Leading by Deception

Chapter 1

Leading by Deception

It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

Mark Twain

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

                                          Marshall McLuhan

                                                                                                

Sound bites plague modern mankind. These short verbal ejaculations prod the public into agreement with a cause for action. They sell, seduce and twist the common perspective and often serve as the mechanism that can “turn the herd” when necessary. The effectiveness of traditional sound bites relies on the conditioned viewpoint of the populace. This viewpoint emanates from authority (fill in church, government, father, mother, or whomever or whatever exerts this power over you) having been programmed through education, social and societal norms. The power of a sound bite can be devastating: launching wars, ostracizing components of societies or entire societies, inducing financial enslavement and engineering other desired (by someone) outcomes.

During the Vietnam war, many young men and women lined up to sacrifice their lives enticed by the first sound bite of which my emerging awareness became conscious. They (authority) told my generation (of Americans) that if we did not stop the communists in Vietnam we would be taken over by the enemy through a process that they called “The Domino Theory” (well crafted sound bite). Eisenhower argued that if South Vietnam was taken over by communists, other countries in the region such as Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Indonesia, would soon fall victim to the “Communist Menace” (not such a shabby sound bite of its own) and eventually the United States would follow. ^_ So amazingly and profoundly unquestioned by the populace of the US was The Domino Theory, that it maintained its prominence as an effective propaganda tool being utilized through the successive administrations of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Good sound bites require constant repetition (in this case to turn a lie into a truth) and demand well positioned protagonists to dramatize (or animate) the deception.

“Vietnam is a nasty place to fight. But there are no neat and tidy battlefields in the struggle for freedom; there is no ‘good” place to die. And it is far better to fight in Vietnam – on China’s doorstep – than fight some years hence in Hawaii on our own frontiers”

H.W. Baldwin

America lost the war and the Vietnamese people still maintain the form of government presided over by Ho Chi Min (whatever that was or may be today).

Although the war machine was ineffective, (if the object was to win) the same cannot be said about the Domino Theory sound bite. Through the skillful use of this propaganda instrument, 58,220 American soldiers lost their lives, (this does not include the veterans who continue to die to this day because of exposure to the deadly toxin dioxin [better known as Agent Orange]), 303,616 Americans were wounded and 13,167 became 100% disabled. 1,921,000 Vietnamese, 200,000 Cambodians, 100,000 Laotian soldiers and civilians also died during this conflict and 3,200,000 total Indochinese were left wounded. But body counts and broken people quickly become historical statistics as time speeds by, and in the instance of this atrocity, the pain and suffering continue to pass from one generation to another constituting the real domino effect set in motion by this well crafted, skillfully employed lie.

In April of 1975, when the US finally pulled out of this ravaged country, it had created 14,305,000 refuges and left a legacy of broken families, disease and misery. 300,000 children had become orphans while another 500,000 were robbed of a parent. But the real horror remained imbedded within the bodies of the Vietnamese left behind. Millions of gallons of toxic herbicides were sprayed over the country exposing an estimated 5 million people, mostly civilians, to deadly consequences. According to the Aspen Institute, 11.4 million gallons of this poison contained deadly dioxin, one of the most dangerous toxins known to man. Better known as Agent Orange, the Vietnamese exposed to this poison suffer from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, reproductive problems, skin and nervous disorders. Second and third generations exposed to this dreadful nightmare suffer from severe physical deformities, physical and mental disabilities, diseases and a shortened lifespan. The direct cost to the American taxpayer of the undertaking based on a lie was a cool $900,000,000,000.

Granted the Domino effect sound bite was not the only propaganda technique used to achieve these fatal consequences, there were other (media/government) events and interventions.

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