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People who think other groups are less evolved are more likely to support retaliation against them.

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This is an excerpt from the just released 2nd edition of Noam Chomsky's OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity published by Zuccotti Park Press.
Free Speech Radio News producer Catherine Komp interviews Noam Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky is amongst the world's most cited living scholars. Voted the "world's top public intellectual" in 2005, he is perhaps best known as a critic of all forms of social control and a relentless advocate for community-centered approaches to democracy and freedom. Over the last several decades, Chomsky has championed a wide range of dissident actions, organizations and social movements. In this excerpt from the just-released expanded edition of the Zuccotti Park Press book, Occupy: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity, Chomsky speaks with Free Speech Radio News about media control, fear, indoctrination and the importance of solidarity.
Catherine Komp: It's been twenty- five years since the publication of your and Edward Herman's acclaimed book Manufacturing Consent. How much do you think has changed with the propaganda model, and where do you see it playing out most prominently today?
Noam Chomsky: Well, ten years ago we had a re-edition and we talked about some of the changes. One change is that we were too narrow. There are a number of filters that determine the framework of reporting, and one of the filters was too narrow. Instead of "anti-communism," which was too narrow, it should have been "fear of the concocted enemy." So yes, it could be anti-communism-most of that is concocted. So take Cuba again. It's hard to believe, but for the Pentagon, Cuba was listed as one of the military threats to the United States until a couple of years ago. This is so ludicrous; you don't even know whether to laugh or cry. It's as if the Soviet Union had listed Luxembourg as a threat to its security. But here it kind of passes.

The United States is a very frightened country. And there are all kinds of things concocted for you to be frightened about. So that should have been the filter, and [there were] a few other things, but I think it's basically the same.

There is change. Free Speech Radio didn't exist when we wrote the book, and there are somethings on the Internet which break the bonds, as do independent work and things like the book I was just talking about when we came in, Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars, which is a fantastic piece of investigative reporting on the ground of what actually happens in the countries where we're carrying out these terror campaigns. And there's a lot of talk about drones, but not much about the fact that they are terror weapons.
So, some progress.
If we were sitting here wondering if, all of a sudden, there's going to be a bomb in this room, because they maybe want to kill him or kill us or whatever, it's terrorizing. In fact, we just saw a dramatic example of this which got a couple lines in the paper. A few days after the Boston Marathon bombing, there was a drone attack on a village in Yemen, kind of an isolated village. Obama and his friends decided to murder some guy. So the villagers are sitting there, and suddenly this guy gets blown away and whoever else is around him. I don't think it was reported except for the fact that there was Senate testimony a week later by a person from the village who's quite respected by Jeremy and others who know him. The man, Farea al-Muslimi, who studied at a high school in the U.S., testified to the Senate and he described what happened to his village. He said that every- body knew the man that they murdered, and that they could have easily apprehended him, but it waseasier to kill him and terrify the village. He also said something else which is important. He said that his friends and neighbors used to know of the United States primarily through his stories of "the wonderful experiences" he had here.* He said the U.S. bombing has turned them into people who hate America and want revenge-that's all it takes. And, in fact, this whole terror system is creating enemies and threats faster than it's killing suspects, apart from how awful that is. These things are going on, and going back to Jeremy, his book exposes a lot of it and also the exploits of the secret executive army, JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command. It's dangerous, but it's the kind of thing an investigative reporter could do, and he's done it. There's more of it now, fortunately, in some respects, than there was then.

Yes. On the other hand, the indoctrination system has gotten incredibly powerful. The examples that I mentioned, like the right-to-work laws-it is pretty shocking that that can succeed. So, I'd say it's about the same inequality entered the national dialogue with the Occupy movement, but the wealth gap for black and Latino families rarely generates debate or headlines. What role should the media-particularly independent media-play in ensuring critical public interest issues like these are at the forefront?

Independent media ought to be telling the truth about things that matter. That's quite different from the task of the commercial media. They have a task. They're supposed to be objective, and objectivity has a meaning in the world of journalism. In fact, it's taught in journalism schools. Objectivity means reporting honestly and accurately what's going on within the Beltway, inside the government. So that sets the bounds. There are Democrats and there are Republicans. Report honestly what they're saying-balance and so on-and then you're objective. If you go beyond that and you ask a question about the bounds, then you're biased, subjective, emotional, maybe anti-American, whatever the usual curse words are. So that's a task and, you know, you can understand it from the point of view of established power. It's a distorting prism with enormous impact. Even just the framework of what's looked at.

Take, for example, current domestic issues. We have "the sequester," which is harming the economy, and that's, in fact, conceded. But what's it about? Well, it's about the deficit. Who cares about the deficit? Banks, rich people and so on. What does the population care about? Jobs. In fact, this has even been studied. There are a couple of professional studies that tested this question. It turns out that concern about the deficit increases with wealth, and the reason is rich people are concerned that maybe someday in the future there might be a little bit of inflation, which is not good for lenders. It's fine for borrowers. So, therefore, we have to worry about the deficit, even if it destroys jobs.

The population has quite different views. They say, no, we want jobs. And they're right. Jobs mean stimulating demand, and government's got to do that. Corporations have money coming out of their ears, but they're not investing it because there's no demand. Consumers can't fill the gap because they're suffering from the impact of the crimes that the banks carried out. Of course, the corporations are richer than ever. That's the way it works, but it's not what's discussed within the Beltway. So you get some little comment on it around the fringes, but the focus has to be on the terrible problem of the deficit, which will maybe be a problem someday in the future, but not very serious.

In fact, professional political science has done a pretty good job on a specific topic relative to this. This is a very heavily polled country, so you get to know a lot about public attitudes, and there are quite good studies on the relation between public attitudes and public policy and differentiating attitudes. And it turns out that maybe 70 percent of the population, the lower 70 percent on the wealth income level, are disenfranchised. That is, their opinions have no influence on policy. Senators don't pay any attention to them.

As you move up in income level you get more influence. When you get to the very top, and here the Occupy movement was a little misleading- it's not one percent, it's a tenth of a percent. When you get to the top tenth of a percent, where there's a huge concentration of wealth, you can't even talk about influence. They get what they want. That's why the banks who created the crisis, often with criminal action, are not only scot-free, but richer, more powerful and bigger than ever. Reading the business press, you can see there's a criminal action here and there, and maybe a slap on the wrist or something there.
The Occupy movement has had several pretty big successes: Occupy Sandy, Occupy Our Homes, Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee. But what do you think a post-Occupy movement looks like? What comes next?
Because of that, what's within the Beltway reflects wealth and power. Elections are basically bought. We know the story. So "objectivity" in the commercial media means looking at the world from the point of view of the extremely rich and powerful in the corporate sector. Now, it's not 100 percent from their view. There are a lot of very honest reporters who do all kinds of things. I read the national press and learn from them and so on, but it's very much skewed in that direction. It's kind of like the filters in Manufacturing Consent. And going back to your point, what the independent press ought to be doing is what the national press ought to be doing, looking at the world from the point of view of its population. This holds on issue after issue-you can almost pick it at random.

The Occupy tactic was a remarkably successful tactic. If I'd been asked a month before Zuccotti Park whether to do this, I would have said, you're crazy. But it worked extremely well. It just lighted a fire all over the place. People were just waiting for something to light the spark. And it was extremely successful, but it's a tactic, and tactics are not strategies. A tactic has a half-life; it has diminishing returns. And in particular, a tactic like this is going to arouse antagonism, because people don't want their lives disrupted and so on. It will be easy to fan it the way you do with public workers. So it's a tactic that had to be revised. Frankly, when the police broke the occupations up, it was harsh and brutal and didn't have to be done like that. But in some ways, it wasn't a bad thing, because it turned people to what they have to do next. And what they have to do next is bring it to the general population. Take up the topics that really bother people. Be there when you're needed like Sandy. Be there for the foreclosures. Focus on debt. Focus on a financial transaction tax, which ought to be instituted. Nobody else is bringing it up. That's what the Occupy movement ought to be doing, and not just as a national movement, but as an international movement.

