masterwordsmith-unplugged

Thanks to Mr TSK for sharing this post.

CLICK  HERE to watch the secret World War 2 Death Lab!

CLICK HERE to view a slide presentation on The Bridge Over theRiver Kwai Music : Malcolm Arnold

2. Kwai (Khwae Noi) - a river in western Thailand near the border with Burma, flows into the Gulf of Thailand. During the Second World War two bridges were built across the river.During the building many Allied prisoners of war were killed. The river and the events of the war was made famous by the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. The David Lean film was based on the novel by Pierre Boulle of the same title.When the Japanese entered the Second World War, they immediately began to wonderhow to avoid the blocking the Bay of Bengal by the Allies.

The search for a different way between the gained lands, stretched from Singapore to the northern border of Burma.Theydecided that the best solution would be to build a railway - linking stations in Burma and
Thailand. They marked trail through the valley of the River Kwai, although the area was almost inaccessible to man.

Work on both ends of the railway line began in June 1942. Its hard to believe that up to 60 thousand slaves were forced to work. Allied prisoners of war, later expanded the number to 200 thousand. Allied prisoners and Asian forced laborers, with the help of primitive tools, cut through three million cubic meters of rock and built nearly fifteen kilometers of bridges. When, after fifteen months the line was completed, it fully deserved to be called the "Railway of Death." The cost of lives rose to 16 thousand prisoners and 100 thousand. Asian workers.

CLICK HERE for more.

A blog that I enjoy reading is Discourse in C#minor at this link. The authoress is a deep thinker who writes with much sincerity and feeling. Honestly, I wish I could write like her. Humble about her abilities, her discourses are varied but interesting. Her latest post is about 'The Death of Marie Colvin' and I am reposting it this evening as a tribute to the late journalist from the UK Sunday Times.

Excerpt:

A little less than a year ago I wrote about a number of women whom I admired over the course of March (Women’s History Month). Two days ago, one of them, Marie Colvin was killed in Syria where she was covering the government-mandated slaughter currently taking place there. This is what I wrote about her in 2011. The whole post is here, if you’re interested.

Marie Colvin is a correspondent for the UK Sunday Times and has been one for over twenty years. She has covered conflicts in the Balkans, Chechnya, East Timor, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and pretty much anywhere else things are blowing up. She was on CNN reporting from Libya last week. Though I can find tons of her work, I can’t find any biographical profiles. This piece, written in 2000 for the American Journalism Review, and this five-year-old article from the New York Daily News are the best I could do. I love her work because she goes places few will and stays after most leave. Such actions make good copy, but come with some with serious risk to life and limb. In 1999, Ms. Colvin lost her left eye while covering the Sri Lankan civil war in an incident which reads remarkably like a set up. Her work has not gone without recognition. In 2010, Ms. Colvin won the British Press Award for Best Foreign Journalist of the Year.

CLICK HERE for the rest of the entry.

I will always remember and admire Marie Colvin's courage and perseverance to report truth as it is. May she rest in peace always.

Enjoy this post by Sheri Berman, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Extract:The Promise of the Arab SpringIn Political Development, No Gain Without Pain by Sheri Berman


Two years after the outbreak of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring, the bloom is off the rose. Fledgling democracies in North Africa are struggling to move forward or even maintain control, government crackdowns in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere have kept liberalization at bay, and Syria is slipping ever deeper into a vicious civil war that threatens to ignite the Middle East. Instead of widespread elation about democracy finally coming to the region, one now hears pessimism about the many obstacles in the way, fear about what will happen next, and even open nostalgia for the old authoritarian order. Last June, when the Egyptian military dismissed parliament and tried to turn back the clock by gutting the civilian presidency, The Wall Street Journal's chief foreign policy columnist cracked, "Let's hope it works." (It didn't.) And Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's attempted power grab in November made such nostalgia commonplace.

The skepticism is as predictable as it is misguided. Every surge of democratization over the last century -- after World War I, after World War II, during the so called third wave in recent decades -- has been followed by an undertow, accompanied by widespread questioning of the viability and even desirability of democratic governance in the areas in question. As soon as political progress stalls, a conservative reaction sets in as critics lament the turbulence of the new era and look back wistfully to the supposed stability and security of its authoritarian predecessor. One would have hoped that by now people would know better -- that they would understand that this is what political development actually looks like, what it has always looked like, in the West just as much as in the Middle East, and that the only way ahead is to plunge forward rather than turn back.

