by Erasmus Nova

Created on: March 11, 2008

I believe that governmental secrecy is the reason we need to be safer in the first place. Since the end of WWII, the United States has been
stuck in a case of "we won the war, now what?" Defenders of the world, masters of the moral high ground. This is the illusion our so-called leaders would wish to preserve for the ages. In fact it was far from the truth. The Allied Powers and Mother Russia had an obligation to rebuild a war-ravaged world together in peace. Instead, walls went up, curtains came down, and secrets became currency. None of this benefited anyone then or now. The currency of secrets became a catalyst for fear, economic struggle, and death.

The Cold War began nearly as soon as the bombs of WWII stopped falling. Truman, and Eisenhower strongly believed in misguiding the public, and the benefits of propaganda. At this time the OSS was morphing into the CIA. In my opinion, from the mid 1940's up to the mid 1960's, the life of a secret agent man was like the life of a medieval bishop. Wealth, power, and hubris all while chanting, "God, mom, and apple pie." Everything the ideologues did, Capitalist and Communist alike, was for themselves. Secrets created tension, and tension flashed into war. The United States and the USSR fought, and Southeast Asia bled.
The Domino Theory they called it. If one country fell to the Communists, then soon another and so on. I truly believe that this falsehood was perpetrated on the citizenry of both superpowers. Along with the by-products of bomb shelters, duck-and-cover drills, and rampant PTSD, governmental secrets didn't make my grandparents any safer.

By the Vietnam era(1964-1975), governmental secrets killed 58,000 American soldiers and countless hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. One of the biggest secrets of the Vietnam War was the fact that most "black" operations were funded by the drug trade of the "Golden Triangle". World wide Communism was merely an excuse to flex our imperial muscle. At the end of the war, the Communist blade was dulling, so our government spies turned to the Middle East. Propping up a puppet Shah in Iran, which later led to Islamic Revolution, certainly didn't make my parents any safer.

At the start of the Reagan administration, secrets had evolved. Communism was dying, and computers were sparking a revolution in world affairs. The birth of the Internet, coupled with the theory to just outspend the Russians, made trade secrets the Manhattan Project of a new age. The threat of nuclear holocaust

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