Americans are mostly a parochial, unsophisticated people. A clear majority have never traveled abroad. Almost 70 percent of Americans don’t even have and never have had passports, and even for those that do their passports largely go unstamped by a foreign country.

O sure, some do travel abroad, but most of them go to Canada, or maybe they get on some cruise ship in Florida and see the Bahamas while others cross the southern Texas border for a holiday tequila in Mexico.  Sadly, the young people that travel abroad are mostly military, and they are fools wreaking havoc in faraway lands at the behest of corporations and plutocrats who generally run things in the US, which was not always the case. Meanwhile, the US government has been hijacked by the powerful, wealthy few. Perhaps this mostly began with the Vietnam War and the faked attack on an American naval vessel in the Gulf on Tonkin. Just before that, leaving office, President Eisenhower was absolutely correct when he warned of the dangers of what he called the Military Industrial Complex. The so-called Deep State in Washington, and the Neocons and Zionists are also fully implicated in the descent of the US as a respected major country. These entities are screaming at Trump right now as some kind of “traitor” for his talks in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin. One may fear for Trump’s life.

Trump makes sense regarding a warming of relations with Russia. He makes no sense at all with his Mideast policies, which seem set largely by the Zionists. Many who did vote for Trump in the 2016 Presidential election did so because he seemed to want better relations with Russia, the primary other country with enough nuclear weapons to end life on earth. Hilary Clinton was always corrupt and bloody. She led the destruction of Libya for one thing and set the stage for the near destruction of Assad’s Syria, and she was never about to improve relations with Russia. She’d also have been a greater disaster than Trump has proven to be for peace in the Mideast, if Iranians can believe that. I know, it would be difficult to believe that for Iranians especially. It’s enough to make a sensible, grown man weep.

As one who has never visited Iran, I am still sure of one thing: Iranians, even those who have never left Iran, know more about what is happening outside Iran than Americans do about what’s really happening, and why, outside the US. There are a number of good American and foreign journalists who tell the truth and inform well, but they are not a part of the mainstream media any longer, which is almost totally a corporate, corruption influenced media now. So most Americans, who don’t read much anyway, are ill informed, and if they do read, it’s a local paper somewhere with canned news, especially regarding other countries. What seems impressive about the Iranian media is that, at least, there is more truth and Iranian writers and leaders opine correctly about the dangers of US foreign policies.

Trump and Pompeo and Bolton among others seem set on regime change in Iran, with or without war, as the Zionists demand. At the very same time “Israel” has gone full tilt, legitimizing full apartheid with actions this month in the Knesset. If anything ever becomes their downfall, this will be it eventually. Neither the US nor “Israel” have friends any longer, or soon won’t. It is simply horrendous that the US and “Israel” might be brought down eventually by causing further destruction and carnage in the Middle East with an attack on Iran, or just won’t go away quietly with the pursuit of rational, benevolent policies at home and abroad.

All this and more has become quite a personal matter for me, too.

My bright son, age 32, was recently mentioned as Julian Assange’s physician. Well, in fact, he is not formally so, but over the last year he has drawn worldwide attention to Assange’s medical woes and demanded treatment for him, after he and a team he assembled evaluated his medical condition at the Ecuador Embassy in London late last year. It appears that very soon the corrupted new President of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, may turn Assange over to the British government, ending his six years of embassy asylum in London, and possibly agree to his extradition to the US. In the US, Assange could well disappear forever. And he has done nothing wrong except be the primary reporter/journalist who has brought attention to US military and internal political misdeeds since 2010, beginning with exposes of US war crimes in Iraq.

Caitlin Johnstone, a very independent Australian journalist, has said it most succinctly this week regarding Julian Assange. She writes that those of good conscience should be prepared to “shake the earth” if Assange is further tortured, or is shipped off to the US. And she adds: “If we allow them to imprison Julian Assange for practicing journalism, that’s it. It’s over. We might as well all stop caring what happens to the world and sit on our hands while the oligarchs drive us to ecological disaster, nuclear annihilation or Orwellian dystopia. If we, the many, don’t have the spine to stand up against the few and say ‘No, we get to find out facts about you bastards and use it to inform our worldview, you don’t get to criminalize that,’ then we certainly don’t have the spine it will take to wrest control of this world away from the hands of sociopathic Western plutocrats and take our fate into our own hands. The arrest of Julian Assange would be the fork in the road. It would be where we collectively decide as a species whether we want to survive into the future, and if we deserve to.

I would say the same thing regarding any US/Zionist attack on Iran. And so would many others, including knowledgeable Americans.