The first error critics make is treating new democracies as blank slates, ignoring how much of their dynamics and fate are inherited rather than chosen. Turmoil, violence, and corruption are taken as evidence of the inherent dysfunctionality of democracy itself, or of the immaturity or irrationality of a particular population, rather than as a sign of the previous dictatorship's pathologies. Because authoritarian regimes lack popular legitimacy, they often manipulate and deepen communal cleavages in order to divide potential opponents and generate support among favored groups. So when democratization occurs, the pent-up distrust and animosity often explode. And because authoritarian regimes rule by command rather than consensus, they suppress dissent and block the creation of political and social institutions that allow for the regular, peaceful articulation and organization of popular demands. So citizens in new democracies often express their grievances in a volatile and disorganized way, through a dizzying array of parties, extremist rhetoric and behavior, and street protests and even battles.

All these dynamics have been present in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. In Egypt, for example, the regimes of Anwar al-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak refused to allow the development of real political parties or many independent civil-society associations, which helps explain why Islamism is such a dominant political force there now. Religious organizations were among the only forums in which average citizens could express themselves or participate actively in the lives of their communities, and so when Mubarak fell and the transition occurred, only Islamists had the infrastructure in place to mobilize supporters effectively. The underdevelopment of other civil-society and political organizations, in turn, meant that once the dictatorship disintegrated, there were few institutions capable of channeling, much less responding to, popular grievances -- which explains the current lack of strong non-Islamist political parties and the tendency of Egyptians to take to the streets to express their demands and dissatisfaction. Morsi's November move to escape judicial review of his edicts reflects a broader Islamist distrust of Egyptian courts, due in part to the absence of reliable rule of law during the Mubarak era, just as the inability of the anti-Mubarak forces to work together today reflects their fractured, poisoned history under the previous tyranny. As Ahmed Mekky, the justice minister, said of the judicial-review controversy, "I blame all of Egypt, because they do not know how to talk to each other" -- which was precisely Mubarak's goal.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

The euphemisms will come fast and furious.  Our soldiers will be greeted as “heroes” who, as in Iraq, left with their “heads held high,” and if in 2014 or 2015 or even 2019, the last of them, as also in Iraq, slip away in the dark of night after lying to their Afghan “allies” about their plans, few here will notice.

This will be the nature of the great Afghan drawdown. The words “retreat,” “loss,” “defeat,” “disaster,” and their siblings and cousins won’t be allowed on the premises.  But make no mistake, the country that, only years ago, liked to call itself the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” whose leaders dreamed of a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East, if not the rest of the globe is… not to put too fine a point on it, packing its bags, throwing in the towel, quietly admitting -- in actions, if not in words -- to mission unaccomplished, and heading if not exactly home, at least boot by boot off the Eurasian landmass.

Washington has, in a word, had enough. Too much, in fact.  It’s lost its appetite for invasions and occupations of Eurasia, though special operations raids, drone wars, and cyberwars still look deceptively cheap and easy as a means to control... well, whatever.  As a result, the Afghan drawdown of 2013-2014, that implicit acknowledgement of yet another lost war, should set the curtain falling on the American Century as we’ve known it.  It should be recognized as a landmark, the moment in history when the sun truly began to set on a great empire.  Here in the United States, though, one thing is just about guaranteed: not many are going to be paying the slightest attention.

No one even thinks to ask the question: In the mighty battle lost, who exactly beat us?  Where exactly is the triumphant enemy?  Perhaps we should be relieved that the question is not being raised, because it’s a hard one to answer.  Could it really have been the scattered jihadis of al-Qaeda and its wannabes?  Or the various modestly armed Sunni and Shiite minority insurgencies in Iraq, or their Pashtun equivalents in Afghanistan with their suicide bombers and low-tech roadside bombs?  Or was it something more basic, something having to do with a planet no longer amenable to imperial expeditions?  Did the local and global body politic simply and mysteriously spit us out as the distasteful thing we had become?  Or is it even possible, as Pogo once suggested, that in those distant, unwelcoming lands, we met the enemy and he was us?  Did we in some bizarre fashion fight ourselves and lose?  After all, last year, more American servicemen died from suicide than on the battlefield in Afghanistan; and a startling number of Americans were killed in “green on blue” or “insider” attacks by Afghan “allies” rather than by that fragmented movement we still call the Taliban.

