serpentjaguar

Nope. Your truly totalitarian dictatorship is about Orwellian deniability, which basically means that plausibility takes a back seat to the official truth, however unbelievable it may be. As Orwell realized, the tyrant doesn't actually need you to believe, he just needs you to stay too scared to point out the obvious lie.

My dad was a door-gunner as well, two tours, '66-'68, and trying to ask him about any of it --including how he got his medals-- is like talking to a brick wall. There is no mystery about why combat vets are like this: it's your run-of-the-mill PTSD, and I think in Vietnam vets, it was worsened by the reception they came home to. My dad quickly, within days, learned not to say a thing about the war to anyone but fellow vets. He lied to my mother for years about what he had done and seen, drank heavily for forty years, went through three marriages, and has only recently, within the last two years, gotten sober.

Do you really have to ask? It is human nature to wish to better yourself and your family. Algeria, while peaceful, holds little opportunity for refugees. One might as well ask why he didnt stay in a displaced persons camp in Lebanon.

were you told to get images by the US that portrayed the Chinese in a certain way?

Lol. Contrary to what much of Reddit believes, the US government and major news organizations are not in cahoots. Were any journalist ever able to actually uncover convincing evidence of the kind of collusion you (and much of Reddit) seem to think is a given, they could easily win a Pultzer which is, as you may know, all the motivation any journalist would need to do so. That said, in my opinion the largest failure of US journalism has been its evident inability to educate the general public about how the news business actually operates. The result is that people like yourself are usually badly confused about what US journalism's shortcomings and biases actually are, as well as where same actually come from.

Part of Michigan's problem is that counter to initial prognostications, the Isle Royale population appears to not have enough genetic diversity for long-term survival, which strikes a significant blow to Michigan's "viable" wolf population. That said, my information is about six months old, so maybe there have been new developments.