It's actually striking that there are Occupy offshoots all over the world. I've talked at Occupy movements in Sydney, Australia, and England, all over. Everywhere you go there's something. And they link with other things that are happening, like the Indignados in Spain; the student actions in Chile, which are pretty remarkable; things in Greece, which are enormous; and even movements in the peripheral parts of Europe trying to struggle against the brutal austerity regimes, which are worse than here and which are just strangling the economies and destroying the European social contract. We look progressive in comparison with Europe.

So that's a future that can be looked forwardto, including things like we were talking about before, supporting and maybe even initiating things like worker-owned, worker-managed enterprises. It sounds reformist, but it's revolutionary. That's changing-at least giving the germs for changing-the basic structure of this society in a fundamental way. Why should banks own the enterprise in which people work? What business is it of theirs? Why should they decide whether you move it to Mexico or Bangladesh or where the next place will be? Why shouldn't the workers decide, or the communities? There's a lot to say about this.

Just consider, for example, the things that aren't being discussed in the immigration struggle. We're here in Boston, right? Right around Boston, there's a pretty large community of Mayan immigrants. They're still coming right now. They live right near here, but under the radar because they're undocumented. Why are Mayans coming here? They don't want to be here. Some of them I know pretty well, and when you talk to them, they say, "We'd rather be home." They don't want to be here.

Why are they coming? Well, because in the early 1980s, there was a virtually genocidal attack on the highlands in Guatemala that was supported by Ronald Reagan, backed by the United States. It practically wiped the place out, andthere are now actually trials going on in Guatemala of the perpetrators, but nobody here talks about it. So, you know, we destroy their country and people flee because they can't survive. In fact, there's an interesting book coming out by David Bacon, who is an immigration activist. It's called The Right to Stay Home.

It was obvious, for example, that NAFTA was going to destroy Mexican agriculture. The Mexican campesinos can be as efficient as they like, but they can't compete with highly subsidized U.S agribusiness, and that means people are going to flee. And, in fact, it's not just coincidental that the year NAFTA was passed, Clinton started militarizing the border. It was an open border before, and so, of course, people are going to come. Well, these topics aren't discussed.
You've talked about the effectiveness of sit-down strikes in which workers occupy a workplace as a precursor to taking it over. You've said, with enough popular support, sit-down strikes can work and be the basis for a real revolution. But how much popular support is needed and what should it look like?
If you're worried about immigration, let's take a look at why people are coming and what our responsibility is and what we can do about it. They don't want to be here. And the same is true about exporting factories. People ought to have jobs in Bangladesh, but we ought to be paying attention to the fact that they have decent working conditions. They want it, we should want it, and we should struggle to make sure they have it. And then decisions can be made about a workforce and where they want their enterprise to be. There are all kinds of topics like this that free, independent media can bring up and movements like Occupy can be dedicated to.
And that was in Ireland?
Well, it has to be extensive. Actually, it can work. I happen to have just come back from Ireland, and one of the things I did there was meet with a group of workers at a plant called Vita Cortex. I'd been supporting their strike. They had a long sit-down strike. The management wanted to sell the plant, a profitable plant, to some rich entrepreneur who would move it somewhere else. All the workers were just going to be fired. Some of them had long tenure. They got together, formed a community support group and sat in on the plant. And there was community support-people wanted to keep them there. People brought food and all kinds of help. And they won, after, I think, about six months. The owner agreed to keep it there, pay the workers and so on.
Why are they so rare in the United States?
That was in Cork, southern Ireland. And it was doing okay, not hugely profitable. Ireland is in a big downturn, so this was serious. But they won. They didn't get everything, but a lot. It can be done. Much of the New Deal legislation, which was important, was motivated by employee concerns, and other concerns, when CIO organizing, which was new then, reached the point where it was leading to sit-down strikes-because sit-down strikes drive fear into management and everyone else. If we're sitting in and doing nothing, why shouldn't we? We're the ones who know how to run the place, so let's run it and kick out the bosses. That's only one step away.

Strikes of any kind are very rare, especially since Reagan, who kind of broke the mandate against using scabs. That's outlawed everywhere in the world. I think maybe apartheid South Africa allowed it. But when Reagan broke the flight-controllers' strike, he set the tone, and maybe ten years later there was a strike at a major Caterpillar manufacturing plant. I think it was in Peoria, and management broke it by bringing in scabs. Now that's illegal everywhere in the world. As I said, apartheid South Africa I think allowed it, but it passed.
What are some of those?
It's kind of interesting what happened. The Chicago Tribune, which is a conservative newspaper but covered labor affairs pretty well, had a lot of coverage about Peoria and the scandal of bringing in scabs. Well, that was maybe twenty years ago. When President Obama-who was in Chicago at the time, so he couldn't have missed it-decided to show his solidarity with workers, he went to that plant and nobody commented on it. It's effaced from memory. And the labor movement, as you know, has been decimated. It developed enormously in the 1930s and it's responsible for most of the progressive legislation that took place. There was an immediate backlash, even by the late 1930s. That's when management initiated what are now called scientific methods of strike breaking, sophisticated strike-breaking techniques.

Some of them are called the Mohawk Valley formula. Say there is some town in Pennsylvania where there's a strike going on. The idea is to saturate the town with propaganda whose basic theme is Americanism: We're all Americans, we all work together, we all love each other. We're all helping the friendly boss who works to the bone eighty hours a day for the service of the workers, the banker who loves to give you money to buy a car, and the workman with his pail going to work and his wife who's making dinner at home. They're all one big happy family living in harmony. And then these outsiders come in, the union organizers, and there's a hint as well that they're probably communists, and they're trying to disrupt the harmony and prevent everyone from living the good American dream. That's basically the theme, and the idea is to saturate everything with propaganda: the schools, the churches, everything. And it sometimes has an effect. That's one technique. There are others.

These developed substantially under Reagan, who was very anti-labor. In fact, he hated poor people with a passion. So, for example, during the lettuce strike, Reagan was governor of California. He very ostentatiously appeared on television happily eating lettuce just to show what he thought about the striking workers, the poorest of the poor. If he can kick them in the face, great. He loved that. Just like his "welfare queen" business, which demonized welfare and portrayed rich black women being driven in their Cadillacs to the welfare offices and stealing your money, and that sort of thing. In fact, he made it very clear. You couldn't miss it.

Reagan opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a little town which is probably unknown except for one thing: There was a massacre of civil rights workers there. And that's where he very ostentatiously opened his campaign-telling people: Don't worry, I'm a racist thug. And then came the strike. But his administration also informed the business world that the government essentially wasn't going to apply the laws. There are laws about illegal interference with union organizing and they're obviously supposed to implement them. But he made it quite clear that you can do what you like. Illegal measures, like firing of union organizers, went way up during the Reagan years. I think it might have tripled, and it continued.

Then came Clinton, who had a different technique for undermining unions. It was called NAFTA. There have been studies on the effect of NAFTA on strike breaking in the United States, and it's substantial. It's illegal, but if you have a criminal state, you can do what you like-you don't enforce the laws. So a standard technique would be, say, if there's an organizing campaign somewhere, for management to tell workers, "You guys can go and strike if you want, but if you win, it's all going to Mexico." That's a very effective technique. In the absence of solidarity, real solidarity, in fact international solidarity, it's a pretty effective technique of strike breaking, and the number of illegal strike-breaking efforts, I think, went up by about 50 percent after NAFTA.

All this started right after the Second World War with Taft-Hartley, the huge anti-labor campaigns and so on. Now there are companies which just do strike breaking. There are scientific and sophisticated techniques, and there's plenty of clout behind it, a huge amount of corporate money, and the government supports it. And there isn't much popular support. You could see it in the passage of the right-to-work law in Michigan, which was pretty shocking. That's a labor state, and it turned that out a lot of union members voted for it. If you look at the propaganda, you can see why. First of the all, the very phrase "right to work": It's actually not right to work; it's right to scrounge. What it means is a person can work in a factory and refuse to join the union so he doesn't have to pay dues, and he'll get all the protection that the union offers to others, the grievances and so on. He gets the protection, but doesn't pay. That's all that right-to-work means.

It's a technique for destroying labor. But the propaganda has been effective, and it's best against public workers, librarians, firefighters, teachers or even workers in a unionized plant. They have jobs, they get pensions, they get health care. You are unemployed, you can't a job. And if you get one, it's part-time and you don't get a pension. So they're stealing from you, especially the public service workers who are leaning on taxes. They're underpaid, relative to their skill level, and the reason they get pensions is because they take lower pay. It's a trade-off. They say, okay, we'll take lower wages, but you guarantee us our pension. But the propaganda works, and the administrations supported it.