Whoever or whatever was responsible, our Afghan disaster was remarkably foreseeable.

Please CLICK HERE to read this fantastic article by Ann Jones.

This afternoon, I decided to blog about comfort women after I read HERE about South Korean activists' plans to put up statues commemorating women forced into wartime sexual slavery by Japan in a number of Asian countries, starting with Singapore next Wednesday.

So far, the best and most graphic website I visited is none other than photographer Jan Banning's post AT THIS LINK. You can read more about Jan Banning HERE. 

Jan Banning's post is particularly moving because he has put up very expressive photographs of 18 women who dared to stride out to speak about their experiences.

Together with writer Hilde Janssen, Banning visited Indonesian women who had been victims of forced sexual labour.

Each photograph is accompanied by a brief summary of the victim's experience. These elderly women exude a certain element of reslience in their expressions. Yet, if you look closely, especially at their eyes, it is clear the pain remains even with the passing years reminding us of how difficult it must have been for them to endure those experiences, worse still, endure the memory of such painful, haunting and emotionally draining experiences.

I thought Mardiyah's photograph was most moving. Her eyes seemed to have a hauntinglike pain, hiding decades of suppressed grief. The deep lines between her brows were probably from the years of asking ,"Why me?", never understanding nor accepting the hardship and turmoil that she has had to endure. And now, she lives in loneliness, haunted by her past.

Dominggas' portrait is also clevery executed by Banning. Look at the deep lines on her face, the blank and almost numb look in her eyes. Painful!

Sanikem's story is tragic but she managed to find happiness. Her face exudes peace and strength of character...hers is a conscious decision to choose happiness over grief. Not many have the strength to make such a decision and to execute that decision successfully.

Icih Dehuri's story is very traumatising to read. I cannot imagine the magnitude of horror she must have experienced. Her facial expression as captured expertly by Banning shows how she has come to terms with her past.

Reading Ronasih's story of how the soldiers systematically raped her for three years was quite a nightmare. Some people may wonder why there are activists who campaign for these comfort women but I believe they will change their perspective once they talk to the victims, see their faces and try to imagine the ordeal and living hell they had gone through.

Mastia's story is deeply moving and gives us an open window to see how comfort women suffer. She said "People nevertheless continued to call me a 'Japanese hand-me-down.' That made me very sad. I still think about it often."

Niyem was raped when she was 10. Shocking. Excerpt from Banning's site: Niyem had to share a small tent with two other girls, where soldiers raped them in the presence of others. She didn't get much to eat and had to drink water from a ditch. "I was still so young, within two months my body was completely destroyed. I was nothing but a toy, as a human being I meant nothing, that's how it felt during the Japanese era."

Banning really captured the sorrow in Antonetha's eyes. It is almost too painful to look at her photograph.

Beauty has a price. That is the lesson that Emah learnt. Clearly, she must have been a stunning beauty during the Japanese occupation. Her striking beauty is still there in the photo. Her eyes are particularly unusual. The right eye seems to show resilience whilst the left eye is trying to mask the grief and sorrow that time can never heal. Maybe I am too imaginative and reading too much into a photograph. According to Banning's site, "In the office where the servicemen had to buy a ticket, there were pictures of the girls they could choose from. "Everyone wanted me. They kept on coming, one after the other." She resented her beauty. "I so much wanted to be ugly, because the ugly girls they quickly sent home again. But the beautiful ones had to stay." She stayed at the brothel until the end of the war. When she returned home, it turned out both her parents had died of sadness. She married an older man of Javanese nobility. "I really didn't want to, but I took pity on him. After he died four years later, I never married again, even though I had many admirers." She never was able to have children and adopted two of her brother's children."

