Whenever the United States has decided to use its military might against some other country, it has mounted a propaganda campaign to demonize the enemy. It is a part of Psy-Ops, the psychological operations that are used to justify our slaughter of large numbers of people.

     The people on the other side are called Gooks or Japs or Huns or Commies or Terrorists. We are told that life is cheap where they come from, or that they want to enslave us and our friends, or that they hate freedom. They are characterized as demons.

     The targets of these propaganda campaigns are not the people we are fighting. It is us, the people of the United States. Our government wants us to believe these racist and ridiculous lies, because the lies make it easier for us to support the massacre of innocents, which happens in every war.

     These propaganda campaigns rely upon our own ignorance of people in other countries, and our tendency to be intolerant of people who are different from ourselves. Those who are ignorant of the lives of people from other places are more likely to fear them. Those who believe that their own culture and religion are the best are more likely to be intolerant of those who have different cultures or religions.

     But we don’t have to buy into these propaganda campaigns. We don’t have to remain ignorant of other peoples and other cultures. We don’t have to be intolerant of people who are different than we are.

     People are not demons. People everywhere are shaped in their behavior and thoughts by the same basis processes. They are born or adopted into a particular culture, and with very few exceptions, they learn and accept the values and behavior patterns of that culture. Sure there is always the occasional sociopath, but these exist in every culture.

     Those cultures, in turn, have evolved over time, and have adapted to accommodate different circumstances as they arise. It is a complex interactive process, with many feedback loops that are constantly operating on and being affected by each other.

     When the Psy-Ops propagandists feed us lies like “they hate our freedom” they are actually making it substantially harder for most U.S. citizens to accurately understand and respond to the world around us. There is a reason for that. They don’t want us to understand what is really going on. They want us to support their predetermined decision to go to war.

     If we are to break free from the lies of the propagandists, we must learn to exorcise our demons. But the people of other countries are not the demons. The demons are the lies which are created by the propagandists, and which live in our own heads. The demons are our fears of the unknown and unfamiliar. The demons are racism and chauvinism and jingoism.

     To exorcise our demons, we must learn to ignore the simplistic lies that are fed to us, and to develop our own more accurate understanding of what is really going on in the world.



     CORRECTION TO MY COLUMN OF DEC. 5, 2006

     Two weeks ago, I erroneously wrote that the directors of the film “The Making of a Martyr” were Brooke Goldstein and Mark Harvey. That was an error which I made by using an apparently reliable but ultimately inaccurate source of information. In fact, the directors of the movie were Brooke Goldstein and Alistair Leyland. I apologize for the error.

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