When Obama declares a freeze on pay for federal workers, he's saying that we're not going to raise taxes on the rich but that we are going to raise taxes on you, because a freeze on public workers is identical to a tax increase. The whole technique of demonizing labor and "corrupt union leaders"-I mean, this goes way back.
One solution, since labor has been weakened, is for workers to start their own worker-run and worker-managed businesses. A lot of people were inspired by the growth of worker-run collectives and businesses in Argentina following the 2001 economic collapse there. In the United States, there are about several hundred, including Free Speech Radio News, which has been worker-run and worker-managed since itwas founded thirteen years ago. Do you think this could grow and expand in the United States?
In the early 1950s there were two movies that came out about the same time. One was Salt of the Earth, a marvelous low-budget movie. It was about a strike that was eventually won. I think a Mexican woman was leading it. It was a very well-done movie, but nobody ever heard of it. There was another movie that came out at the same time called On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, and it was about a corrupt union leader and the good, honest workman, you know, Joe with his pail and stuff. They finally got together. Marlon Brando kind of organized them, and the thing ends up with Marlon Brando throwing the union organizer into the ocean or something like that. Now that was a big hit. Incidentally, it was directed by Elia Kazan, who was supposedly a rather progressive director. But the point was to get people to hate the unions because they're all a bunch of corrupt gangsters and they're just stealing from you honest workmen and so on. And this is just one piece of an enormous campaign. By the time some of the scholarship came out on it, I was shocked by the scale. I had been following it, but had no idea. And it's had an effect.
And that's been around since the 1950s, right?
It's quite significant. There's been very good work on this, which ought to be read, by Gar Alperovitz, who is both an activist and a writer, a very good historian. What I know of, it's mostly around northern Ohio and the Rust Belt, and what happened there is interesting and worth thinking about. The steelworkers union, which is one of the more progressive in some ways-not without plenty of problems-are working on some sort of an arrangement with Mondragón, which is this huge, worker-owned conglomerate in the Basque country in northern Spain.

Goes back to the 1950s as church-initiated, what became liberation theology and so on. But there's also a strong workers' tradition there, going way back to the Spanish Revolution. And it's grown and developed. It's now a number of productive enterprises: banks, housing, schools, hospitals. It's quite an elaborate affair. And it seems to be with standing the financial crisis, while everything else in Spain is collapsing. I don't know the details, but that's what it looks like. It's not worker-managed. Workers select management, who then act on their own. And, of course, it's part of an international capitalist economy which means that you can argue the ethics of it, since they do things like exploit labor abroad and so on. They say that they have to do it to compete and survive-maybe-that you can't extricate yourself from the world you're in.

Of course, the more solidarity spreads, the more you can do things about that, but that's not easy. It's hard enough to reconstruct the labor movement internally. After all, every labor movement is called an international. That's an aspiration. It's a real problem in the United States. You could see it yesterday. Yesterday was May Day. I happened to get a letter in the morning. A ton of email comes in-one of them was from a friend in Brazil who told me that she wouldn't be going to work that day because it's a holiday, a labor holiday. In fact, it's a labor holiday all over the world, except in the United States where nobody knows what it is. I happened to be giving a talk at Harvard in the afternoon and this came up. I asked the big audience of Harvard graduate students, "What do you think May Day is?" And some people said, "You mean dance around the May pole," or something like that. It's not only a labor holiday. It's a labor holiday that was initiated in support of American workers who were struggling for an eight-hour day and who were among the most oppressed in the industrial world.

So here's this holiday-you know, big demonstrations everywhere, and all kinds of celebrations and so on, and here nobody knows what it is. That's a sign of extremely effective indoctrination. It's the kind of thing that we just have to work our way out of. Here there are some small celebrations. Maybe Occupy might have had a May Day march or something. And it's kind of interesting the way the press treated it. Usually they just ignore it. But if you take a look at the New York Times the next day, it had an article that said demonstrations were in support of labor or something. But it was datelined "Havana," and there was a picture of a huge mob of Cubans marching and some commentary. It was clear what the implication is: This holiday is some kind of commie business; it's got nothing to do with us. I don't know if it's conscious or if it's just so internalized that the journalists don't even see what they're doing. But the message was, "Forget it, it's some alien thing."
* Charlie Savage, "Drone Strikes Turn Allies Into Enemies, Yemeni Says," New York Times, published April 23, 2013.
It's like breaking up the harmony in your town when the union organizers come in; it's kind of that imagery. And here, strikingly, we do have a Labor Day, but notice what day it is. It's the day when you go back to work, not the day when you struggle for your rights. The success of indoctrination in the United States is really amazing.

This originally ran on Truthout.

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Media Control and Indoctrination in the United States

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This is an excerpt from the just released 2nd edition of Noam Chomsky's OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity published by Zuccotti Park Press. Free Speech Radio News producer Catherine Komp interviews Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky is amongst the world's most cited living scholars.

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Since 1980, during the Carter Administration, America's K-12 education system has come under increasing control by the dictates of the federal Department of Education (DOE) with failing results, taxing states and filtering the money through Washington to return a portion of it back to the states. In 2002, the Bush Administration approved the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act creating punishing amounts of federal paperwork and bureaucracy for local schools, requiring a $1B grant in special funding to help state and local education systems comply. In 2015 Congress enacted new legislation, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), to allegedly overcome the NCLB federal intervention. The Heritage Foundation's Lindsey Burke says, " ESSA does not accomplish these critical policy priorities" to reduce the interference and excessive hours of standardized testing time. The 2016 DOE budget is $70.7B excluding a Presidential request for an additional $75B mandatory funding over ten years for Pre-K education.

What is America getting for federally-funded interference in education? The US spends over 23.2% of per capita income on its students each year, 9% more than Singapore while over 26 other countries that spend less outscore US students. Charles Murray says that even after substantial resources were dedicated to assist minorities over a 10 year period, SAT scores have indeed dropped for Amerindians ( -28%), Latinos (-26%), Blacks (-14%) and Whites (-6%) while substantially increasing for Asians (+54).

Of 64 countries in the International Student Assessment, the U.S. ranks 35th in math and 27th in science. Singapore spends almost half of what the U.S. spends in primary education and about 70% on secondary education while internationally scoring first in math and second in science. Ironically, while more than 1.7M students are now homeschooled, the National Center for Educational Statistics does not produce statistics on the likely difference in achievement between homeschooled students and public education students.

Students in institutional schools are measured repeatedly, however. A typical student takes 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-K classes and 12 th grade; by contrast, most countries that outperform the U.S. on international exams test students three times during their entire school careers.

In spite so much testing and measuring, the standards are being manipulated to enhance the illusion of improving student performance. The modern thinking appears to be that "everyone must be a winner." A variation of this is "average is over," a perverse twist on economist Tyler Cowen's thesis. In K-12, only children with extremely low I.Q.'s, juvenile delinquents or truants receive average grades, and rarely do students receive D's or F's. 1 In most states, students with English as a second language are passed along with C grades regardless of performance. Piereson & Riley note that the Department of Education released data showing that from 1990-2000 high school graduate GPAs rose a third of a point and one public school district in northern California altered student grading so that students scoring above 80% received A's and students below 20% were given F's. 2

K-12 Education's Left Liberal Orthodoxy

In the past 30 years, the Department of Education has exerted an increasing influence on K-12 education. K-12 teachers, overwhelmingly if not exclusively, are the products of schools of education whose influence is largely left-leaning and their teachings politicized. David Labaree, Professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Education has states that "education schools are solidly in the progressive camp ideologically." 3 Stotsky concludes that K-12 English classes have increasingly become ersatz social studies classes with biased content taught by moralizing pedagogues who are untrained in either history or social science. Teachers Unions maintain a strangle hold on local school districts and principals' ability to terminate ineffective teachers.