I cannot imagine the horror and anguish comfort women suffered. May God heal them of their past and may the memories of their pain and ordeal fade away to be replaced by happiness in their sunset years. And for those who have departed, may they rest in peace, at last.

Thank you, Jan Banning and Hilde Janssen for your work to let us understand the turbulence and suffering of Indonesian comfort women.

If you want to know a first hand account, CLICK HERE.

Excerpt:

During WWII, up to 200,000 women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. These women and girls were kept in 'comfort stations' in China, Taiwan, Borneo, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), Indonesia and many of the Pacific Islands.

Women were abducted, deceived or sold by extremely poor parents. The majority of women were under the age of 20 and some were girls as young as 12. These women and girls were kept for months or years on end.

South Korean Kim Bok-dong, was one of those women. Now 90 years old, she was taken from her home village and abused as a ‘comfort woman’. Here she gives a rare insight into her horrific experience and her continued fight for justice. CLICK HERE for more.

I am sure the following photograph is familiar to those of us who are older, especially the baby boomers.

According to The Daily Mail:

It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago.

It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history.

But beneath the photo lies a lesser-known story. It's the tale of a dying child brought together by chance with a young photographer.

Read more about the girl in the photograph AT THIS LINK.

The following post by Josh Hong was first posted HERE.

Nearly ten years ago, the United States and Britain were caught in a frenzy in banging the drums of war against the Saddam Hussein regime. The world was split down the middle, with Donald Rumsfeld, then-US defence secretary, labelling European leaders who refused to consider military action as belonging to ‘old Europe’. No doubt, a flurry of angry reactions ensued.

In Malaysia, the public opinion was however carefully manufactured, as Mahathir Mohamad sought to capitalise on the situation by portraying himself as at the forefront against what the Malaysian Muslim community - and he himself particularly - perceived as yet another example of US hegemony in the Middle East.

Anti-war rhetoric was all over the media, and Umno-linked newspapers churned out one article after another condemning the propaganda machine from the White House. Of course, these Umno mouthpieces would conveniently forget that they, too, only sing from the song sheet given by the Malaysian government.

I remember attending a talk at a five-star hotel in Kuala Lumpur, at which Karim Raslan openly derided an American Muslim who was there to defend the Bush administration’s pursuit of war as ‘Uncle Tom’, to resounding applause from the floor. The American guest was thoroughly humiliated and I could not have felt more sorry for him.

While I shared some of the anti-war sentiments, the jingoistic language employed by the Malaysian speakers was making me equally uneasy. But I was at the same time cognisant of the fact that they were there as proxies of Mahathir, with a view to running down American policy without taking stock of the human rights violations at home.

The Iraq War has now come and gone, leaving millions in misery in the country.

Fast forward a decade later, things remain precarious in the Middle East; what has changed drastically is the position of the Malaysian government. Although the western countries are again drumming up a phony war against both Syria and Iran, Najib Abdul Razak appears least interested to make a stand.

Perhaps most disturbing to his mind is how to ensure an electoral victory by hook or by crook, or all the allegations of his involvement in the submarine scandal. Even James Wong, a high priest of war, has gone silent after George W Bush’s weapons of mass deception were exposed.

The recent killings of more than 100 civilians - including many children - in Syria were shocking, and sparked outrage from Washington, Paris to Ankara. Syrian ambassadors are now given short notice to leave, even though the circumstances of the attack remain unclear. To me, it is rather inconceivable that Bashar al-Assad would have allowed himself to be shot in the foot when the world media had been conspiring against him. As always, truth is the first victim of war.

Clipping Russian and Chinese influence

The world has not changed much. After the euphoria over the ignominious fall and death of Colonel Qaddafi, Libya’s civil war is only escalating. Still, many have their eye set on Syria in an attempt to isolate Iran. Once these objectives are achieved, the presence of Russia and China’s effort to exert its influence in the region would be severely clipped, if not eliminated.

Unfortunately, Moscow’s and Beijing’s unequivocal objection to tougher UN Security Council action presents a major obstacle, and Hilary Clinton’s (right) dismay is only expected.

The Free Syrian Army is determined to go the full mile and certain western powers are ready to back them. Like Iraq, Syria is a diverse country with various ethnic groups. Should this come to pass, waves of sectarian violence are a sure outcome, providing real terrorists with a passport to roam around and to present a far greater threat to a region already strewn with insecurity.

