Among Military Families, Questions About Bush

[Snellius]

FORT CAMPELL, Ky., April 8 — The billboard across from the huge Army post here reads patriotism, pure and simple: "We Support Our Troops, Our President."

But talk to members of military families in the parking lot next door, and the emotions are a good deal more complex. Samie Drown, 28, voted for George W. Bush in 2000, and she was stoic and supportive when her husband, a member of the Army's elite 101st Airborne Division, was secretly shipped off to Iraq with less than a week's notice last year. Mrs. Drown took care of their four young children as the 101st led United States troops into Baghdad.

But now, with the occupation dragging on and casualties mounting week by week, she says she feels her views shifting. And not just about the war, but about the president who sent her husband to Iraq.

"This has completely changed my view of the administration," said Mrs. Drown, wearing an American flag T-shirt and sunglasses. "My husband is a soldier and his job is to fight for freedom. But after so many months and so many deaths, no one has shown us any weapons of mass destruction or given us an explanation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/campaign/11MILI.html

[Malva Zebrina]

1. I wish I really understood how

people can think troops are fighting for freedom. I just do not understand that at all.

[leftchick]

2. me either Marianne...

It is insane group-think to rationalize the mis-administration's insane policies and promoted by the insane US Pravda news shows.
Disgusting....

[susu369]

19. "Me either, Marianne"

and someone please explain "the terrorists are freedom haters"

:shrug:

[lindashaw]

3. What I don't understand is how the mass brainwashing took place.

I know how they did it, by constant insinuation, aside references, carefully-chosen terms linking Iraq when talking about weapons, etc...But I'm asking myself if something more dark didn't take place -- like subliminal suggestions on television.

[JohnyCanuck]

7. Former US Army AI expert says America is being brainwashed.

Brainwashing America
by Dr. Norman Livergood (former head of the Dept of Artificial Intelligence, US Army War College).

The puppet Bush regime is using new, aggressive forms of brainwashing to change the very way Americans think and feel.

This is the psychological dimension of the "High Cabal's" general onslaught against American workers, just as the "war on terrorism" is the military dimension and corporate crime and tax cuts for the rich comprise the economic dimension.

We are living under the beginning stages of a military dictatorship in precisely the same way that 1930s Germans suffered under the Nazi regime. As in the case of Nazi Germany, state-sponsored propaganda (brainwashing) is a vital part of the Bush regime's strategy. New propaganda slogans are being overtly and subliminally implanted by Bush and his gang through their speeches and actions:

dissent is treason

Constitutional liberties are less important than security

the "war on terrorism" excuses any attack on civil liberties

the Bush administration has the right and the duty to bring about "regime change" in any nation it chooses

the economy is basically sound

only a few bad apples are found in the corporate barrel, which requires no new oversight laws

if Bush and Cheney say they're not guilty of corporate crimes, then believe it and shut up

http://www.hermes-press.com/brainwash1.htm

[drfemoe]

8. whoooooa

from your link:
"We need a program of psychosurgery and political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.
"The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.
"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electrical stimulation of the brain."

Dr. Jose Delgado (MKULTRA experimenter who demonstrated a radio-controlled bull on CNN in 1985)
Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School
Congressional Record No. 26, Vol. 118, February 24, 1974

...
But don't worry. There is NOTHING to those tin foil hat conspiracy theories. Nah. Nada. Zip.

[JohnyCanuck]

9. Here's some more juicy stuff.

It's actually a link I followed from Dr. Livergood's "Brainwashing America."

Author Mack White in "Television and the Hive Mind" explains that the famous Orson Welles radio show "War of the Worlds" that scared thousands of people out of their wits because they really believed Welles when he announced, "the martians are coming, the martians are coming," was actually an experiment in psychological warfare. Peoples' reactions to the fear and terror invoked by the program were studied and the results incorporated into media propaganda techniques. Check out the last sentence in the last paragraph I snipped and remember how on 9/11 they played the planes crashing into the towers and the collapse of the twin towers in an endless loop.

"Television and the Hive Mind"

Sixty-four years ago this month, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare.

It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At 8 p.m. CST, the Mercury Radio on the Air began broadcasting Orson Welles' radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. As is now well known, the story was presented as if it were breaking news, with bulletins so realistic that an estimated one million people believed the world was actually under attack by Martians. Of that number, thousands succumbed to outright panic, not waiting to hear Welles' explanation at the end of the program that it had all been a Halloween prank, but fleeing into the night to escape the alien invaders.

Later, psychologist Hadley Cantril conducted a study of the effects of the broadcast and published his findings in a book, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. This study explored the power of broadcast media, particularly as it relates to the suggestibility of human beings under the influence of fear. Cantril was affiliated with Princeton University's Radio Research Project, which was funded in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also affiliated with the Project was Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive Frank Stanton, whose network had broadcast the program. Stanton would later go on to head the news division of CBS, and in time would become president of the network, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, the influential think tank which has done groundbreaking research on, among other things, mass brainwashing.

<snip>

Under the guise of journalistic objectivity, news programs subtly play on our emotions--chiefly fear. Network news divisions, for instance, frequently congratulate themselves on the great service they provide humanity by bringing such spectacles as the September 11 terror attacks into our living rooms. We have heard this falsehood so often, we have come to accept it as self-evident truth. However, the motivation for live coverage of traumatic news events is not altruistic, but rather to be found in the central focus of Cantril's War of the Worlds research--the manipulation of the public through fear. (my emphasis /jc)

Television and the Hive Mind

[riverwalker]

16. the big daddy thing

Why are the ones that want a paternal, strict, authoritarian, militaristic, omnipotent government want the same kind of God? Are they looking for daddy figures? The reason I can never take right wingers seriously, is that they want to remain children.

