A bayonet shoves Hitler’s book in front of a prisoner and says “Here, improve your mind!”. Source: “Donald in Nutziland”, Disney 1943.
In 2006 a special international communication draft was released by the applied studies program of The Institute of World Politics (IWP) called “Ridicule as a Weapon, White Paper No. 7“. It contained sharp analysis such as this:
…U.S. strategy includes undermining the political and psychological strengths of adversaries and enemies by employing ridicule as a standard operating tool of national strategy. Ridicule is an under-appreciated weapon not only against terrorists, but against weapons proliferators, despots, and international undesirables in general. Ridicule serves several purposes:
• Ridicule raises morale at home.
• Ridicule strips the enemy/adversary of his mystique and prestige.
• Ridicule erodes the enemy’s claim to justice.
• Ridicule eliminates the enemy’s image of invincibility.
• Directed properly at an enemy, ridicule can be a fate worse than death.
More precisely, it offers this applied context:
The Nazis and fascists required either adulation or fear; their leaders and their causes were vulnerable to well-aimed ridicule. […] Like many in Hollywood did at the time, the cartoon studios put their talent at the disposal of the war effort. Disney’s Donald Duck, in the 1942 short “Donald Duck In Nutziland” (retitled “Der Fuehrer’s Face”), won an Academy Award after the unhappy duck dreamed he was stuck in Nazi Germany.
And then it concludes with this suggestion:
U.S. policymakers must incorporate ridicule into their strategic thinking. Ridicule is a tool that they can use without trying to control. It exists naturally in its native environments in ways beneficial to the interests of the nation and cause of freedom. Its practitioners are natural allies, even if we do not always appreciate what they say or how they say it. The United States need do little more than give them publicity and play on its official and semi-official global radio, TV and Internet media, and help them become
“discovered.” And it should be relentless about it.
And for what it’s worth John Lenczowski, a National Security Council staffer under President Ronald Reagan, founded the IWP.
A modern and somewhat nuanced take on what this all means today is captured in a new talk by General Glen VanHerck, head of US Northern Command:
“Rather than primarily focusing on kinetic defeat, for the defense of the homeland, I think we must get further left,” VanHerck told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “Deterrence is establishing competition by using all levers of influence as I conveyed, and most importantly, the proper use of the information space to demonstrate the will, the capability, the resiliency, and the readiness by creating doubt in any potential adversaries mind that they can ever be successful by striking our homeland.”
Putting “doubt in any potential adversaries mind that they can ever be successful”… is to ridicule them, as Rommel found out the hard way when he quickly lost all his potential to be an adversary.
A 911 call was placed by “neighbors” near Grand Rapids, Michigan when a black army veteran with his son and his real estate agent toured a home for sale.
The trio suddenly found themselves surrounded by police pointing guns… with no cause.
Thorne and his son were touring a home Sunday with real estate agent Eric Brown, who’s also Black, in Wyoming, Mich., when police suddenly surrounded the house with guns drawn. The officers were responding to a neighbor’s 911 call about a break in. They ordered the three out of the house, handcuffed them and put them in separate vehicles.
Except it wasn’t a break in. Brown, 46, who has been working in the Grand Rapids area market for 20 years, had arrived at the house on Sharon Avenue SW around 2 p.m. Thorne brought his 15-year-old son, Samuel.
The police were forced to release them since they had absolutely no cause (other than racism) in what amounted to little more than a “shining city” intolerance operation at taxpayers’ expense.
Another Black man with a similar car to the real estate agent’s vehicle was arrested after he went into the house without permission July 24, police said. […] A neighbor saw Brown’s car parked in front of the house on Aug. 1 and called police, wrongly reporting that the intruder had returned, the statement said. Brown’s car is the same color as that first person’s but a different make and model.
Ok, let’s break this down, because it’s so racist it screams here are some racists who actually think they aren’t being racist while being even more racist.
Did you notice how the recount starts by claiming a “similar” car yet ends up claiming it was a “different” car?
Imagine the police saying to the 911 caller “you said someone similar is in the house” and the caller replies “I see a different person in the house, they just have similar skin color”.
Take a proper look at what is really being said.
“Another black man” was driving “the same COLOR as that first person”… “but a different make and model“.
In other words…color. It reads as a confession. If you display the same color as a criminal, you will be treated as a criminal. The police literally have confessed now, albeit awkwardly, their actions were BASED ON COLOR ALONE and no actual cause.