In 2000 Clinton created the National Education Standards and Improvement Council for teaching American history. None of the 31 standards mentions the U.S. Constitution; the National Standards Advance Placement history exam also politicized American history in a highly progressive manner. Revisionist history books represent the horrors of the American revolutionists and their colonial oppression. No period of American history is being celebrated; instead the historians have apologetically presented our forefathers as war mongers and racists. We foresee the day when the Constitution will be burned in effigy because so many authors were slave owners. Science exists in a sustainability vacuum where climate change is presented as gospel in place of the scientific truths of the elective courses in Physics. States have banned classic literature for its "incendiary" themes including Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Catcher in the Rye; while age appropriateness is certainly a valid concern, an outright ban is unconstitutional. As a by-product of this censorship, Yale freshmen recently petitioned faculty to remove the "nondiverse" English literature of Shakespeare, Dickens and Bronte from the required curriculum.

Notably some of the brightest spots in K-12 education exist in isolated places including New York and California where parents fought the government and union to take charge through organizations like Excellent Educational Solutions and the Harlem Success Academy.

And Still More to Come

President Obama's 2013 State of the Union Address, mandated government controlled pre-school education for millions of young children and represents a new stealth opportunity for left liberal indoctrination. The U.K. adopted Pre-K in 2007 for children age 3-4, with underwhelming results which don't include educational attainment of the children. While a child's academic gains were at best marginal in the U.K. (small improvements by age 5 and no improvements by age 11), 4 was free child care for parents. Gerard Robinson argues that with the Pre-K schooling now an educational reality, the government not parents has clearly become the controlling force in early childhood education. We can only imagine that in the U.S., this is another opportunity to create a new entitlement and progressively indoctrinate even younger children without any parental controls.
Carol A. Vance, Esq., CPA is an instructor in Tax & Business Law at the University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee and a practicing CPA and tax attorney. Contact: email. Loyd S. Pettegrew is professor of communication at the University of South Florida and also runs his consulting firm, Decision Strategies Group, Inc., which performs research and training for corporations. Contact: email.

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Indoctrination: 35 Years of the US Department of Education

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Since 1980, during the Carter Administration, America's K-12 education system has come under increasing control by the dictates of the federal Department of Education (DOE) with failing results, taxing states and filtering the money through Washington to return a portion of it back to the states.

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Hundreds of thousands of Germans were killed fighting for the Nazi regime long after defeat had become inevitable. Sir Ian Kershaw explains why so many were willing to follow Hitler to the end...
This article first appeared in the September 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine
Submitted by: Ellie Cawthorne
In one of the last photographs ever taken of him, Hitler leaves the safety of his bunker to award decorations to members of the Hitler Youth. (Getty)
On 18 April 1945, a 19-year-old theology student, Robert Limpert, decided to act to prevent the senseless destruction of the picturesque town of Ansbach in Franconia. He had already taken big risks by circulating leaflets pleading for the surrender of the town without a fight. Now he went further, cutting communication wires to a Wehrmacht unit outside the town, but was spotted doing so by two boys from the Hitler Youth. Following arrest by the local police, he was brought before the local military commandant, a Luftwaffe colonel with a doctorate in physics - and a fanatical Nazi. The commandant immediately set up a three-man tribunal which lost no time in sentencing Limpert to death.

As a noose was placed round his neck outside the town hall, the young man struggled free, but was caught within a hundred yards, kicked, punched and pulled by the hair before being hauled back to the place of execution. No one in the small crowd that had gathered and witnessed the scene stirred to help him. After further moments of torment when the rope broke, Limpert was finally hoisted to his death. The commandant said the body had to be left hanging "till it stinks". He then fled from the town on a requisitioned bicycle. Four hours later, the Americans entered Ansbach without a shot being fired and cut down Robert Limpert's body.

The Limpert tragedy was not just a matter of the rabid fanaticism of the Nazi town commandant. The local constabulary and civilian administration played their part, choosing to carry out what they saw as their duty even though they knew that American occupation could only be a few hours away. Civilians showed Limpert no sympathy. As in many other places, while most people were desperate to avoid futile destruction in what were obviously the dying days of the regime, some were even now prepared to back the savage repression of real or presumed opponents of Nazism. Similar horror stories were registered in numerous German towns and cities in the last weeks of Nazi rule.

Amid mounting military collapse, in areas not occupied by enemy forces the regime still somehow functioned in limited fashion even in April 1945. The Reich had shrunk by now to little more than a sliver of territory. Communications and transport were near total breakdown, millions were without gas, electricity and water. But there was no descent into anarchy.

The state bureaucracy functioned, if under enormous difficulties. Wages and salaries were paid in April 1945. A leading academic body was still awarding grants to foreign students, seen even now as an investment for German influence in a 'new Europe'. Newspapers, though drastically reduced in size and number, were still published. Improvised attempts were made to deliver post.

There was even some escapist entertainment. The Berlin Philharmonic held its last concert on 12 April, four days before the Soviet assault on the capital began. Citizens of Stuttgart could shut out their trauma for an hour or two to see The Woman of My Dreams at the cinema, only days before the city's surrender on 22 April. The last football match of the war took place on 23 April, when Bayern Munich beat their local rivals, TSV 1860 Munich, 3-2. It was hardly Premiership standard, but remarkable that football was played at all only a week before Hitler's suicide.

Signs of disintegration

Above all, the Wehrmacht kept fighting. Losses were staggering. Between 300,000 and 400,000 German soldiers were dying every month as the end of the war approached. But there was no widespread mutiny, as there had been in 1918. Most soldiers by now, like the civilian population, longed for the end of the war. Signs of disintegration were unmistakable. Thousands of soldiers deserted, despite draconian punishment if they were caught. They were nonetheless a small minority. The Wehrmacht continued to function. Had it not done so, the regime would have collapsed. But generals still issued their orders, however hopeless the circumstances. And the orders were obeyed.

The writing had been on the wall ever since summer 1944 when the western Allies consolidated their landing in Normandy and the Red Army advanced deep into Poland. But the German leadership, not just Hitler, held on to the belief that, if not outright victory, something at least could still be gained from the war. New, devastating weapons, it was thought, were on the way. If some terrible damage could be inflicted upon their enemies, the thinking ran, the unholy wartime coalition of the western powers and the Soviet Union would split apart.

The Allies would then be driven to negotiations, leaving Germany with some of her territorial gains intact. Many German leaders only slowly and reluctantly abandoned such illusions. Only following the swift collapse of the last major German offensive in the Ardennes, and, even more calamitously, the devastating onslaught of the Red Army in January 1945 was it obvious that the war was irredeemably lost. Once the western Allies crossed the Rhine in March, the advance into the heartlands of the Reich was rapid. In the east, the Red Army was poised for the final assault on Berlin. There was no rationale to continuing the war. But the Wehrmacht fought on.

Fighting on to the very end in an obviously lost cause is rare. Nearly all wars in modern history, like the First World War, finish with some form of negotiation. Even authoritarian regimes, plainly seen to be heading for the buffers, are not normally able to hold out to the point of total destruction. Usually, they are toppled beforehand, either by revolution from below, or, more frequently, by internal coup within the ruling elites. But Nazi Germany refused to surrender. Why?

It is often claimed that the Allied demand for 'unconditional surrender', laid down at Casablanca in January 1943, ruled out all prospects of German capitulation. It certainly played into the hands of propaganda as the regime exploited it to justify the fight to the end. But it did not eliminate expectations of peace negotiations. Most Nazi leaders proposed at one time or another approaching the western Allies, or even the Russians, to seek a way out of the impending doom. But Hitler adamantly refused to contemplate negotiation except from a position of strength - a prospect diminishing by the day. So should we look no further than Hitler himself, the supreme leader who was prepared to take his country into the abyss rather than entertain another 'cowardly' surrender like that, as he saw it, of November 1918?

Hitler's intransigence was obviously crucial. And because he had no future after any negotiated surrender, holding out for him was easy. He knew it would have to end in his suicide. But how could he continue to exercise such baleful power when all knew that his days were numbered? Why was no further attempt made to kill him, remove him, or at least confront him with an alternative to total destruction? An answer takes us beyond the dictator himself, to the structures of Nazi rule and the mentalities that underpinned them.

A big part of the answer is undoubtedly terror. Fear was a rational response to a terroristic and terrifying regime. From February 1945 onwards the regime's inbuilt terror exploded in a final paroxysm of unbound fury directed at all who stood in its way. The unrestrained readiness to extreme violence even against its own citizens ruled out the possibility of a revolution from below, as had happened in 1918.

