Dehumanize the opposition...

An excerpt from "Peace is the Way" by Deepak Chopra.

I recently read that on June 6, 1945, the day the Allies landed in Normandy, a disturbing phenomenon took place. It was discovered that the average G.I. wouldn’t fire his gun at the Germans defending the beaches. Even under direct order, with a commanding officer marching down the line of riflemen and shouting the order to fire, only about one in twenty-five soldiers obeyed.

In the aftermath of war, when D-Day became a glorious victory for right and good, this unsettling fact was not made public. Only an internal U.S. Army report discussed it. In that report the reasons for not firing was clear. It had nothing apparently to do with cowardice; rather, the G.I.s couldn’t shoot advancing Germans because they saw them as human beings. From early childhood each rifleman had been taught that it was against God’s law to kill, and the teaching was nearly impossible to overcome, even in the heat of battle. This reluctance to fire on the enemy was a problem for the army, which decided to change its training methods. Instead of shooting and killing another human being, riflemen were taught to make contact with the target or fulfill the strategic objective. Which still means killing another human being, but with a thick mask of language papering over the brutal facts. The overall solution was to condition the average soldier never to see the enemy as fully human, certainly not as human as those fighting on our side.

”Peace is The Way”, pages 31-32.

Ah, the power of “them”. The power of the “evil empire” and satanic forces. The power of fear. Som widespread in Iraq, in the MSM, in politics, in Florida....