The movie, “War Made Easy” presented many techniques used by the United States Government, and the President, to get the American people hyped and ready to go to war, many of which were used by President George W. Bush, in the recent State of the Union Address earlier this year.
One technique Bush uses is euphemisms. That is, he phrases things that would generally not appeal to the people, in such a way so it will appeal to the people. For example, “…captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists…” That last section was the euphemism. This was a nicer way of saying that they have killed thousands of the world's people. By the definition of terrorist, [from Webster online] A systematic user of terror (intense fear) especially as a means of coercion (dominate by force), the amount of actual “terrorists” that were killed is in the hundreds.
The majority of the people killed were Afghan and Iraqi civilians, as well as other civilians around the world. These innocent people were merely living there life as usual when U.S soldiers were to told to ruthlessly kill them all. I am not saying that all of the people killed were innocent, but that whenever a missile went missed, hundreds, and thousands of women and children were killed. Another example is "The men and women of our armed forces have delivered a message now clear to every enemy of the United States: Even 7,000 miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountaintops and in caves, you will not escape the justice of this nation.” In this statement, the word justice is being used as a synonym for revenge.
Observe, “"The men and women of our armed forces have delivered a message now clear to every enemy of the United States: Even 7,000 miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountaintops and in caves, you will not escape the revenge of this nation.” We did not go to war with the “terrorists” because they attacked someone/ anyone else. We went to war for the same reason we got ourselves involved in WWII, they attacked us. On September 11th, 2001, a group of “Afghani terrorists” attacked Americans on American soil. This obviously means that we have to attack Afghans on Afghani soil. This is also clear because he specifically said “on mountaintops and in caves” which is specifically mentioning the “terrorists” in Afghanistan, because our intelligence tells us that they are in caves in the mountains. So we have to bomb all around the caves, since they are so deep in the mountains, and kill a whole bunch of innocent people that live in those areas, so we can kill the few “terrorists” in the caves.
George Bush used many other techniques in his address as well. Another one is talking about the good, and failing to mention the bad (I don't remember the specific term). The same example used above can also be used here. “…captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists…” They may have done this, but in the process also “rid” the world of many of its innocent inhabitants. Not only have they killed innocent people, like that isn't bad enough, they have captured them, taken to prisons-torture centers in other countries, not even official United States territories.
There are many more techniques that the government uses to ready the country to kill others that I have failed to mention. These are but a mere few. I think that Americans need to learn these methods, and find out what is actually going on, so we can do something about it. After all, this is a democracy, right?