But how long would Russia and China hold on to their position is anybody’s guess. After all, state and strategic interests trump solidarity in international politics.

While the atrocities of the al-Assad regime over the years are undisputed, it is worth asking why the same international media have not shown the same degree of keen interest in Bahrain, where civilians are routinely beaten up and even killed for speaking against the royal family.

Al Jazeera has legitimately and rightfully cried foul over the censorship by the Malaysian government over its coverage of the Bersih 3.0 rally, but the so-called alternative to the BBC and CNN, owned by the Qatar Media Corporation, too, has been playing down anti-establishment movements in Bahrain in its Arabic programmes while never failing to highlight Syria.

And news on the daily drones by the US authorities continues to receive minimal attention.

As Micah Zenko and Emma Welch argue in Foreign Policy, the overseas use of drones has expanded across the battlefields of Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq, targeting “suspected militants and terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, as well as to conduct surveillance missions over Colombia, Haiti, Iran, Mexico, North Korea, the Philippines, Turkey, and beyond”. What the two authors have not mentioned is the high civilian deaths in the adventures.

Confronted with all the double standard practiced by media from west to east, I could not help but feel an immense sense of liberation when I finally unsubscribed from Astro. So long!

-Written by Josh Hong-

JOSH HONG studied politics at London Metropolitan University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A keen watcher of domestic and international politics, he longs for a day when Malaysians will learn and master the art of self-mockery, and enjoy life to the full in spite of politicians.

On August 6, 1945, the United States used a massive, atomic weapon against Hiroshima, Japan. This atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, flattened the city, killing tens of thousands of civilians. While Japan was still trying to comprehend this devastation three days later, the United States struck again, this time, on Nagasaki.



Hiroshima

At 2:45 a.m. on Monday, August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off from Tinian, a North Pacific island in the Marianas, 1,500 miles south of Japan. The twelve-man crew (picture) were on board to make sure this secret mission went smoothly. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot, nicknamed the B-29 the "Enola Gay" after his mother. Just before take-off, the plane's nickname was painted on its side.

The Enola Gay was a B-29 Superfortress (aircraft 44-86292), part of the 509th Composite Group. In order to carry such a heavy load as an atomic bomb, the Enola Gay was modified: new propellers, stronger engines, and faster opening bomb bay doors. (Only fifteen B-29s underwent this modification.) Even though it had been modified, the plane still had to use the full runway to gain the necessary speed, thus it did not lift off until very near the water's edge.1

The Enola Gay was escorted by two other bombers that carried cameras and a variety of measuring devices. Three other planes had left earlier in order to ascertain the weather conditions over the possible targets.

On a hook in the ceiling of the plane, hung the ten-foot atomic bomb, "Little Boy." Navy Captain William S. Parsons ("Deak"), chief of the Ordnance Division in the "Manhattan Project," was the Enola Gay's weaponeer. Since Parsons had been instrumental in the development of the bomb, he was now responsible for arming the bomb while in-flight. Approximately fifteen minutes into the flight (3:00 a.m.), Parsons began to arm the atomic bomb; it took him fifteen minutes. Parsons thought while arming "Little Boy": "I knew the Japs were in for it, but I felt no particular emotion about it."2

"Little Boy" was created using uranium-235, a radioactive isotope of uranium. This uranium-235 atomic bomb, a product of $2 billion of research, had never been tested. Nor had any atomic bomb yet been dropped from a plane. Some scientists and politicians pushed for not warning Japan of the bombing in order to save face in case the bomb malfunctioned.

There had been four cities chosen as possible targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata (Kyoto was the first choice until it was removed from the list by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson). The cities were chosen because they had been relatively untouched during the war. The Target Committee wanted the first bomb to be "sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it was released."3

On August 6, 1945, the first choice target, Hiroshima, was having clear weather. At 8:15 a.m. (local time), the Enola Gay's door sprang open and dropped "Little Boy." The bomb exploded 1,900 feet above the city and only missed the target, the Aioi Bridge, by approximately 800 feet.

