It is even harder when they don't consider themselves oppressed (edit, typo)

Oppressed people can and do stand up to tyranny. Essentially, every nation has the government it deserves. If enough _individuals_ resist, the government will fall. If not, then those _individuals_ who want freedom for themselves must leave or find some other alternative as they can.

"I swear by my life and by my love of it, never to live for the sake of another man..."

Why should any American die to help people in Iraq or Ireland or India?

And who stands by us? Do you see Switzerland and the Cayman Islands coming to help Americans who are oppressed by taxes? And why should they?

(.... or ask another man to live for mine.")

It is hard for oppressed people to stand up to tyranny. We need them to know we will stand with them if their government initiates force.

Ayn Rand explained the theory of the "muscle mystic" who believes that mere possession of material resources grants power that is lacking in the mind. Ayn Rand explained why the USSR was _not_ a credible military threat. Standing up to them - as opposed to joining them - was important, but not critical. Doing nothing FOR them - versus the Lend Lease, the Rockefeller oil fields, the Ford Motor plants - would have brought them down on their own. The same is true of the Nazi German government. Goering touted their "Pluenderekonomie" but all the art work that he stole from France did not feed any Germans.

A recent movie, Jazz Kids, was about the Nazi crack-down on American music. It terrified them.

The government can not "promote [political] freedom" any more than a church can promote "freedom of religion" and for the same reasons. Government exists for one purpose only: to defend rights (with retaliatory force).

When the US government attempted to "promote freedom" with its campaigns like Radio Free Europe all it produced was a mish-mash of bad ideas that encouraged at least one doomed revolt in Hungary 1956.

"The pen is mightier than the sword" is an old expression to admit that ideas move the world.

Music and movies would not have stopped the Nazis. The policies of the Reagan administration helped bring down the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. The government can have a promote freedom.

We must differentiate the US _government_ from American _culture_. Our own government was opposed to the very things that attracted people to American culture in the Cold War: rock 'n' roll music, comic books, kids in cars, and being hip. As late as 1981, conservative Secretary of the Interior James Watt called The Beach Boys "the wrong element" and denied them a permit to play at the Reflecting Pool (preferring Wayne Newton or another Las Vegas entertainer). Nancy Reagan intervened. But the point is that our own government is often "anti-American" if want to to cast it in those terms.

US military intervention in the Arab/Islamic world will do nothing good for America.

We need to stand up for reality, reason, and freedom. We need to push capitalism, enterprise, and individualism. And we need to do that via music and movies.

Unfortunately. I don't see how the world benefits from the US having less influence.

I think things are progressing just the way mr. thompson and his handlers have planned.