"In America truth is offensive, If you tell the truth, you are offensive."

So writes former U.S. deputy treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, in his column for CounterPunch, America, Land of the Lost. 

Roberts recently published the e-book, The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism, reviewed on this blog three weeks ago.   Plenty of offensive truth-telling there.   Now, Roberts confronts the shrill unacceptability of being both honest and open in modern Western culture.

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians have prospered.  It is the same today.

 If you tell readers what is really going on, they want to know why you can’t be positive. Why are you telling us that there are bad happenings that can’t be remedied?  Don’t you know that God gave Americans the power to fix all wrongs?  What are you?  Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-commie?  If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba, Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

Roberts notes the irony in the treatment of Julian Assange by the U.K. and the U.S. when contrasted by China's treatment of its own truth-telling dissident.

In contrast with “freedom and democracy” US and UK, the “authoritarian,” “communist,” “oppressive” Chinese government when confronted with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s defection to the US embassy in Beijing, let him go.

It is an upside down world when America and the British refuse to obey international law, but the Chinese communists uphold international law.

Insouciant Americans are undisturbed that alleged terrorists are tortured, held indefinitely in prison without due process, and executed on the whim of some executive branch official without due process of law.

Most Americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture, and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility to the entire world. There has never in history been a population as unaware as Americans. The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only for a short time, a superpower.

The world needs intelligence and leadership in order to avoid catastrophe, but America can provide neither intelligence nor leadership. America is a lost land where nuclear weapons are in the hands of those who are concerned only with their own power. Washington is the enemy of the entire world and encompasses the largest concentration of evil on the planet.

Where is the good to rise up against the evil?

There are those of us who persist in telling the truth even when it is unwelcome and who are standing by ready to rise up to confront the poison that has spread throughout our own government.  Yet there are not many.   Indeed there are far, far more who style themselves progressive who would readily embrace complacency and submission.  Far more.  Ask yourself what side of the line are you on?