By Richard C. Cook, Co-Founder and Lead Analyst, American Geopolitical Institute. Author, Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023)
October 2, 2024
The U.S. mainstream media, military leadership, and political elite have a bad habit of demonizing their opponents in war, failing to realize how much it undermines the war effort when they start believing their own propaganda.
This is a fatal tendency that can be seen over and over again throughout American history. It also gives the lie to the true motivations behind the conflict.
Americans demonized the Native Americans while carrying out genocide. They demonized the Mexicans at the time of the Mexican War. They demonized the Germans in World War I, calling the Germans “Huns” and accusing them of war crimes no worse than what the Allies themselves were doing.
During World War II, it was Hitler they made into a caricature, and still are, even though their friend and ally Stalin outdid the rest of the world combined in the number of people he and his fellow Bolsheviks murdered, including tens of millions of Russia’s own citizens.
In the Korean War, the Americans carpet bombed and napalmed North and South Koreans alike, killing millions of civilians they called “gooks.” The “gook” appellation returned during the Vietnam War with incidents like the My Lai massacre setting new low marks for wanton, senseless slaughter. Meanwhile, North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was always available for hatred and mockery.
By the latter part of the 20th century, the Americans continued their highly refined practice of demonizing national leaders, including Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Milosevic in Serbia, and Osama bin Laden in connection with 9/11 and Afghanistan. Then came Qaddafi, the murdered Libyan leader. Today it’s Russian President Vladimir Putin and, in the Middle East, the leaders of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. In China, it’s Xi Jinping.
The list is legion: Castro in Cuba, North Korea’s Kim, Jong Un, Ortega in Nicaragua, Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, and on it goes. And the people in the countries we choose to hate—well, besides “gooks,” there are “towel heads,” “sand niggers,” etc. Helping make anyone a hated enemiy is the slightly off-white color of their skin.
Such people our propaganda deem unworthy of life become special targets for murder and assassination, as our ally Israel just did to Axis of Resistance leaders in Lebanon. Our brilliant American policy makers are now claiming that with Israel’s enemies being weakened and demoralized, including the exploding pager stunt, the time is now ripe for a limited incursion by Israel into Southern Lebanon.
The problem with that was that within a few short days, Iran’s launch of hundreds of rockets into Israel dealt that nation another humiliating blow. Similarly, the killing of leaders of Hamas in Gaza has done nothing to improve Israel’s failure to defeat the insurgency there which is about to enter its second year.
This U.S. habit prevents us from seeing why the nation in question views us as an enemy. So we can never understand that these people view us, usually correctly, as exploiters, as stealers of their resources and property, as disrespectful of their customs, their history, their independence, their aspirations, their traditions, their values, their hopes and dreams.
We come at these nations as thieves, as thugs, as killers, as abusers. Then when they react negatively, we call them names, we mock and shame them, we try to make them feel guilty for refusing to lie down and take the beating we are sure they have coming to them.
Rarely do these non-compliant nations call our bluff. If they do, we arrange “regime change” for them or we bomb them to smithereens ,as we have done in every modern war we have fought. But this rarely, if ever, gains us a clean victory, and it never makes us friends. Like the Romans, we “make a desert and call it peace.”
Russia is calling our bluff in Ukraine in the proxy war we instigated there starting with the Maidan coup in 2014. China is calling our bluff by building its own gigantic military establishment, fully aware that war with the U.S. in East Asia may be only a few years away.
Perhaps the nation that has been most successful in keeping its independence in the face of constant U.S. pressure, including threats and sanctions, has been North Korea. They have armed themselves to the teeth, covered their small territory with fortifications and underground tunnels and factories, and developed a nuclear deterrent now capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. They have also sold ballistic missiles to Iran and given Hamas and Hezbollah lessons in underground fortifications that is the single most important factor in keeping Israel at bay.
I personally believe the U.S. habit of demonizing our adversaries to be a sign of weakness, not strength, that only makes us more hardened and bitter enemies than before the conflict began. Israel does the same to even a greater extreme. This is one major reason they are losing the war in Gaza and now Lebanon and imperiling their very existence while the U.S. provides them money and weapons without cessation.
Richard C. Cook is co-founder and lead investigator for the American Geopolitical Institute. Mr. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack at https://montanarcc.substack.com/publish/posts and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.
This thread of history is quite long.
There is an element amongst humanity that aims to rule the entire globe with a singular most potent ideology: divide and conquer, sow fear, mistrust and division; whether between individuals, within families, communities or entire nations and you will weaken that structure enough to easily conquer and rule.
All humanity is one, our differences augment our weaknesses and when we cooperate and learn from each other we can ascend to great heights, but the gutter we find ourselves in is purposefully created so we lived imprisoned to the dictates of wannabe Gods.
There is a simple, quick way out... 'hold tight to the rope of God and be not divided.'
The rope of God leads us to absolute justice and truth under the umbrella of compassion and mercy.
100% correct.