The Media Enemy

Feeling down?

Remember, the media has done nothing but generate enemy propaganda, day after day after day, to make you feel that way.

Indeed, considering their relentless efforts for five years now, we're holding up better than they probably expected!

Even the "good war", the one in Afghanistan -- the righteous counter-attack, the anti-Iraq, not a "war of choice" -- is now being portrayed as a lost cause, whose public support has dropped to minority status, if the ridiculous CNN poll can be believed as reported here.

This report from the Christian Science Monitor, which just seems to have learned of the Spring Offensive, barely conceals its glee at NATO setbacks as it expresses its admiration for the cunning and resilient Taliban.

This is pure enemy propaganda that serves no other purpose than to demoralize our will to fight. For example:

New strategy in Taliban's offensive

Already it's a Taliban offensive. More accurate reports indicate NATO pre-empted the Taliban by attacking first and decisively.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Like any modern fighting force, the Taliban have learned the benefits of emotional warfare.

As the Taliban's spring offensive gets under way, kidnappings have become their new weapon of choice, targeting a growing chink in NATO's armor: Across Europe, the United States, and Canada, public opinion for the war in Afghanistan is sliding.

That disenchantment is proving as devastating as any bomb. Last month, after the Taliban kidnapped Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, the Italian government nearly collapsed when opposition parties raised a storm of protest.

Well isn't that special!

Now the Taliban, among the most backward beings on the planet, are lauded as a "modern fighting force."

Real patriots would be denigrating the enemy on a daily basis in order to WIN as fast as possible.

Many complain about the Iraq war costs; how much did we spend to defend Europe all those years, and for what? So that when the ONE time NATO was activated to defend one of its members after a direct homeland attack, our "allies" can't withstand the kidnapping of one single person? Who chose to be in the war zone?

And with fewer than 2,000 troops deployed, Italy's commitment is nominal at best anyway. What do they bring to the table? Several of the NATO contingents are doing great work, but others declared they will not participate in combat operations; what kind of mutual defense pact is that? Unilateralism looks better every day.

The reporter goes on gush (check out all the emotionally-loaded terms!),

In the weeks to come, the Taliban's greatest weapon is likely to be its emotional assault on international will.
...
Just as they have gotten more brutal, so too have the Taliban become more clever...

It is a timely tactic, suggesting the Taliban's astute read of the political climates in NATO countries [created by you, the media! -- ed.]. Italy's response etched in the sharpest tones what a liability the war in Afghanistan has become for that government. [so solemn treaty obligations due for 60 years of our defending them are a liability. I see. --ed.]
...
But with more than 500 foreign troops dead and last year witnessing the highest death toll since the war began in 2001, the Taliban's new spate of kidnappings hopes to capitalize on public dismay throughout many of the states comprising the bulk of NATO's 36,000 troops.

What's that? 500 dead over 5 years spread out over all of Europe? And the public can't take it?

What kind of ninnies believe such a thing? What kind of cowards buy into it? As Steyn notes,

It's often said that Canada came of age at Vimy, in northern France, in the Easter of 1917, when a nation of seven million lost over three-and-a-half thousand in a few days. Ninety years later, a nation of 30 million cannot absorb four dozen dead in half a decade without recoiling from the very notion of soldiering.

This "public perception" is purely a creation of the media saying over and over again that support is waning. Then the very same media conducts a poll of the very same people who consume their reports of doom and gloom and ask them what their perception is.

How very circular.

Such a fantasyland construction of opinion wouldn't matter compared to the reality on the ground of Operation Achilles...except for the fact that these morons are allowed to vote.

The result is a wildly pessimistic "poll" that just doesn't pass the credibility test:

In Canada, which has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, 46 percent of respondents agreed that their troops should be withdrawn before 2009, according to a February poll by Vancouver-based polling service Angus-Reid.

• In Germany, which has deployed 3,000 troops, 57 percent of respondents believe their troops should be withdrawn, according to a March poll released by Der Speigel magazine.

• In the Netherlands, which has 2,200 troops in Afghanistan, only 33 percent supported the recent deployment of additional troops, according to a January 2006 poll by market-research firm TNS NIPO.

• The public is also divided in the United States and Britain, the nations with the two largest troop deployments of 15,000 and 5,200 respectively. Fifty-three percent of British respondents to a September BBC poll oppose their government's military operation in Afghanistan. Fifty-two percent of US respondents also oppose it, up four points since September, according to a January poll released by CNN.