It’s like a bad joke: Have you heard about the neighborhood where police can’t tell that a black driver named John in a Hyundai with license plate XYZ123 is NOT the same person as a black driver named Roger in a Mercedes with license plate ABC456?
Fun history fact: license plates were invented because the first cars all looked too similar and people reporting crimes in progress couldn’t tell them apart. That is true.
With everything said so far it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate what blinds police into incorrectly fixating when there were so many obvious differences.
Again, no other reason has been given for calling 911, just COLOR. And again, no other reason has been given for drawing guns, surrounding the house and detaining three people, just COLOR.
See also, an introduction to American racism and related housing discrimination:
The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to
make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should
be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within
internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by
support groups.
Reader view
The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents
which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is
another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple
protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword
search by a remote information server.
The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are
hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places
within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar
to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.
To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or
she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other
search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire
world of data.
Information provider view
The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols
(FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data
is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and
information suppliers encourage each other.
Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your
existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and
making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file
available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small
start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of
the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full
text or keyword indexing.
The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format
between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart
browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into
multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of
them across the web.
This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the
WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant
out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more
information in the online project documentation, including some background on
hypertext and many technical notes.
Try it
A prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser is currently available
in source form from node info.cern.ch [currently 128.141.201.74] as
/pub/WWW/WWWLineMode_0.9.tar.Z.
Also available is a hypertext editor for the NeXT using the NeXTStep graphical
user interface, and a skeleton server daemon.
Documentation is readable using www (Plain text of the instalation instructions
is included in the tar file!). Document
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
is as good a place to start as any. Note these coordinates may change with
later releases.
And thus began the WWW with a line mode browser in a Z compressed tar (tape archive).
According to a 2008 paper called the Two Faces of Death, vaccination and antibiotics completely changed mortality statistics for US military:
Throughout America’s first 145 years of war, far more of the country’s military personnel perished from infectious diseases than from enemy action. This enduring feature of war was finally reversed in World War II, chiefly as a result of major medical advances in prevention (vaccines) and treatment (antibiotics). Safeguarding the health of a command is indispensable for the success of any campaign. Wars are lost by disease, which causes an enormous drain on the military’s resources and affects both strategy and tactics.
Wars are lost by disease, as none other than General George Washington himself argued in his day.
Among the Continental regulars in the American Revolution, 90 percent of deaths were caused by disease, and Variola the small pox virus was the most vicious of them all. […] Weighing the risks, on February 5th of 1777, Washington finally committed to the unpopular policy of mass inoculation by writing to inform Congress of his plan. Throughout February, Washington, with no precedent for the operation he was about to undertake, covertly communicated to his commanding officers orders to oversee mass inoculations of their troops in the model of Morristown and Philadelphia (Dr. Shippen’s Hospital). At least eleven hospitals had been constructed by the year’s end. Variola raged throughout the war, devastating the Native American population and slaves who had chosen to fight for the British in exchange for freedom. Yet the isolated infections that sprung up among Continental regulars during the southern campaign failed to incapacitate a single regiment.
Yes you read that right. Washington was killing Native Americans and free blacks in his quest to create a kind of independence that allowed white men like him to preserve and greatly expand slavery for personal enrichment.
Another way of explaining this can be found in the book “Thirteen Clocks”
Parkinson reveals how the system’s participants constructed a compelling drama featuring virtuous men who suddenly found themselves threatened by ruthless Indians and defiant slaves acting on behalf of the king. Parkinson argues that patriot leaders used racial prejudices to persuade Americans to declare independence. Between the Revolutionary War’s start at Lexington and the Declaration, they broadcast any news they could find about Native Americans, enslaved Blacks, and Hessian mercenaries working with their British enemies. American independence thus owed less to the love of liberty than to the exploitation of colonial fears about race.
One might think forced vaccination in this context would become inherently part of the American dream of prosperity and freedom (to continue slavery). Just look at how John Adams wrote to his wife in the month before Declaration of Independence in 1776:
The smallpox is ten times more terrible than the British, Canadians and Indians together. This was the cause of our precipitate retreat from Quebec.