The population in 1945 was browbeaten, exhausted and resigned, but not rebellious. The terror apparatus still functioned. Some 15,000 German soldiers were executed for desertion (compared with 18 in the First World War), the number rising steeply as the end of the war approached. Itinerant drumhead courts left a trail of arbitrary executions, also of civilians. Any defeatist comment could invite swift and brutal reprisal.

Hundreds of German citizens fell victim to untrammelled violence in the last weeks of the Nazi regime as local party representatives, with their last act of power, ensured that longstanding opponents would not live to enjoy their downfall. Now as before, however, the targets of the worst of the murderous violence were those dubbed racial and political enemies. Foreign workers and prisoners, seen as security threats, were killed mercilessly. Aimless 'death marches' through German townships, in full view of the population, left concentration camp prisoners, many among them Jews, wholly at the whim of their guards, who despatched them without a thought. An estimated quarter of a million are thought to have perished on the marches. Most Germans watched passively, whether from lack of sympathy with the marchers or for fear of repercussions should they try to offer any assistance.

Widespread detestation

Terror is not, however, a full explanation for Germany's continuation of the war. The regime's droves of petty functionaries and officials, who continued to serve it and make it function, were not terrorised. Nor were military leaders. Generals, though often dismissed, were not executed (apart from those involved in the 1944 conspiracy). It was not, though, as is often claimed, that a consensus behind the regime held until the end. Countless internal reports provide testimony to the widespread detestation of the party, and even the collapse of belief in Hitler, long before the end. However, there was an obvious ambivalence. Though Germans overwhelmingly longed for the war to end, few wanted foreign occupation, least of all by the feared Russians. In fighting to their utmost to fend off the enemy, Germans were, however much they might have hated the regime, actually helping it to continue functioning.

The terrible war in the east created a kind of negative integration, for soldiers and civilians alike. The justified horror at falling into Soviet hands made soldiers fight like demons, seldom by now from Nazi convictions, but for family, comrades and ultimately for their own survival.

In any case, there was no alternative. Whatever their individual feelings and motives, ordinary soldiers had little choice but to obey the orders of their officers or face execution as deserters. Petrified civilians fled wherever they could, or otherwise braced themselves for the worst. Suicide numbers rocketed, especially in eastern parts of Germany. Estimates suggest that some 20 per cent of women were raped as many Red Army soldiers did their best to match the caricatures of Nazi propaganda.

In the west, there was no equivalent fear. Defeatism was widespread but the Wehrmacht fought on here, too, despite obvious indications of intense war-weariness. Apart from the determination to prevent Germany's occupation by foreign powers - and notwithstanding the small numbers of outright Nazi fanatics, especially in the Waffen-SS - fighting on had become an end in itself.

In the last months of the war, German citizens were oppressed, marshalled, and corralled as never before by the party and its myriad affiliates which had occupied all organisational space. Given wide-ranging powers to orchestrate all civil defence measures in their areas, the Gauleiter - the hard-bitten Nazi regional chieftains who had burnt their boats with the regime - and their subordinates at district and local levels, acted brutally to maintain control.

Local military commanders and party functionaries took matters more and more into their own hands. Whether a town or village surrendered without a fight or was nearly obliterated in pointless last-minute shows of defiance rested on the behaviour of those with power and influence in the locality. Despite dire threats facing any perceived 'defeatist', few wanted to end their lives in a show of futile 'heroism' and see their homes and workplaces blown up senselessly. Many mayors and even party functionaries, often following the initiative of groups of respectable 'worthies' in a township, defied orders to fight on, though this could bring savage reprisals if local desperadoes - usually party fanatics or SS units with nothing to lose - gained the upper hand.

Why was there no further attempt to change the regime from above after the failed plot of July 1944? Crucial was the radicalisation of the structures of power since then. Beneath Hitler, four Nazi grandees, three of them brutal fanatics, the fourth a power-hungry organisational genius, ran Germany in the last months.

Martin Bormann, secretary to the Führer and head of the party administration, extended the controlling hand of the party over almost all facets of daily life. Joseph Goebbels combined the key areas of propaganda and manpower mobilisation. Without the million extra men that he dredged up by the end of 1944, the immense losses suffered by the Wehrmacht could not have been replaced. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the Reich's enormous security apparatus, now penetrated the Wehrmacht, too, adding to his vast powers the command of the Replacement Army, from whose headquarters the attempted coup in July 1944 had been planned.

Last but not least among the quadrumvirate, Albert Speer, minister of armaments of war production, performed near miracles of organisation in ensuring that the troops still had weapons to fight with. If Speer had worked half as hard, Germany could not have held out for remotely so long.

Crucially, the regime could depend too upon the backing of the military leadership. At the very top, Field-Marshal Keitel and General Jodl, the key figures in the high command of the Wehrmacht, were ultra-loyalists, firm believers in Hitler even now. After the failed bomb plot, Nazi penetration of the armed forces was intensified. Many middle ranking officers had swallowed tenets of Nazi doctrine in the Hitler Youth and were now doubly anxious to display their loyalty. Only loyalists were left, too, among the generals in command positions. Few were fully-fledged Nazis, but their nationalist mentalities easily blended with Nazi dogma.

Some generals had serious disputes with Hitler and were dismissed. But even where they disagreed fundamentally with Hitler's tactics, they did not doubt his right to issue them. Divided among themselves, they were neither temperamentally nor organisationally capable of challenging Hitler. Some, most notably the extraordinarily brutal Field-Marshal Schörner, remained fanatical backers of Hitler. Grand-Admiral Dönitz was another ardent believer in Hitler and unbending in demanding a fight to the last.

Even those who had broken inwardly with Hitler could not contemplate doing other than their utmost in the defence of the Reich, seen as their highest duty. Faced with increasingly impossible orders for the defence of Berlin, for instance, Colonel-General Heinrici felt that to refuse them was to commit treason. Even in late April 1945, Field-Marshal Kesselring rejected moves to surrender in Italy as long as Hitler was still alive.

Hitler's hold among the power elite - in the dwindling area where his writ still ran - was sustained to the end. Partly this was a matter of his domineering personality and ruthlessly intransigent determination to fight on even if the German people should be destroyed in the process.

But it was not simply personality. Confronting Hitler in an organised body, political or military, was impossible. An equivalent in Hitler's Germany to the Fascist Grand Council which had toppled Mussolini in July 1943 did not exist. There was no cabinet, senate, politburo or military council that could challenge Hitler. And there was no alternative source of loyalty. Hitler's popularity had long been in steep decline. But the fragmented structures of authority, all of them dependent upon Hitler, persisted to the end. As soon as Hitler was dead, after his suicide in the bunker on 30 April 1945, his chosen successor, Grand-Admiral Dönitz, until then an arch-fanatic in his unbending advocacy of the fight to the last, saw the need to bow to reality and seek a negotiated end. The whole surviving political and military apparatus immediately followed suit. This sudden reversal is the clearest demonstration of how much the fight to complete defeat and destruction was owing not just to Hitler in person, but to the character of his rule and the mentalities that had upheld his charismatic domination.

Ultimately, the dominant elites possessed neither the collective will nor the mechanisms of power to prevent Hitler taking Germany to total destruction. That was decisive.
Sir Ian Kershaw is a leading historian of 20th-century Germany. He is the author of The End: Hitler's Germany, 1944-45 (Allen Lane, 2011).
On 26 February 2017, BBC History Magazine will be returning to Bristol's M Shed for a day of talks re-examining the momentous global conflict of 1939-45.

To find out more about our Second World War Day, and to buy tickets, click here.

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In one of the last photographs ever taken of him, Hitler leaves the safety of his bunker to award decorations to members of the Hitler Youth. (Getty) On 18 April 1945, a 19-year-old theology student, Robert Limpert, decided to act to prevent the senseless destruction of the picturesque town of Ansbach in Franconia.

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British Colombia teachers on teacher religion

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British Colombia teachers on teacher religion

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Students at several Jefferson County, Colorado, high schools walked out to protest the school board's recently proposed curriculum review committee that seeks to promote patriotism, respect for authority, free enterprise, plus the positive aspects of U.S. history.

