I have posted on this a number of times, somewhere, but figure it’s time for an update.
If you are going to move an immovable rock, how do you start? Is it not by eroding its foundations? Given time, the largest rock can be reduced by flowing water. The Grand Canyon was once solid.
The task of the brainwashing is to develop comfort with cognitive and perceptual dissonance. As one example, they might ask the captured American: do you think black people should be able to vote? Do you think they all deserve to be beaten? Do you think rich people owe no debt to the poor?
They might bring in some little girl who they say (it need not be true, of course) has been victimized by American bombs. They ask: do you feel sorry for this little girl?
They keep at this until they get some small agreement, then they ask you to write it down.
The next day they go a little farther, and then farther, and you acquire gradually the habit of small accomodations. Small changes, you figure, can’t hurt. You are kept in a ideologically sealed environment, such that you can’t see how you change over time in your views. One day, they tell you the United States is the Great Satan, which is the inverse of the truth where Communists are concerned, and you disagree. Then they show you all the notes detailing American aggressions. You want to fight it, but you wrote the notes. Emotional and cognitive pain follows. If you are going to fall, you fall here.
Once you fall, the justify it to yourself, that you are now in possession of the true truth, and you become an advocate of hate in the name of compassion, violence in the name of peace, and economic oppression in the name of economic liberty.
To the point on the question of who our President actually is, and if he is actually legally qualified to be our President (plainly, he is not qualified on his merits), the example I would use is the Communist use of sticks of varied lengths to gauge their progress.
First, they give you one stick that is 4″ long, and another that is 4 1/16″. There is a perceptible difference, but only if you place them right next to each other. They ask you if they are the same. You say no. They say that if you admit they are “mostly like each other”, that you will extra rations (they have of course been starving you to weaken your will, and diminish your judgement). This goes on for some time, and you get used to the rations. “It’s just a harmless game”, you say.
Then they put the two out, and they say, these two are of course the same, but do you see any difference between these two, where one is 1/8″ shorter than the other. Are they basically the same?
If you don’t confront them there, you will rationalize what they said. You will have internalized as truth something that just recently you knew to be false.
In my view, this birth certicate issue–where no representitive of the American people as a whole, which would presumably be a member of Congress and/or their designated representative, has been allowed to look at anything remotely conclusive–has a similar dynamic. We are being asked to accept as valid a process which is nothing of the sort. This situation is ridiculous. We are being asked to accept a a3″ stick as a 4″ stick. Once you have done that once, you will do it again.
That to my mind is the true significance of this issue. I don’t know and I don’t care what they find: they need to do the damn thing, as a matter of PRINCIPLE. Pass an Act of Congress forcing Fukino to release it to unbiased experts representing both parties, and the nation as a whole.
To do otherwise is to plead cowardice quite explicitly, in my view.