Staff Sergeant George Caron, the tail gunner, described what he saw: "The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside. . . . It looked like lava or molasses covering a whole city. . . ."4 The cloud is estimated to have reached a height of 40,000 feet.

Captain Robert Lewis, the co-pilot, stated, "Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains."5 Two-thirds of Hiroshima was destroyed. Within three miles of the explosion, 60,000 of the 90,000 buildings were demolished. Clay roof tiles had melted together. Shadows had imprinted on buildings and other hard surfaces. Metal and stone had melted.

Unlike many other bombing raids, the goal for this raid had not been a military installation but rather an entire city. The atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima killed civilian women and children in addition to soldiers. Hiroshima's population has been estimated at 350,000; approximately 70,000 died immediately from the explosion and another 70,000 died from radiation within five years.

A survivor described the damage to people:

The appearance of people was . . . well, they all had skin blackened by burns. . . . They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back. . . . They held their arms bent [forward] like this . . . and their skin - not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too - hung down. . . . If there had been only one or two such people . . . perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people. . . . Many of them died along the road - I can still picture them in my mind -- like walking ghosts.6

NAGASAKI

While the people of Japan tried to comprehend the devastation in Hiroshima, the United States was preparing a second bombing mission. The second run was not delayed in order to give Japan time to surrender, but was waiting only for a sufficient amount of plutonium-239 for the atomic bomb. On August 9, 1945 only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another B-29, Bock's Car (picture of crew), left Tinian at 3:49 a.m.

The first choice target for this bombing run had been Kokura. Since the haze over Kokura prevented the sighting of the bombing target, Bock's Car continued on to its second target. At 11:02 a.m., the atomic bomb, "Fat Man," was dropped over Nagasaki. The atomic bomb exploded 1,650 feet above the city.

Fujie Urata Matsumoto, a survivor, shares one scene:

The pumpkin field in front of the house was blown clean. Nothing was left of the whole thick crop, except that in place of the pumpkins there was a woman's head. I looked at the face to see if I knew her. It was a woman of about forty. She must have been from another part of town -- I had never seen her around here. A gold tooth gleamed in the wide-open mouth. A handful of singed hair hung down from the left temple over her cheek, dangling in her mouth. Her eyelids were drawn up, showing black holes where the eyes had been burned out. . . . She had probably looked square into the flash and gotten her eyeballs burned.7

Approximately 40 percent of Nagasaki was destroyed. Luckily for many civilians living in Nagasaki, though this atomic bomb was considered much stronger than the one exploded over Hiroshima, the terrain of Nagasaki prevented the bomb from doing as much damage. Yet the decimation was still great. With a population of 270,000, approximately 70,000 people died by the end of the year.

I saw the atom bomb. I was four then. I remember the cicadas chirping. The atom bomb was the last thing that happened in the war and no more bad things have happened since then, but I don't have my Mummy any more. So even if it isn't bad any more, I'm not happy.
--- Kayano Nagai, survivor8



For more on Hiroshima, CLICK HERE.

For more on Nagasaki, CLICK HERE

______________________________________________

Listening to the Language and the Voices of Terrorists by Noa Zanolli

Psychological warfare is a tactic involving the use of propaganda or similar methods to demoralize the enemy in an attempt to ensure victory, possibly without even having to use physical violence. New technologies such as the radio, television, and the internet have helped carve the face of modern psychological warfare, ever creating new ways to reach the opposition. As long as conflicts exist, expect new forms of psychological warfare to be formulated and implemented.

Historical Perspective

1. Biblical Times

Psychological warfare was used in the Old Testament in Judges when Gideon fought the Amalekites.

2. Alexander the Great



Alexander the Great of Macedon swayed the mindsets of the people who were expropriated in his campaigns. To prevent them from revolting, he left some men behind in each city to introduce Greek culture, control it and oppress dissident views as well as interbreed. Most successfully, he influenced loyalist and separatist opinions alike and changed the psyches of the occupied people to conform.

3. The Mongols

Without psychological warfare, the Mongols would never have conquered more territory in the 13th century than anyone else in human history. This was their SOP:

Before attacking a settlement, the Mongol general would demand tribute and submission to the Khan or otherwise threaten to attack. The Mongols would threaten a village with complete destruction should a single arrow be fired. Nations like Kiev and Khwarizm, refused to surrender. In a series of choreographed maneuvers, the cavalry slaughtered the enemy.

