They say a leopard cannot change its spots and I believe it. It's also said that a person can't easily change his or her early teachings and formed habits, and I believe this, too. In this respect people are very much like leopards; their early education and habits of thought and behavior normally stay with them for life as does the leopard's spots. Unless a concentrated and controlled effort is made to discard old habits and develop new, the old ones are always there.

My true education began in the 1960s, when I was in my early thirties. I was a young father of three children, two of whom were boys. The Vietnam War raged, the draft was in place, and I grew concerned for the future of my sons. I seriously thought about the affairs of the world for the very first time in my life. Public school history classes had all been boring and I had learned little. But I was complacent to know little, as were most of the friends with whom I grew up. Now I truly wanted to know, and so I studied. I studied for years and I slowly learned what life for a common Earth person was really all about. I specifically wanted to know why—if this is a democracy—some Americans held the power to send other Americans off to wars most of these others didn’t feel should be fought and didn’t want to go.

I learned that until the freedom-seeking exodus from the Old World to the New World of the Americas, life for all people, of all times and all places on planet Earth was a class-divided life: you were either rich and privileged or you were poor and common. You belonged to the minority oppressor class of privileged people, or you were of the oppressed majority class of uneducated commoners. There were no other classes.

Just so there is no misunderstanding, the traditional definition of a privileged person is one with rank, title, or wealth. A commoner has none of these assets. Moreover, for the past five hundred years “poverty” has been defined as the inability of an estate to produce an income large enough to pay for the necessities of life and still have funds enough for regular savings or investments. It means, simply, if you are a worker dependent upon a weekly wage or salary to survive, you are a commoner.

Obviously, democracy as a concept was born in response to the oppressiveness of hierarchical governments; top-to-bottom governments. If the differences between a privileged class and a common class of people weren’t as severe, and if hierarchical governments hadn't been as callously oppressive as most have been, there would be little reason for the concept of “democracy.”

I also learned that privileged citizens of all places and all times believed themselves superior to the common person, and that they deathly feared rule of the common uneducated majority, for such rule might force them to change their very lifestyles

Class prejudices cannot be changed anymore than a leopard can change its spots. I learned that these privileged class discriminations—these Old World feelings of superiority and callousness to suffering were also imported to the New World and were greatly responsible for the cruelty of American Empire builders. Wealthy, privileged, land-owning Americans believed that because they were wealthier and better educated than the common farmer or craftsmen, they were better qualified and more deserving to own and control these new lands; even more qualified and deserving than the red people or our brown neighbors to the South who had inhabited them for hundreds of years. With their more advanced weaponry, the American Establishment easily took lands away from Indians and Mexicans and began building the Great American Empire.

I learned that in 1787, the Founders of the American Constitution, who were all wealthy or influential men, discarded the Articles of Confederation—the republic’s existing constitution—and deliberately, and without authority from their individual states, bestowed upon the American people a “representative” democracy and not the true democracy that most common Americans had expected. If you haven't thought about it, representative government is a top-to-bottom pseudo-democratic political system in which a few chosen people at the top make laws for all to follow, but a true democracy is a bottom-to-top political system. It's a system beginning with the individual voter who willingly assumes responsibilities and obligations to help make the laws and policies of society without the aid of professional politicians.

Class prejudices cannot be changed anymore than a leopard can change its spots. I learned how, in 1898, American troops, presumably to free the people from Spanish control, added the Philippines to the American Empire by invading the islands, ignoring promises for independence and freedom, brutally murdering resisting natives, and gaining desired Pacific coaling stations for its ships.

Class prejudices cannot be changed anymore than a leopard can change its spots. I learned that not only did wealthy American employers fear and fight the growth of labor unions and common worker benefits for the first one hundred and fifty years of the American experience, but at the turn of the 20th century, the practice of eugenics, a Greek term meaning “well-born” was adopted and popularized by white American supremacists who were alarmed at the growing populations of American blacks and Eastern European immigrants. During the 1920s, eugenicists influenced the passage of both state laws permitting the sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and of federal immigration laws blocking passage to the U.S. of those people whom white supremacists believed “unfit.”

I learned that although Adolph Hitler and his Nazis gave our world the Holocaust, it is a truth that Hitler approved, applauded, and imitated the American eugenics policies, and it is a truth that both German and American white supremacists did what they did to breed a superior people. It is a truth that both the German, and those American white supremacists who have ruled the U.S. for most of its existence, are cut from the same mold; foolishly arrogant, class conscious, and cruel. True Nazis

And because a leopard cannot change its spots, I understood the reasoning why some of these Americans planned the 1933 attempt to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal Administration; why some of them supported the Nazis financially before, during, and after World War II; why their giant corporations built factories in Germany to produce war vehicles and other war equipment; why some of their companies supplied German submarines with fuel during the war, and why after the war ended some of these people helped German war criminals to escape to South America or to the U.S. to work in their factories—eventually becoming U.S. citizens. Once embedded with Nazi ideals and habits, always a Nazi

By 1945, World War II was over—the U.S., it’s industrial powerhouse, and the determination of the planet’s free people had defeated the German onslaught.

But American Industry needed the raw materials that could be obtained only from the lands of Southeast Asia. My studies taught me that under the pretext of fighting Russian Communism, the U.S. kept its troops in the small French-controlled country of Korea, deliberately dividing Korea into North and South (just like the U.S. had been divided during its Civil War), forcing the Korean people to war against one another. Russia removed its troops from the small country in 1948, but U.S. troops remained, and in 1950 they openly helped South Korean troops fight against the North Koreans. The Korean War ended in 1953. More than 23,000 American boys and as many as 5 million Asian people had lost their lives.

I learned that no sooner had this contrived war ended than the U.S. Establishment announced in 1953 that American troops had been placed in the small country of Vietnam (although the first American "advisor" to Vietnam had been killed in 1945) and that the small country also had been arbitrarily divided into North and South forcing the Vietnamese people to fight against one another. The long Vietnam War ended in January of 1973. More than 58,000 young Americans and untold millions of innocent Asians lost their lives in a war that should never have been fought by the U.S. and its people who claim to love freedom.

The Pentagon Papers, released to an American newspaper by one of its authors, confirmed that this war had deliberately been started by the American Establishment to maintain its commercial presence in Asia and to gain essential raw materials. The bottom line is that the Korean and Vietnamese Wars were both unnecessary, but to satisfy the demands of powerful corporate interests, the lives of more than 80,000 young commoner Americans were thrown away.

Today, U.S. troops are fighting another two long unnecessary and illogical wars to control the vast oil reserves of the Mideast for oil corporations. We fight in Afghanistan and we fight in Iraq. And because a leopard cannot change its spots and because once a Nazi always a Nazi, we have seen the American Nazi policies of torture used callously and indiscriminately by American troops in both countries against people who were really not our enemies at the start of these wars. It's also a truth, although long forgotten by the American people, that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had anything to do with the horror of 9/11. And so—as in Korea and Vietnam—the lives of thousands of young Americans have so far been lost in the Mideast wars and the bodies of many thousands more have been damaged or destroyed. However, these foolish wars go on as neither the American corporate world nor the politicians who run American governments seem to care.

Today, not only do I know why some Americans hold the power to send other Americans off to die in wars these other Americans feel unwarranted and don’t want to attend, I know much more, for I have had time to study the patterns of the American elite’s activities since WW II ended, to contemplate them, and to form conclusions.