Notably, John Adams refused to abolish slavery such that when the British Army went around America giving slaves their freedom (at least a third of slaves in Georgia were set free — fresh in their mind was how America had been violating the 1735 abolishment of slavery under British rule). Adams even set about trying to win some “restitution” for the American slaveholders forced by the British government to give black people their freedom!
Imagine being the guy demanding an end to tyranny under Britain, yet then turning around and demanding Britain pay Americans compensation as the British freed people from tyranny.
I mean the American military leaders only very reluctantly allowed black men to fight alongside them. By comparison the British encouraged both black men and women to join them, enticing them with freedom from American slaveholders like Washington and Adams.
The most accurate reading of the time is Washington personally refused the constant pressure to end slavery as he could not conceive of how to get rich (offset loss of productivity/wealth he was illegally gaining) without being immoral. Adams refused constant pressure to end slavery as he likewise saw slavery as a “unifying” cause among the wealthy white men holding power.
Adams was often wrong and this was no exception. While Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts abolished slavery during the war, and while Virginia, Maryland and Delaware legislatures removed barriers for slave owners to free their enslaved workers… Washington and his peers gave lip service, balked and backpedaled.
You would think that Washington or Adams simply would look at the record of black freemen fighting alongside whites in a war for independence, and quickly set blacks free (as the British had said they would). Consider this 1782 document of Freeman service from the State of Connecticut, for example:
Source: US Library of Congress, Revolutionary War documents for Juba Freeman
Instead Washington died on December 14, 1799 from illness allegedly caused by forcing his slaves to work in harsh weather (no one speaks of what happened to his slaves forced to suffer that same weather).
Washington clearly invested his entire life in preserving slavery and nobody can deny the documents that show how hard he worked with his lawyers to secretly find ways to delay and avoid abolition — refuse his slaves freedom even by 1780 when he was legally required to do so. He literally broke the law to keep enslaving people.
This is essential to help understand why President John Adams wrote (incorrectly) in 1801 “the practice of slavery is fast diminishing” or the actual fact that by 1810 nearly 75% of slaves in “northern” states of America had been emancipated. Yet black Americans faced brutally violent racism and the systemic inability of their government to accept blacks into society let alone power, or grant them equal rights.
…tell me if their declaration is true — viz. if the United States of America is a Republican Government? — Is this not the most tyrannical, unmerciful, and cruel government under Heaven — not excepting the Algerines, Turks and Arabs? — I believe if any candid person would take the trouble to go through the southern and Western sections of this country, and could have the heart to see the cruelties inflicted by these Christians on us, he would say, that the Algerines, Turks and Arabs treat their dogs a thousand times better than we are treated by the Christians.
American ships circulated this book, as Walker very intentionally engaged with sailors at the port close to his shop in Boston. In response, authorities in the South applied harsh censorship to stop circulation; sailors were thrown in jail for having a copy and spied upon.
David Walker died soon after publishing his clear-eyed assessment of freedom in America… allegedly from disease.
While these important contextual details of America’s first forced variolation (early form of vaccination) rarely are discussed, I find it most interesting how Washington was an adamant advocate and pushed so hard to give people a cure from physical disease one hand while refusing to stop the “cognitive disease” of racism.
An 1808 illustration by renowned cartoonist Cruikshank with pioneering “speech bubbles” depicting pioneering vaccination proponents chasing away the dangerous old variolators. (Click to enlarge and read)
Washington essentially used variolation as a tactic to help cement a vision of white male prosperity through tyranny in America (dangerously postponing global movement towards abolition, greatly expanding enslavement), which arguably set a direct course towards Civil War.
In that sense, President Grant should be seen as rising above Washington in every regard. Not only emancipating his own slave but directly facing the conflict and ending slavery nationally and establishing civil rights for black Americans. Grant was the best President in American history, a better man than Washington by far… with a curious exception of military vaccination.
During the Civil War almost 40% of Union soldiers with smallpox died from it, such that it has been estimated many more died from disease than during battle.
“Roughly two out of three men who died in the war died from disease,” Hacker says. “The war took men from all over the country and brought them all together into camps that became very filthy very quickly.” Deaths resulted from diarrhea, dysentery, measles, typhoid and malaria, among other illnesses.
Perhaps Grant in his day lacked the data available now, which is is why he didn’t see vaccines as the obvious and undeniably effective way to prevent unnecessary deaths. It raises an interesting question as to whether he would have mandated vaccinations, as he was able to correctly see the future in so many other ways.
