Political Animal
Get the Military Out of Our High Schools
Early in July, he woke up to a knock on his door. His parents were at work. Garrett says that he was greeted by an army recruiter and two police officers. “They had been calling me for weeks, saying I had to come enroll, but I kept telling them, ‘I’m going to school,’” he said. “Now they said, ‘If you don’t come with us right now, you are going to jail.’”
CounterPunch
Posted Oct 23 2004 11:14 AM
Political Animal
The Ascent of Man
THERE ARE TWO PARTS to the human dilemma. One is a belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become a monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation a civilisation into a regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.'
DrBronowski.com
Posted Oct 17 2004 4:22 PM
Political Animal
WAR ON TRUTH: The Secret Battle for the American Mind
"Some years ago, in a speech to clients in the cattle industry, Ron Duchin, senior vice-president of the PR firm Mongoven, Biscoe, and Duchin (which represents probably a quarter of the largest corporations in the world), outlined his firm's basic divide-and-conquer strategy for defeating any social-change movement. Activists, he explained, fall into three basic categories: radicals, idealists, and realists. The first step in his strategy is to isolate and marginalize the radicals. They're the ones who see the inherent structural problems that need remedying if indeed aparticular change is to occur. To isolate them, PR firms will try to create a perception in the public mind that people advocating fundamental solutions are terrorists, extremists, fearmongers, outsiders, communists, or whatever. After marginalizing the radicals, the PR firm then identifies and 'educates' the idealists - concerned and sympathetic members of the public - by convincing them that the changes advocated by the radicals would hurt people. The goal is to sour the idealists on the idea of working with the radicals, and instead get them working with the realists."
The Last Wizards
Posted Aug 30 2004 10:25 PM