[Skittles]

4. our soldiers serve our country

the fact that Bush Inc is horribly misusing them does not change that fact.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

11. Every White House has horribly "misused them," not just this one. Deal.

Read Noam Chomsky's 'Hegemony or Survival.' Or many other sources.

The US gov't has been PREVENTING DEMOCRACY for hundreds of years.

Despite the lies about 'defending our freedoms,' that is the hard and heartbreaking truth I wish our troops would understand before they sign up and ship off as hitmen for a gang of corporateers.

It seems that many veterans justify their participation in the military because
1) They are hard working
2) They are self-sacrificing
3) They bond with and support their fellow troops against everything.
4) They are principled and disciplined.
5) They've been told the US Gov't has a history of being the white knight saving the world.

BUT:
I think our troops transfer their own virtues to the government despite all the evidence that the US government policies are a combination of South Africa's apartheid and Nazi Germany's holocaust.

We do the same thing with our parents. We need to believe that they are good and virtuous because we identify with them so closely.

Thus we defend them as we would defend ourselves, deservedly or not.
And it is almost impossible to breakout of that pattern of thinking.

Especially when your own life is in their hands.

[Malva Zebrina]

12. I know that is the conventional wisdom

but please tell me how they are serving our country when they are brainwashed and trained to think they are performing a service to protect our freedoms when they kill and murder ten or more thousand innocent children, women and old men in our name. We do NOT want them to serve us in that way.

It does not make sense. How do they serve me and others like me, who has been opposed to this war from it's onset and even before? How do they serve others in this country, if all the religious leaders, with few exceptions, have said that this war is not a just war?

\
And yet they march to "serve" and to protect our "freedoms"


there is nothing in this mission that they are "serving" and there is nothing in this mission that is defending our "freedoms"

They are there at the whim of an evil man, who wants his buddies to make a lot of money and has used our young to reach that personal goal. He could give a shit aobut them. In fact, he likes the idea that he has control over their life and death. And to top it all off, he was AWOL and is coward himself, but no one wants to say that. :eyes:

It is time to stop this nonsense and this shit.
We are people here and we have children, sons and daughters and we do not want them used by fascists to obtain for the same, monetary goals

They are pawns and they are compliant pawns by virtue of thier training. and that training is and has been geared to making them into killing machines and non thinking killing machines. They know not justice from injustice.

Somewhere along the line, one must make a decision here. We cannot support this mission and we must take a look at how our children have been manipulated from all aspects. They want a college education that they would or could not or did not want to go into a loan for, so they become pawns of a virtual fascist.

It is time to take another look at what our troops really are and what they really think.

How are they serving this country when it is the corporations who will profit from an evil man Commander in Chief and AWOL at that?

NO--they do NOT serve this country. They serve George Bush and his greed. That they have no control over that is another subject

[Skittles]

17. some soldiers are in Iraq and Afghanistan

do you know what the rest are doing? If you were never in the military you really don't know.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

18. And knowing that he's misusing the military,

who the hell is going to want to join?

Our armed forces are soon going to be in worse shape than they were after Viet Nam. There are people in this world who can't wait for America to be that vulnerable again...

[glarius]

5. They're fighting for freedom of Iraqis and "peace in the world"..didn't

you know?....That's the line we hear now....The WMDs are not in the picture now...:puke:

[Jade Fox]

6. This is the oldest line in justifying a war....

They used it in the Gulf War, Falklan (sp?) Islands, Grenada, Viet Nam, Korea,
and probably every other nasty little war.

[atreides1]

10. This Is Part of The Problem

Mrs. Drown"My husband is a soldier and his job is to fight for freedom."

An American soldiers duty is to defend the US, and to defend the freedom of Americans. We helped to liberate Kuwait from Iraq, but
we didn't free the Kuwaiti people, we invaded Grenada because the
leadership was dealing with the Cuban government, but the US said that the medical students needed to be rescued, and I don't even remember why we invade Panama, that's right, because our pawn Noriega
was trying to cut out the middle man, in his dealings with the Columbian drug lords. Vietnam, we were fighting against Communism, and Korea was actually a UN mission.

In WWII we did fight for the freedom of the world against the Axis powers, and that was fighting for our self preservation.

So when do the Iraqi people get their freedom. No offense intended but Mrs. Drown's husband hasn't been fighting for freedom, he and all the others have been fighting for Halliburton and other war profiteers.

[Malva Zebrina]

13. In Kuwait, women still do not have the right to vote.

and that is the truth.

[Mari333]

14. I cannot fathom this. I knew from the beginning

from the moment Bush stole the election, from day one, this whole administration has been a fraud. Now, even more so, with Michael in harms way, in Baghdad, I wish I were in some modicum of denial..its even more infuriating and depressing for my husband and I, 3 times we marched against this war, and were aware of PNAC from day one..
its bitter and cruel to know that Michael is standing over there and could die just to protect corporate interests, and it makes me physically ill to think so many US citizens arent free and critically thinking enough to think for themselves and question this administration, any administration , anytime their child is taken to one of the US wars.
http://www.bringthemhomenow.com

[scarface2004]

15. everyone in iraq is dying for nothing!!!

bush is a frikking idiot who doesn t give a shit about anything but his own! fuck him!!

[0007]

20. btt