Empire's especially have always used propaganda to control and influence the populace. It takes courage for a minority of truth-tellers to speak up. For too long too many "truth tellers" have remained silent on who are the real American heroes.
An anecdote told to me by a neighbor, now deceased, is quite insightful. I'll call him "Bill", and he was a cop. Bill was one of those blue collar white working-class guys who never bought into the racism, stereotypes, and "phobias" that many of his fellow officers did.
Bill said that one morning he was driving his young son "Nick" to school. They passed by a bus stop and noticed a man, dressed as a laborer, perhaps in the construction industry, waiting for the bus. The man was holding a similar lunchbox lunch that Nick carried with him to school each day. Bill said he looked over to young Nick and said:
"Son, you see that guy there? Now that is a real hero. He gets up early each morning, takes the bus to work, and punches out the hours each day to support his wife and kids. He makes far less than the guys on the baseball cards that you think are your heroes. They're not even in his class!"
When Adolf Hitler sent his Wehrmacht army to invade Poland under phony pretenses, the Nazi spin-machine painted them as hero-warriors. They were not! Were they brave? Yes, most men put into a situation where they can get killed or maimed for life are surely brave ... but that's about the end of it. Those German grunts were placed in harm's way for the sinister purposes of their leaders, and of course the grunts were propagandized to believe that they were heroes.
Such was and is the same case with our own USA grunts in Bush-41's first Iraq war of 1991, Bush-42's illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Obama's continuations of the wars of aggression and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq today.
All those yellow ribbons saying "Support Our Troops", glorification of war, and propaganda about our "brave warrior heroes" should never hide the truth. When will John and Joan Q. Public finally wake up to the truth?
1