As seen in many movies, a few would be spared to take their tales of the encroaching horde to the next villages. This created an aura of insecurity with the resistance, eventually supplanting the will of the villagers ending in victory.

Genghis Khan used fire at night to create an illusion of numbers. He ordered each soldier to light three torches at dusk in order to deceive and intimidate enemy scouts. Tamerlane, built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads before the walls of Delhi, to convince them to surrender.

4. World War II

Most of the events throughout history involving psychological warfare utilized tactics that instilled fear or a sense of awe towards the enemy. In the 20th century, advances in communications technology acted as a catalyst for mass propagandizing.

a) Adolf Hitler was one of the first leaders to relentlessly gain fanatical support through the use of technology. Most intelligently, Hitler used resonating projections of his orations through a microphone to exaggerate his presence to make him seem almost god-like.

This was a form of psychological warfare, because the image that he created for himself greatly influenced and swayed the German people to eventually follow him to what would ultimately become their own destruction. Sir Winston Churchill made similar use of radio for propaganda from the Allied side.

b) The American military in the invasion of Normandy displayed a fusion of psychological warfare with military deception. Before "D-Day," "Operation Quicksilver" created a fictional "First United States Army Group" (FUSAG) commanded by General George S. Patton that supposedly would invade France at the Pas-de-Calais. American troops used false signals, decoy installations, and phony equipment to deceive German observation aircraft and radio intercept operators.

America also used psychological warfare with some success in Japan during the same war. The Lemay bombing leaflets over Japan at the end of WWII was a major move by American forces. These documents, containing propaganda in Japanese, fostered distrust of Japanese leaders and encouraged the surrender of Japanese forces.

c) Radio personalities such as Lord Haw-Haw, Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose, Seoul City Sue and Hanoi Hannah also used propaganda for their respective causes.

d) The Cold War raised psychological techniques to a high art and merged them with economic warfare, "character assassination," and brainwashing. Techniques used include:

• Broadcasting of white noise to convince eavesdroppers that encryption was in use, and to waste vast sums of time and money trying to decrypt it.

• Recruiting particularly innocent-appearing individuals to be spies or saboteurs so that, when revealed or captured, doubt would be cast on many more individuals.

• Various methods to ensure that any captured agent implicated as many innocent others as possible, for instance, maximizing the number of questionable contacts.

e) Information age

In the 1980s, the Information Age provided the potential to extend psychological warfare throughout all civilian activities. Growing exponentially through the rise of radio, television, and finally manifesting itself on the Internet, the power of those who framed facts about the world steadily grew during the postwar period.

According to Daniel Lerner in Psychological Warfare Against Nazi Germany: The Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day, psychological warfare operations can be divided into three categories:

1. White [Omissions + Emphasis] - Truthful and not strongly biased, where the source of information is acknowledged.
2. Grey [Omissions + Emphasis + Racial/Ethnic/Religious Bias] - Largely truthful, containing no information that can be proven wrong; the source may or may not be hidden.
3. Black [Commissions of falsification] - Intended to deceive the enemy.

Bear in mind that psychological warfare uses propaganda. Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell defined propaganda as "the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognition, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist."

Propaganda appeals to emotion, not intellect. Propaganda was often used to influence opinions and beliefs on religious issues, particularly during the split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches.

Psychological Operations or PSYOP are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motivations, objectives, reasoning and behavior. It entails learning about the enemy - their beliefs, likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Once they know these, they will begin the psychological warfare campaign which is a war of the mind!!!

You can read more at THIS LINK. For samples of propaganda leaflets, CLICK HERE.

Some of you may wonder why I read up so much to write on this topic. Well, firstly, I am quite fed up of the current scene and need to activate my brain by reading more. Secondly, I love to give myself little research projects like this to occupy my time :-) in the evening. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed surfing the net for the wealth of information available and believe this information is so vital for us to make sense of the nonsense around us. Do leave a comment about this topic if you wish. I would love to hear your views. Take care and have a blessed evening/day wherever you may be.