Moyers mentions, in a very humanitarian manner

...brute force can turn self-defense into state terrorism. It's what the U.S. did in Vietnam, with B-52s and napalm...

Even today, we still choose to enforce the bedrock conception that what the U.S. hawks did in Vietnam could somehow be considered "self-defense".

The quote is short, and we don't know (from this quote, there is extended discussion elsewhere) exactly what is meant, yet to the ordinary listener, there is only one meaning: what the U.S. did in Indochina had something to do with "self-defense" that was allowed to escalate too much.

I'd like to think that someday, maybe in the far, far future, no one in normal society will intentionally or unintentionally attempt to describe the aggressive war that the U.S. waged against the civilians of Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) as "self-defense" without encountering the sort of reaction we give to people who allege that the moon landings were faked.

I don't say this to simply attack Moyers, but to point out how even generations later, it's still the norm to always describe one's own or one's preferred allies' aggressive, even imperial actions, in such moral terms like "self-defense".

And it continues with the suggestion that as long as many of those on the inside believed stories about the rationale of their own actions, and more importantly that of the governments they served, that those beliefs serve to actually describe the policies.

We were just defending ourselves, somehow, against the Vietnamese who wanted independence from France. We were defending ourselves from Cambodia whose territory was used by those we were self-defending against in Vietnam. We were defending ourselves from Laos who looked as though they might have a government too close to those against whom we were self-defending ourselves in Vietnam. And we were self-defending ourselves against the population of Indonesia, one of the dominoes our elites actually cared about, when we had our CIA assist a tyrant in overthrowing the elected government and slaughtering a half-million people in the opposition.

Self-defense is difficult, especially when you have to search harder and harder for any sign that someone might some day attack you.

We were acting in self-defense when we hired a terrorist army to attack civilians and destroy medical centers and mine the harbors in Nicaragua until we got a government that our government preferred. We were acting in self-defense when we hired the death squad democracies of El Salvador, Honduras, and even the genocidal Guatemala to crush rebellions that seemed to get out of hand.

In all of these cases, the range of polite debate stays the same: the aggressive right argues that we should be even more violent and more openly proud of the violence we employ; on the "liberal" side, we need to continue with basically the same policy (crush the governments and movements we don't like) but let's see if we can possibly do it with less bloodshed and without so much chest-beating -- I mean, after all, we have to "defend" ourselves, right?

Maybe I'm asking too much, like so many others before me, and we should simply accept that this self-defense of our own and our allies' aggression is always to be with us; but it truly is difficult for me to see how we can ever fundamentally break from the types of actions our government has wrongly committed in the past without breaking from the innate self-justifying process which permits them.

One of the reasons that dynastic & machine politics are so successful in passing on political legacies and promoting candidates is that there aren't really systematic mechanisms set up to encourage ordinary citizens to run for office, including knowledge of procedures.

This is a very important topic you've chosen today; it's both surprising to me and all-too-expectable that fundamental aspects of our democracy (and its problems) are not only not understood, but not even examined in public discourse.

A topic which might include dynastic politics as part of a larger subset is a fundamental nature of U.S. politics: it is, over time, and through many mechanisms, consistently albeit imperfectly dominated by its uppermost classes.

The best overall scholar on the subject is retired. He is sociologist G. William Domhoff, and he can be contacted via the information site:

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/

Needless to say, he is a very serious empirical scholar, and this is not "conspiracy theory" of any type -- unless, that is, "conspiracy theory" is used to dismiss any approach to studying politics which pays attention to the influence of concentrated wealth and power.

If you are able to either download or stream the MP3 version at

http://tinyurl.com/greenwald-burroughs

it sounds much better and less crackly than the on-screen player.