Missile Defense

"Far more a political tool than a military one" says that we use our nuclear weapons as talking points in our discussions, as threats.

I think that American presidents, diplomats, and military people make these threats routinely, and shamelessly, and have for years. It is a crazily irresponsible thing to do.

I feel that the world should get together, and stop the US from bluffing in this destructive way -- it does far, far too much harm.

US renunciation of first use of nuclear weapons would be a very good thing for the safety of the whole world. And doing so ought to be a necessity for the honor of the United States itself.

I hate to remember a famous quote from H.L. Menken, in his essay "Valentino", but feel that it applies to US bluffing about nuclear weapons, and too much else:

" Unfortunately, all this happened in the United States, where the word "honor," save when it applies to the anatomical purity of women, has only a comic significance."

Even the thin standard Menken cites has eroded. The quote recurs to me, too often. Americans can and should do better than deserve Menken's words.

rshowalter - 12:24pm Apr 12, 2001 EST (#2192 of 2192)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I made a comment on US training practices in rshowalter 4/12/01 10:52am where I said this:

" the US knows how to train monsters fully as monstrous as the Nazis, in large part on the basis of procedures derived from Nazi handbooks that I have read -- techniques used to reduce the Kapos in the death camps to the horriffic robots they became are thoroughly understood in the US military, and sometimes used, full force, on US military personnel."

Here is the main technique, applied full force on a United States citizen who has entrusted himself to the care of the United States government. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/arts/29NOTE.html You Have to Face Reality. It's on Every Channel. . by JULIE SALAMON March 29, 2001 ---- shows a picture credited to Fox's "Boot Camp" and titled "A participant receives some assertive guidance."

a recruit is being yelled at, at close range, under threat, by drill sergeants. This is the same tactic (other torture was not necessary) by which the Nazis reduced many Jewish prisoners in the death camps to Kapos who would assist in the guidance of others into the gas chambers, who would extract teeth and jewelry, and otherwise "process" the corpses, and who, after a while, would walk, usually without even protesting, into the gas themselves.

I personally believe that yelling, in this way, at a person who is concentrating hard, can produce focused and extensive brain damage, by resonant destruction of spines.

Whether that is true or not, americans were instructed carefully, in person and by means of documents, on how prisoners could be "processed" into Kapos on a routine basis, repeated thousands of the time.

(There were other techniques I read of, as well, that I don't feel like repeating here.)

American training officers are permitting this to be done to American military recruits. Doing so, they can compel obedience, and they know this well, with a depth of knowledge and a degree of detail that, in my view, rules out extenuation.

I believe, on the basis of personal instructional experience and conversation, that many cases of focused reading disability trace to a similar cause -- kids are yelled at, when they are trying very hard, and the part of the brain that is "trying" -- in a resonantly receptive state -- is injured. Based on limited successful experience, I believe that this might be fixed routinely, if the process were acknowledged. I hope to get past some "paradigm conflict" issues and get this done, but that is a problem for another day.

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