War of the Words
 

If you're really paying attention you can catch it, those little bits of mental manipulation designed to imprint an idea in our mind so that we accept it as fact. It used to be called brain-washing. Now it's called spin or propaganda, or focused marketing, but whatever name it's given, the intention and outcome are the same. It is meant to make us believe something that isn't true or to make us associate one thing with something else. Most of the country has been taken in by these tactics. Why shouldn't they be? They've been taken in by the best. The Bush administration employs some of the most expensive, well-known and successful marketing and advertising companies in the world. They know how to make us buy things we neither want nor need, including proposals by George W. Bush that lead us to invade other countries.

The latest "war of the words" is a clever ploy to bring us back to the moment of our greatest fear and horror , 9-11, and associate those suspected perpetrators with the fighting in Iraq and the killing of our troops. It is intended to make us rationalize and justify in our minds an action for which there is no justification. It takes the blame from Bush and the White House and erases the reality of their monumental blunder by re-focusing our association and perpetuating our fear and it's all done with just one word.

Whenever an attack occurs on our troops in Iraq we read, "Terrorists kill one, injure seven." Terrorists! We are continuing our War on Terror. We are fighting the people who attacked us in New York and Washington. Except that's not the case at all. We are told we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them on our own soil. Except that's not the case at all. The fact that we accept that premise so readily and that the concept is so firmly entrenched in our sub-conscious is a testament to the success of those advertising firms working in the White House and why they get the big bucks.

Those people we are fighting in Iraq are fighting a military who invaded their country and are imposing curfews and checkpoints on them as an occupying force. It is what people of any country would do if their country was invaded. It is what we would do. We have been programmed to believe we are liberators. We are the good guys because liberators are good. They are terrorists. They are the bad guys because terrorists are bad. Except that's not the case at all. We are in fact invaders and the Iraqis who are resisting our invasion and occupation haven't had the benefit of expensive advertisers programming their thinking. They are freedom fighters who are avenging the destructive bombing of their country and the killing of their families, friends and neighbors. They had nothing to do with the attacks on New York or Washington. They are not associated with the group suspected of those attacks. They are not terrorists, but if we were not programmed to believe they were, how could we justify killing them and continuing to kill them.

George Bush said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones we need to concentrate on." With the help of his expensive advertising firms, it would seem to be so. Are you fooled?

1-8-04