The teachers union, whose members forced two high schools to close by calling in sick, is against the implementation of performance-based pay. The union has encouraged and applauded student protests against what it's calling academic censorship.

The average parent and taxpayer has little idea of what is being taught to our youngsters. In February 2006, I wrote a column titled "Indoctrination of Our Youth," followed in March with "Youth Indoctrination Update." Both columns focused on rants that a student secretly had recorded of a geography teacher at another Colorado school - Overland High School in Aurora. The teacher was Jay Bennish. He told his students that President George W. Bush's State of the Union address sounded "a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler used to say."

He continued, "Bush is threatening the whole planet." He then asked his students, "Who is probably the single most violent nation on planet Earth?" He shouted the answer, "The United States!" During this class session, Bennish peppered his 10th-grade class with other ridiculous statements, saying the U.S. has engaged in "7,000 terrorist attacks against Cuba" and telling his students capitalism "is at odds with humanity, at odds with caring and compassion ... (and) at odds with human rights."

Bennish reasoned with his class, "If we have the right to fly to Bolivia or Peru and drop chemical weapons (pesticides) on top of farmers' fields because we're afraid they might be growing coca and that could be turned into cocaine and sold to us, well, then don't the Peruvians and the Iranians and the Chinese have the right to invade America and drop chemical weapons over North Carolina to destroy the tobacco plants that are killing millions and millions of people in their countries every year and causing them billions of dollars in health care costs?" This kind of anti-American teaching might help explain why some Americans have joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Relevant to our struggle with ISIL is this observation by Bennish, reported by columnist Todd Manzi (http://tinyurl.com/nv2hedm): "You have to understand something. When al-Qaida attacked America on Sept. 11, in their view, they're not attacking innocent people. OK? The CIA has an office in the World Trade Center. The Pentagon is a military target. The White House was a military target. Congress is a military target. ... So in the minds of al-Qaida, they are not attacking innocent people; they are attacking legitimate targets."

This kind of teacher indoctrination is by no means restricted to Colorado. Many teachers, at all grades, use their classroom for environmental, anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-parent propaganda. Some require their students to write letters to political figures to condemn public policy the teachers don't like. Dr. Thomas Sowell's "Inside American Education" (2003) documents numerous ways teachers attack parental authority. Teachers have asked third-graders, "How many of you ever wanted to beat up your parents?" In a high-school health class, students were asked, "How many of you hate your parents?"

We can't tell whether Jefferson County teachers are giving their students the same kind of anti-American indoctrination, because if there is not recorded evidence, they will deny brainwashing. If they are brainwashing students, then it's understandable why they are against the school board's curriculum review demanding that they promote patriotism, respect for authority, free enterprise and the positive aspects of U.S. history.

Parents should become more involved with their children's education. They should look at the textbooks used and examine their children's homework. Parents should show up en masse at PTA and board of education meetings to ensure that teachers confine their lessons to reading, writing and arithmetic and leave indoctrination to parents.

The most promising tool in the fight against teacher indoctrination and classroom misconduct is the microtechnology that enables students to secretly record and expose academic misconduct by teachers.

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Students at several Jefferson County, Colorado, high schools walked out to protest the school board's recently proposed curriculum review committee that seeks to promote patriotism, respect for authority, free enterprise, plus the positive aspects of U.S. history. The teachers union, whose members forced two high schools to close by calling in sick, is against the implementation of performance-based pay.

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MOSCOW - Every day, Russian state television serves up adult-sized doses of programming designed to inspire love for the motherland.

Soon, the TV dial may include a "patriotic" channel made just for kids.

The government has given the green light for the creation of a state-financed TV company that would seek to inculcate patriotism in teens and younger children, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia reported on May 20.

President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed that young people should be encouraged to love their country, suggesting patriotism is a powerful antidote to what he calls Western efforts to undermine Russia.

Since he came to power 15 years ago, Putin has tightened the government's grip on the media and used television to seek to consolidate control over the country - efforts that have prompted opponents to refer to the TV set as the "zombie box."

The idea of a channel that would help raise Russians as patriots has been advocated publicly by Viktor Vodolatsky, a lawmaker for the ruling United Russia party.

Vodolatsky told Izvestia that Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko has instructed the Education Ministry to form a working group that will bring the TV station on air.

"The working group is already at the stage of being formed; it will soon start work," Vodolatsky said. "Specialists are preparing concrete proposals on the issue of correctly conducting informational-patriotic work with teenagers."

The channel will broadcast youth-oriented talk shows and programs on education, news, and other issues, according to Izvestia.

Volodatsky proposes calling it ROSsvet.
According to Izvestia, the channel may be funded from the federal budget and draw on money earmarked for a broader five-year plan from 2016-20 to instill patriotism in Russia's youth.

That national program, touted on the website of the Education Ministryon April 3, describes patriotism as "love for the Motherland, loyalty to the Fatherland, the striving to serve its interests and the readiness to defend it."

The national program will receive an estimated 1.8 billion rubles in funding.

Russia's liberal opposition has accused the Kremlin of using appeals to patriotism to boost support for Putin and paper over what they say is the government's failure to address pressing economic and social problems.

Putin's government has stepped up its emphasisis on the need for patriotism amid a confrontation with Kyiv and the West over Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists rebels in a deadly conflict in eastern Ukraine.

But the Kremlin has been seeking to instill patriotism in young Russians and win their support since Putin's previous stint as president in 2000-08.

After the 2004 Orange Revolution brought a pro-Western leader to power in Ukraine, the Kremlin formed a youth group, Nashi (Ours), that was seen as a way to harness mainly provincial youth as a power base for Putin and mobilize them against the opposition.

Nashi is now defunct, but the Kremlin has continued to form or support youth groups such as and MediaGvardiya, which aims to purge the Internet of "dangerous" content.

Another group, Network, last year produced a "patriotic" learning tool that tells children P is for Putin, R is for Russia, and T is for Topol - a long-range missile that is a mainstay of Moscow's nuclear arsenal.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-patriotic-tv-channel-for-children/27028668.html

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Blatant Indoctrination of Russian Children

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Russia Plans 'Patriotic' TV Channel For Children By Tom Balmforth May 21, 2015 MOSCOW -- Every day, Russian state television serves up adult-sized doses of programming designed to inspire love for the motherland. Soon, the TV dial may include a "patriotic" channel made just for kids.

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When Jeon Geum-ju was a girl in Hoeryong, a depressing mining town at the very northern reaches of North Korea, she used to sing at school about the country's supreme leader.

"Kim Jong Il, how hard he works, he works so hard that he sleeps in the car and just eats rice balls," sang Jeon, now 29, sitting in a restaurant here trying to recall the words that were once ingrained into her. "On his desk there are piles and piles of reports that he has to read and approve. He works so hard for us, the people."

And when Lee Hyun-ji, 19 and also from the country's north, was in elementary school, learning to throw wasn't a simple matter of pitching a ball.

In gym class, there was a wooden target of a human figure with pale skin and a huge nose, with "cunning American wolf" written on it. Lee and her young schoolmates would practice their throwing with a wooden "grenade."

For North Korea's dynastic Kim regime, citizens are never too young to be indoctrinated. Indeed, an all-encompassing personality cult has kept the country intact even as the Soviet Union collapsed and as China and Cuba have opened up.

With its pudgy leaders and their comical haircuts, its goose-stepping soldiers and its inventive turns of phrase, this bastion of totalitarianism has provided endless opportunity for mockery, most recently with the controversial U.S. film "The Interview."

Although critics have questioned its artistic merits and defectors have lamented the way it makes fun of North Koreans, the movie targets a central tenet of Kimist mythology: the idea that the North's leaders are divine beings. The crucial moment in the film is not the death of Kim Jong Un but earlier, when a talk show host interviews Kim and taps into his daddy issues, leading the young dictator to start blubbering, "I am strong," revealing him to be not only human but also insecure.

The personality cult that permeates every aspect of North Korean life has become an ideology in itself. It revolves around Kim Il Sung, portrayed as
an anti-Japanese revolutionary hero and founding father who remains North Korea's "eternal president" more than two decades after his death.

His son, Kim Jong Il, was, according to North Korean myth, born on a sacred mountain, under a bright star at night. (In reality, he was born in Siberia.) Since Kim Jong Il's death in 2011, Kim Jong Un has taken over the family business.

