War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death Page #2

States like these and their terrorist

allies constitute an axis of evil,

arming to threaten the

peace of the world.

These are barbaric people.

Servants of evil. The cult of evil.

A monumental struggle

of good versus evil.

But good will prevail.

Solomon:
Whether it's the

Soviet Union or Al Qaeda,

it provides a way to

legitimize US plans for war.

You have the comparisons between

the enemy leader and Hitler.

President Bush calls Saddam Hussein

a little Hitler again today.

We are dealing with Hitler revisited.

Bin Laden and his terrorist

allies have made their intentions

as clear as Lenin and

Hitler before them.

Solomon:
We don't get

information that...

would help us put the

images in perspective.

This mad dog of the Middle East.

I find that he's not only a

barbarian but he's flakey.

The drug indicted, drug-related

indicted dictator of Panama.

And to support their claim that

Noriega was out of control,

ghoulish evidence of Satanic

practices with dead animals

that one official called kinky.

Saddam Hussein is a

homicidal dictator

who is addicted to weapons

of mass destruction.

Solomon:
And as Aldous

Huxley said long ago,

it's more powerful often to leave

things out then to tell lies.

For instance, quite

often the US government

directly helped the dictators

that were now being told

must be overthrown and it's

that selectivity of history

that's a very effective

form of propaganda.

Narrator:
This selective

view of reality,

buttressed by these

fear-based appeals

represents a larger pre-war pattern.

The repeated claim that the

United States uses military force

only with great reluctance.

We still seek no wider war.

The United States does

not start fights.

America does not seek conflict.

I don't like to use military force.

Our nation enters this

conflict reluctantly.

Narrator:
And only for the

most virtuous of reasons,

first and foremost to spread

freedom and democracy.

We want nothing for ourselves,

only that the people of South Vietnam

be allowed to guide their

own country in their own way.

Solomon:
The rhetoric

of democracy is...

part of the process

of convincing people

that even though unpleasant things

must be done sometimes in its name,

like bombing other countries,

democracy is really what it's about.

The United States has been engaged

in an effort to stop the advance

of Communism in Central America

by doing what we do best.

By supporting democracy.

Solomon:
And it's

almost as if though...

repeating it enough

times makes it so.

Our cause of liberty,

our cause of freedom,

our cause of compassion

and understanding.

People want democracy,

peace and the chance for a better

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