By Bruce Fenton, via Todd Boyle
Did you know that the U.S. government took over $5.4 million of hard earned taxpayer wages to pay to the NFL to feature flag waving and “support our troops” / “hometown hero” slogans during football games?
Categorized as part of the massive Department of Defense “marketing and advertising budget”, which does things like this very often, the deal is just one of hundreds of sports related marketing campaigns.
Another ad campaign featured an Army recruiter dressed as a camouflage Star Wars stormtrooper with a laser gun that shoots government marketing t-shirts into the cheering audience.
The purpose of this is to:
1) Increase support of war – not based on facts, not based the Constitution, not based on a case about why American soil is in danger of invasion….but based on cheering and “feel good” sentiment which could just as easily be used by any country, any time.
2) To work as a recruiting tool for young people by showing them the adulation and heroic status they can get if they enlist to fight the wars the politicians and their backers support.
There simply isn’t any way to define this other than propaganda.
Propaganda is the tool governments use to manipulate people into accepting ideas that the rulers like ….but that the ruled would not like without the manipulation.
This type of thing is pervasive throughout America — all told, they spend billions of our own money to convince us they are spending our money the right ways — in many cases is created without the government even needing to spend more of our tax dollars…the machine creates more cheerleaders. The news media, private organizations and millions of citizens have been fooled into thinking that this is patriotism.
It’s not patriotism. It’s being fooled by propaganda.
The end result of this cheerleading for war, is that war has become so common we don’t even know or care as a nation who or where we are fighting or what the objective is. While used to take seriously every death of a service-member, they are now so common it barely makes the local news.
We have placed our country in more danger, ruined our economy, made ourselves hated and have cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of other lives…with nothing to show for it. Our disastrous policies led directly to the creation of ISIS, massive instability in Iraq and the region and before this, the deposition of a democratically elected leader in Iran, replaced by our puppet the Shah who was such a dirtbag he turned the whole country against us for decades.
These are not good policies. They are stupid policies….therefor they need heavy marketing to be sold to Americans. If we stopped and thought about it logically we’d stand against these policies. We’d also most likely not get a warm and fuzzy feeling when we see young people (who are government would gladly send to die for lies) waving flags at a cost of $5.4 million of our own money.
Source: public record, multiple articles