"I believed in this system for more than 20 years, but I was so thirsty to find out about the outside world," said Jeon, who now lives in South Korea and works in an office. Her curiosity led her to decide to sneak across the border to China. "Then, when I realized it was all lies, it was like I was just born at 23 years old. Twenty-three years had been stolen from my life."

365 days' worth of Kims

In North Korea, there is no escaping the Kims. Every home, office, classroom and even train car features portraits of the first two leaders, and the pictures must be cleaned with a special cloth every day.

North Koreans wear pins, usually of Kim Il Sung but sometimes of both Kim One and Kim Two, on their chests, on the left to be close to their hearts.

Television sets and radios are fixed to state-run channels - being caught with an unfixed device, or worse, foreign DVDs, is a severe offense that often leads to time at a labor camp - and for all but a handful of the elite, there is no Internet. Although an increasing amount of information seeps across the border from China, the state continues to have almost total control over the flow information.

After years of futile efforts to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, the international community is now focused on human rights violations there. Unprecedented attention is being given to political imprisonment and executions.

More pervasive, but less obviously gruesome, is the way the regime brainwashes children from an early age to believe in the Kims as godlike leaders.

This indoctrination program has two basic goals, according to a groundbreaking 372-page report published last year by a U.N. commission of inquiry: to instill utmost loyalty and commitment toward the supreme leader, and to instill hostility and deep hatred toward the United States, Japan and South Korea.

The brainwashing starts in kindergarten.

"The milk would arrive and we would go up one by one to fill our cups," recalled Lee, who came to South Korea only in March and asked to use a pseudonym to protect her family in the North.

"The teachers would say: 'Do you know where the milk came from? It came from the Dear Leader. Because of his love and consideration, we are drinking milk today,' " said Lee, looking every bit a South Korean with her dyed hair and trendy sweater.

"I didn't really ask questions," she shrugged. "Somehow I just knew not to."

Children's books convey the ideology, too. "The Butterfly and the Cockerel," for example, tells the story of an irascible, bullying rooster (the United States) outwitted by a small, virtuous butterfly (North Korea).

Teachers don't just teach history, they teach "revolutionary history." And all music, storybooks, novels and artwork relate to the Kims.

"When I taught math problems, they would go like this," said Chae Kyung-hee, who used to teach middle school in North Korea and now runs a school for defectors in Seoul. "If you have this many of Kim Il Sung's anti-Japanese fighters and this many Japanese soldiers, and X-many Japanese soldiers are killed . . ."

There are 365 days' worth of education materials, so every day teachers could say to their students, "On this day, Kim Il Sung went there, did that." At age 7, all children must join the Children's Union. The next year, they start Saturday "self-criticism" sessions in which they must confess how they fell short of the "Ten Principles" that are the foundation of North Korea's ideology. The principles include requirements such as studying the "revolutionary ideas of Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung" daily.

At 14, they move up to the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, which focuses on worshiping the Kim family.

High school students in North Korea must complete a three-year, 81-hour course on the history of Kim Jong Un, according to a recent report from South Korea's KBS World Radio, which cited a copy of the North Korean Education Committee's "compulsory education outline." The course is in addition to a 160-hour course on Kim Il Sung and 148 hours of study about Kim Jong Il.

Social molding

Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert on North Korean literature who teaches at Korea University in Seoul, said that by not allowing people to form their own opinions, North Korea infantilizes its citizens.

"North Korea molds children socially," Gabroussenko said. Books for different generations have different styles but the same message and characters, sometimes involving South Korean "stooges" or American "beasts."

"In the children's version, a child will be fighting Americans by throwing pepper in their eyes and making them sneeze and cough," Gabroussenko said. In the adult version, weapons, rather than condiments, are used.

"The message 'We are one nation' implies that you can't rebel against your father, you can't rebel about your government, that it's important to stick together," she said.

Indeed, the system of surveillance and informing on people is so pervasive that husbands dare not voice doubts about the regime to their wives, and parents, if they are skeptical, dare not try to protect their children's minds.

"My parents were very loyal," said Ji Sung-ho, a 31-year-old who lost a foot and an arm as a teenager when he fell from a moving train while trying to steal coal for his family. "I think my parents really believed it, even when people were dying of hunger."

The U.N. report concluded that the system of indoctrination and surveillance constitutes numerous human rights abuses, including violations of the freedoms of thought, expression and religion. To some, those violations are just as inexcusable as the executions, torture, infanticide and other abuses documented in the report.

"Of course, you can talk about torture and labor camps," said Jeon, the defector, "but I think a more serious infringement of human rights is not giving people any choice to think for themselves or giving them access to outside information."

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In North Korea, it's never too soon to start the brainwashing

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When Jeon Geum-ju was a girl in Hoeryong, a depressing mining town at the very northern reaches of North Korea, she used to sing at school about the country's supreme leader.

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Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I'll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War. More than seventy million people died in the war, most of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.

Let's begin at the end. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the first of twelve military tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Twenty doctors and three administrators - twenty-two men and a single woman - stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had participated in Hitler's euthanasia program, in which around 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped people deemed unfit to live were gassed to death, and they performed fiendish medical experiments on thousands of Jewish, Russian, Roma and Polish prisoners.

Principal prosecutor Telford Taylor began his opening statement with these somber words:

The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected ... To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.

He went on to describe the experiments in detail. Some of these human guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high altitude parachute jumps. Others were frozen, infested with malaria, or exposed to mustard gas. Doctors made incisions in their flesh to simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken glass or wood shavings into them, and then, tying off the blood vessels, introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women were made to drink seawater, were infected with typhus and other deadly diseases, were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their agonized screams and violent convulsions.

The descriptions in Taylor's narrative are so horrifying that it's easy to overlook what might seem like an insignificant rhetorical flourish: his comment that "these wretched people were ... treated worse than animals". But this comment raises a question of deep and fundamental importance. What is it that enables one group of human beings to treat another group as though they were subhuman creatures?

A rough answer isn't hard to come by. Thinking sets the agenda for action, and thinking of humans as less than human paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen - subhumans - and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It's wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.

Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project. From the beginning, Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a deadly threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization were represented as parasitic organisms - as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion. "Today," Hitler proclaimed in 1943, "international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus." Both the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a "severe but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements" (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of "international Jewry", and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, "soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as 'animals' ... that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis' new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter."

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it can be strangely comforting. It's all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it's tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What's most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It's that they were ordinary human beings.

When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the Holocaust, but it wasn't only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin's Red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the smell of Germany's animal breath," and described Germans as "two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war" - "ersatz men" who ought to be annihilated. "The Germans are not human beings," Ehrenburg wrote, "... If you kill one German, kill another - there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses."

This wasn't idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. "They were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists..." writes journalist Giles McDonough:

East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army ... In the course of a single night the red army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.

Excerpted from Less Than Human by David Livingstone Smith. Copyright 2011 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.

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'Less Than Human': The Psychology Of Cruelty

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Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I'll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War.

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Perhaps one of the most bizarre yet common bits of anti-religious rhetoric that has foamed to the surface in recent years is the accusation that to raise-or "indoctrinate"-one's children in a given religion is to commit child abuse. Richard Dawkins has put it this way:

'What a child should never be taught is that you are a Catholic or Muslim child, therefore that is what you believe. That's child abuse.'

An article in the Huffington Post makes an even broader assertion:

"Forcing religion onto minors is essentially a form of child abuse, which scars their ability to reason and also limits their ability to consider the world in an unbiased manner."

This sort of language is a prime example of why many of today's atheists (in both academic and armchair circles) have been popularly pegged as the New Atheists. Why new? Because, as the Oxford mathematician John Lennox has put it, this distinct brand of atheism is new in both tone and emphasis. The New Atheists emphasize not only their non-belief in God, but also their contempt for religion; and the tone of their anti-religious language is often riddled with zeal and ridicule.

