I couldn't agree more with everything that Bats has said in this thread.
But you have to remember that people are presented with a complete false impression of what is really going on. Sometimes with something like Iraq or Vietnam the cover story is so farcical that people see through it. But quite often they don’t. Many people to this day believe the war fought in Kosovo, for example, was completely just, whereas we know for a fact – because we know exactly what happened, and we’ve even seen parliamentary documents that prove 100% that everyone in government knew beforehand what was going to happen – that the complete opposite is the case.
There’s a reason for all the military parades and pageantry and the way that language is used with relation to them and the constant glorification of the armed forces and all the pomp and circumstance and
esprit de corps and all that shit. It’s something that’s been exploited by every totalitarian state in history that you can possibly name. If you think of the most infamous totalitarian and authoritarian states, Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Roman Empire, Napoleon’s France, they are intrinsically associated with the military, and they made huge efforts with regard to displaying their military might publicly and attempting to associate feelings of patriotism and, crucially,
belonging with it.
It’s all a massive attempt to appeal to an element of our deep psychological nature, which is that we organise ourselves into groups or tribes, and then come to identify with our tribe, while ostracising and demonising those that we feel don’t fit in, or are perceived as a threat to us. In Psychology, this is referred to as in-groups and out-groups:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
So you have the very famous Goering quote: “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” That’s why you have all the military parades, and all the flag waving, and all the rest of it, because you’re training people from birth to view all that as part of their in-group, and then it can be naturally suggested that anyone attacked by ‘your’ nation, using ‘your’ military is an out-group. And this really works on a surprisingly large percentage of the population.
We look at Nazi Germany and wonder how it was ever allowed to happen. The answer is that people were trained steadily to see things in a completely warped fashion. It happened incrementally, it happened steadily, it was achieved step by step by step. This is exactly what happens in our societies today, where 3 year-olds are taught to salute the flag by adults that they trust, and then they see the President speaking in front of one every day, and the same flag being displayed in front of military parades and even during wars. Even at that early age, they’re steadily being trained to associate these symbols with positive feelings that they later associate with things that shouldn’t be considered positive at all (Pavlovian conditioning).
An 8 year-old can still see through it. An 8 year-old can say “killing is wrong, war is wrong”, because an 8 year-old hasn’t yet been fully conditioned to see things in this skewed manner. It takes years of prompting, parades and propaganda to produce people who support ‘our troops’ when it should be blindingly obvious that they don’t represent ‘our’ interests whomever ‘we’ are.
A 28 year-old has learnt to say “war is wrong, but the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is justified because our country is under constant attack from Palestinian terrorists, who hate our freedoms and way of life in Israel, and would convert the entire country to Islam if they could, and mutilate our wives and children, so I’m very proud of the work our military men and women do in keeping us safe and protecting our homeland from the onslaught of attacks that have intensified over the last few years, with Mossad carrying out numerous completely unprovoked atrocities within our beloved homeland.”