Now, I can believe the Dutch and Germans can loathe themselves into national suicide (their now less than replacement birthrate guarantees it in the long run), but a majority of Americans oppose operations in Afghanistan?

And pacifistic Canada, whose liberals despise its military and have shrunk it to near extinction, is leading the way in public support?

At levels higher than the United States -- which was the attacked party?

I'm delighted if a majority of Canadians still support the effort, but how can it possibly, for real, be higher than our own? Which is now supposedly a minority view?

If that's true we should surrender now and save us all further trouble.

Another example of propaganda is this ridiculous short "documentary" video of a gun bazaar in Pakistan.

The narrator, some westernized Pakistani or something like that, goes to visit the Khyber Pass and see the "illegal" gun market in the tribal regions where the Taliban flourishes. He builds it up like something really impressive, like some vast engine of industrial weapons power.

It turns out to be some stupid flea market of shoddy-looking copies of modern guns that have to be test-fired (by shooting randomly in the air) to see if they really work.

Clearly impressed, he goes on and on about how these people make these modern rifles and pistols "with their bare hands!!!"

Though of course, those "bare hands" are operating tools.

And as if guns weren't invented and perfected by westerners hundreds of years ago -- by hand!

So there are these people who collect scrap metal and used shell casings, and, like any hobby reloader here in the good ol' USA, make "new" bullets.

Wow. Color me underwhelmed that they can use a scale and operate a hammer and a crimping tool.

Then, we are introduced to...a man with no tongue! Who assembles pistols... with his bare hands!!!

Awestruck, our narrator ends by proclaiming,

You think some soldiers can press on these people and change their way of life? They live in caves! They have no tongues! They build guns with their bare hands!!!

You can't beat these people!!!

Well, maybe the narrator would like us to believe we can't beat these people.

It's an absurd piece of sheer propaganda.

Hmm, let's see, we'd all agree they'd be beaten if they were all dead, right? A few neutron bombs could see to that, hypothetically speaking of course.

But, they're some kind of Supermen who can't be beaten because...they have no tongues!

Why not say something like, "these Americans, you can't beat them...they've walked on the Moon!"

Which we did, several times, with 40-year-old technology and nobody else in the world has done it since.

But making knock-off copies of guns -- with your bare hands! -- by bending sheet metal and working a lathe makes you undefeatable.

Producing aircraft carriers or jet fighters or undetectable stealth bombers or a world-ringing web of orbital satellites to guide our bombs precisely to their targets anywhere on the planet within a few hours of the word "Go!"...that's all unimpressive compared with a tongueless savage sitting in a "cave" with a hammer.

Because, dear god! He uses...his bare hands!!!

It's pure defeatist idiocy, designed to fulfill a psychological need. Maybe modern life is just too easy for humans, and we need to introduce hardship to give our lives meaning, so we're tearing down the most successful and prosperous society every created.

Well, some are doing it. And I'd rather they just sought therapy instead of taking us all down too, wouldn't you?

Bill Whittle has more here in a brilliant (as usual) essay on the psychological motivations of the "dramatists" who must portray us as evil puppets of shadow conspiracies, and our ruthless enemies as noble. Looking at bizarre conspiracy theories, Whittle notes (among other things) that many believe we did NOT in fact land on the Moon, which I showed above perhaps not coincidentally would make the claim of our inferiority easier to swallow for the self-loathing defeatists.

I want to forgo the niceties of the hot towel and go straight for the jugular on this one. My goal here is not to bust any of these four conspiracy theories; that has all been done much more effectively elsewhere. What I am trying to do here is to build a chain of evidence to show a progressively deteriorating epidemic of world-wide insanity, of truly diseased thinking -- not just a misunderstanding or difference of opinion but real, diagnosable mental illness.
...
How much poison can you put into your veins before you are too weak to walk? Too weak to breed? And how much more of this poison I.V. drip is needed until you die? How many of these cultural suicide pills are we going to swallow before we start to wake up to the fact that dramatists – not the government – are going to kill us all?

When you look at what these people ask you to believe, to justify that naked, awful emptiness in their own souls and the horrible damage their lies are doing to our civilization – well, it’s enough to make you want to take Occam’s Razor out of its golden box and slit their miserable throats with it.

By the way, I wrote this posting...with my bare hands!!!!!!!!!!