Sunday, November 7, 2010
Creating The Enemy
Conflict is a perpetual reality, and enemies are not figments of our imagination.
...but somehow we never seem to run out of them. We have new enemies popping up constantly.
We seem unable to live even a few years without fighting some perceived foe.
As a nation we role-model contempt on a mega-scale, pinpointing enemies as threats to our way of life.
Enemies are invariably presented as evil, as agents of dark forces. Demons, enemies of God, who, incidentally, is always on our side...
Criminals, committers of atrocities, sadists. Agents of death in a cosmic drama, a battle of Good vs Evil, Light vs Darkness.
Barbarians, destroyers of culture and civilization.
Enemies are good for the economy, or rather, for the military mega-corporations and the international bankers.
The top aerospace and defense corporations consist of a dozen companies employing close to a million people.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman...all seeking to open up new markets...
...Constantly feeding on fresh enemies and pointless, unwinnable wars.
Over one third of all American engineers and scientists are engaged in military-related jobs.
Living in a logic of War makes us invent enemies everywhere.
Propaganda is used to dehumanize perceived enemies, so they can be killed without remorse.
Propagandists seek to alter our understanding through deception and confusion.
Effective propaganda misdirects the public's finite attention away from important issues.
The aim of propaganda is to create a false image in our minds, and manipulate our emotions, create a focus for our mistrust and hatred, stereotype, over-simplify to promote the desired reaction.
Pinpointing the Enemy excludes all relevant facts that might complicate or contradict the promoted argument.
As domestic and foreign lobbies invent our enemies to force their agenda, making it nearly impossible to distinguish our real foes from the fabricated ones, inventing enemies where they don't exist ultimately leads to a self-fulling prophecy.
It is quite a possibility that, of all the enemies we fight...our biggest enemy may still be the Enemy Within.
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I am so sick of the Bush-Hitler analogy. It's drivel bull shit.
ReplyDeleteAnd for me, Hitler WAS an enemy. An enemy to civilization and I'm hardly one to get worked up over things.
T.C., have you read Pat Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"? Here's an article by Buchanan on the subject: Did Hitler Want War?
ReplyDeleteAs for Bush, he's a war criminal. Read Vincent Bugliosi's The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.
While I marvel at Buchanan's stunning understanding of American politics (he rips to shreds most pundit in my view) and while he wrote one of the most balanced anti-Iraq war piece way back in 2003 or something, I think he's over reaching here.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I think the reaction to it was a little hysterical.
Frankly, I think it's patently absurd to assert this position. Feeling of humiliation combined with the residue of Nietzsche's Superman philosophy and Hitler's own 'Mein Kempf' declaration sealed the world's fate.
And for crying out loud. Once he invaded Poland (a country he considered illegitimate) and Belgium it was game on.If he didn't want war why invade? And don't get me going on the exterminations of fellow humans from Jews, retards, gays and Slavs.
He just played people and looks like he's still playing people from his grave.
Sometimes war is real and unavoidable. It's part of human nature. We WERE on the right side. It's possible this can be true. I invoke Occam's Razor in this instance.
Don't care what you say, do, or draw until you're all blue like Papa Smurf in the collective faces of Skeptical Eye, but you'll never convince this nimrod that Bush is Hitler. And I'm pretty confident historical facts will side with me - and you all know it.
You can't build a psychological profile for Bush like you can Hitler. Just impossible.
I think you can easily make your anti-war cases without resorting to that.
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture11.html