Vietnam, and that invaded Iraq, and that invaded Syria, and that Invaded Libya, and that perpetrated coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1953), Ukraine (2014), etc., and basically destroyed each one of those countries, should invade a country, tend to be extremely prejudiced in favor of whatever the leadership of their party, ethnicity, or religion, want. For example, on April 19th, Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report — a site that opposes all bigotry, by anyone against anyone — headlined “Maxine Waters Loses Her Mind to ‘Anti-Russia Dementia’ – Like the Rest of the Black Caucus“, and he wrote:
“When Maxine Waters goes gung-ho crazy for the War Party, it tells us that the Black political class — overwhelmingly Democrats — are utterly useless to any movement for peace and social justice. In the throes of a terminal case of ‘Anti-Russia Dementia,’ otherwise known as ‘Putin Derangement Syndrome,’ the California congresswoman told a Tax March crowd in front of the U.S. Capitol that President Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin somehow conspired to arrange both the chemical event that killed dozens in northern Syria and the U.S. missile strike on a Syrian military airfield that followed”.
Of course, similarly, most American Jews are prejudiced in favor of “the Jewish state” — the apartheid ‘democracy’ 
Israel — which likewise is trying to replace the non-sectarian pro-Russian Syrian leader by a pro-Saud jihadist leader. (The Israeli regime and the Sauds have been secretly allies for quite some time now; and both of those aristocracies are allied with the U.S. regime — notwithstanding that the Sauds were behind the 9/11 attacks, and the Israeli regime militarily attacked the U.S. in 1967, and the U.S. regime covered-up both.)
So, it doesn’t make much difference what type of bigotry an American happens to have, but practically all of America’s bigots hate Russians. It’s what they’re taught, every time they open a ‘news’paper, or watch the ‘news’ propaganda on television, or read ‘think’-magazines such as The Atlantic. The regime’s propaganda-tentacles reach everywhere, to pollute Americans’ minds, in the same way, regardless of party — they’re all controlled by the same aristocracy. (It’s done mainly by agents hired by the roughly 1,500 billionaires that constitute the U.S. aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies abroad — the people who have been running the U.S. empire, especially during recent decades. Their behind-the-scenes influence — shown in wikileaks etc. — is so powerful that they effectively control the U.S. government, and not just the mega-banks, the mega-oil-companies, the mega-propaganda-organizations, etc.)
This is the real-world version of George Orwell’s dystopic classic novel 1984, which was symbolically prophetic — a symbolically remarkably accurate version of the real thing. On the deeper level, that novel’s portrayal of today’s international relations is far more accurate than are today’s mainstream U.S.-and-empire ‘news’ ‘reports’ about the government’s foreign policies. If it hadn’t been merely symbolic, it probably would not have found a publisher at all, but in that fictional form it became a best-seller. Some truths are too deep to be published in a self-described-but-false ‘democracy’, except in a fictionalized form; and, even at the end of World War II, Britain was still being controlled by its aristocracy. But, after Tony Blair’s regime and the conquest of Iraq, even a fictionalized account that might be published today of such reality, would likely be suppressed by the UK’s ruling class.
A fiction-book like 1984 that’s published today would probably be too clearly relevant to what’s occurring in the world, so that even the regime itself cannot deny the allegory’s reference to the regime. Ways could be found to stop its publication, or else to discredit its author. Similarly, the U.S. government has been very successful at making its public hostile toward such heroic champions of democracy as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. When the same aristocracy controls the government as controls the press, it’s fairly easy to do. And, of course, the more misinformed a citizen is, the likelier that citizen will be to think of a whistleblower as being instead a ‘traitor’. This is how an advanced, modern, police-state functions.
And, this way, far fewer people need to be physically imprisoned. The more that the mental means succeeds, the less there needs to be usage of the far costlier cement type. Deceit (coercion against the mind) is much more efficient than violence (coercion against the body). Every aristocracy, throughout the ages, has thus preferred fraud, as its modus operandum, over violence; and has, consequently, sought to make as difficult as possible, any prosecutions for fraud (the aristocracy’s predominant form for coercions), and as easy as possible, prosecutions for violence (the public’s predominant form for coercions).
This is also why the worst criminals are likelier to be found in the White House, than in the big house. And, in any case, partisan prejudices are likelier to decide ‘criminal’ verdicts, than the facts will.
However, if Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal standards were to be applied today, most recent American Presidents would be behind bars, if not executed. Only the aristocracy prevents that from happening. And, after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy for starting to buck the aristocracy, no subsequent U.S. President has done likewise. That ended that.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