This harsh and unhelpful language does not apply to every atheist out there but, unfortunately, it applies to enough of today's skeptics to cause real frustration for those believers and non-believers who desire meaningful and productive dialogue. For this reason-and for the sake of real progress in believer-skeptic dialogue-I'll offer a brief appraisal of these aggressive accusatory remarks.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police define child abuse as the "maltreatment of a child whereby the survival, safety, self-esteem, growth and development of the child are endangered." It ought to go without saying that accusations of child abuse should never be thrown around lightly. Child abuse is, after all, a criminal offense. Thus if any skeptic is going to make such an allegation, he better be ready and able to use airtight logic and solid evidence to support his indictment; or else he will appear as nothing more than a sloganeering rhetorician unworthy of being taken seriously.

One problem with this accusation is that it paints all religions (or all families within a given religion) with one broad stroke of black; but without adequate justification. Sure, there may be extreme examples out there of, say, religious fideism or poor parenting, but there is no good reason to believe these are the widespread norm.

Now from a Christian perspective:

First, there is nothing in Sacred Scripture, apostolic tradition, or any other authoritative guideline from the Church that mandates religious coercion or the prohibition of inquiry within the family. As a baseline, this just shows that extremist indoctrination to the point of "maltreatment" is not the accepted mode of religious education within orthodox Christianity.

Abusive religious coercion by parents is a rarity as far as I can tell, and examples are sparse-case studies-and every scientist knows that case studies although potentially interesting are not the gold standard for drawing broad conclusions. What the anti-theist must do for his accusation of child abuse to be taken seriously is show good evidence that all religions foster the harmful indoctrination of children; or show sound evidence that particular religions do this as a matter of principle.

I agree that "forcing religion onto minors is child abuse" if by "forcing" the accuser means communicating ideas through a violent means. But teaching is a different story; forcing and teaching are not synonymous. The Oxford online dictionary defines indoctrination as "the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically." But surely this definition -inasmuch as it implies inappropriately forced belief-does not always correlate with what takes place in religious homes.

Personally speaking, I was raised in a faithful Christian home but questions about "why we believe what we believe" were never prohibited; and I was never shunned or ridiculed when I began to openly question and criticize the religious beliefs I had been taught as a child. It made for good and often fruitful conversation. Nor have I seen the stifling of religious inquiry in other homes where belief in God is paramount and worship is commonplace. The Christian faith has never discouraged "digging deeper" intellectually; the Church has always faced questions and objections head-on with great seriousness. Such willingness to enter into dialogue with those who disagree has been of the essence of Christianity from the beginning.

The Christian Church has a duty to teach what is true; and so do Christian parents. And teaching is a far cry from coercion. The more parents are convinced that some fact about the world is true, the more they are obliged to teach it as true; and the less likely it is that they will encourage their child to question it.

Indeed sometimes it is appropriate to accept a given belief uncritically. Imagine a child who learns about the molecular structure of water in science class. Most parents (I would venture to infer) acknowledge the presence of oxygen in water. They hold this belief with scientific conviction despite never seeing an H2O molecule directly with their own eyes. Now parents may not encourage their children to question the presence of oxygen in the water molecule, but that doesn't mean they won't allow their child to do so. The same goes for religious beliefs. The child must be allowed to think critically and even challenge beliefs when reasonably warranted, but they must also be taught to revere truth and follow the evidence where it leads-and this goes for scientific and religious inquiry.

The point amounts to this: parents have an obligation to teach their children the truth. If parents are convinced that certain tenets of religious faith are true then they have an obligation to teach their children those things as truths-because the cardinal rule of child-rearing is to teach children how to live in the real world.

And don't skeptical parents do the same? I hope so. Good parents teach their children what they believe to be true and, furthermore, why those explanations are the best explanations. Teaching the "whats" and "whys" is not indoctrination; it's called education.

But what about the violence associated with religion? Is that a reason to oppose or at least be wary of religious education in the home?

Perhaps in the case of radicalized religion where resultant violence is immanent. But the majority of world religions do not encourage or foster violence-that's just a fact. Frankly the over-generalized, distinction-lacking blanket statement "religion causes wars" is getting old (but unfortunately I don't think it's going anywhere so we've got to be able to address it). Yes, certain religious convictions have been the motive for some of the violence throughout history and into the modern age; but so have anti-religious convictions (to which the 20th century overwhelmingly testifies).

But much violence has also erupted in disputes about money; and land; and property. But these are not bad things in themselves. What then is common thread among all of these things? Value. Man in his pride and brokenness always carries with him the potential to get violent when he is contending for the things he values the most. What's the value of religion? Order, sanity-and hope. Religion has the potential to give life context and meaning, thus driving the former atheist C.S Lewis to write:

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

Thus just because something has the potential to cause violence does not mean that it, by its nature, causes violence. Perhaps the problem lies not in the thing man fights over, but in man himself.

Clearly a general disdain for all religions (or Christianity in particular) on the basis of violence is not reasonably warranted; for most religions do not by their nature foster violence. Unless one wants to be consistent and hold contempt for every other thing-be it money, land, property, truth-that can and has caused violent conflict down through history. But of course, no one is going to be that consistent.

At the end of the day-when we look at what really happens in the majority of Christian homes-there is no real basis for accepting the notion that raising one's children to identify as a Christian from a young age can be classified "maltreatment of a child whereby the survival, safety, self-esteem, growth and development of the child are endangered."

In the end it seems that while the universe remains a place of discovery and wonder, no parent-religious or skeptic-will ever leave their children completely un indoctrinated; for no one lives without holding uncritically to some doctrine about the real world. As we've acknowledged, some truths become so apparent, often by evidence and intuition, that criticism just becomes superfluous and unnecessary.

Skeptics ought not pretend that they do not (or would not) educate their children to believe in certain dogmas that they are certain of: dogmas like "God doesn't exist" or "don't believe in superstitions" or "only believe what can be proven with the scientific method" or "think for yourself." Again, no parent on the face of the earth can be wholly un dogmatic about the world when raising their children.

And couldn't the charge of child abuse, given the skeptics reason for opposing the religious education of minors (that religion is not evidence-based), be applied equally to the atheist parent who teaches their children that atheism is true? For atheism, despite the confident sounding anti-religious oratory that fumes from the New Atheists, is not itself evidence based. Which experiment has discounted the existence of God? Which arguments have refuted, say, the St. Thomas' five ways, the moral argument, or Leibniz's argument from contingency? There appears to be a heavy bias driving this sort of anti-religious verbiage, and G.K. Chesterton saw it in the 20th century when he wrote:

"It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism."

At the end of the day, doctrine just means truth; and any parent who does not teach their children to live according to the truth as they see it has failed. And failing to educate one's children to live in the real world in harmony with its real laws, physical and spiritual-or indoctrinating one's children to believe they can choose their own "truth" according to their own personal liking-now that's a real problem.

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On The Religious "Indoctrination" Of Children

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Perhaps one of the most bizarre yet common bits of anti-religious rhetoric that has foamed to the surface in recent years is the accusation that to raise-or "indoctrinate"-one's children in a given religion is to commit child abuse.

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( The above image is that of a jacket worn by a teacher in a West Virginia public school.)

The father of America's public education system, Horace Mann, famously quipped: " Men are cast-iron, but children are wax."

Mann knew that education was never a "value-neutral" proposition. It has always been and always will be a process that shapes not only a child's abilities, but more importantly, the child's worldview based upon the values of the educator. It was for this reason that many Americans pushed back, though unsuccessfully, against the kind of public, compulsory education Mann was championing in the early- and mid-1800s.

In 1840 a special legislative committee in Massachusetts had serious reservations about increasing government control over education. Regarding the wax-like nature of children, here's what the committee's final report had to say:

" The right to mold the political, moral, and religious opinions of ... children is a right exclusively and jealously reserved by our laws to every parent; and for the government to attempt, directly or indirectly, as to these matters, to stand in the parent's place, is an undertaking of very questionable policy. Such an attempt cannot fail to excite a feeling of jealousy, with respect to our public schools, the results of which could not but be disastrous."

Without a doubt, the kinds of activities currently taking place in Edina, Minnesota, one of the state's most celebrated districts, mirror that 175-year-old warning. What teachers are doing and administrators are condoning is very much an attempt to mold the "political, moral, and religious opinions" of children -- starting in kindergarten.

Below are a few of the articles Intellectual Takeout published recently on the topic:
Communist Clubs Are Sprouting Up in U.S. High Schools Again Wealthy Minnesota School District Treating Its Students Like Racists Elementary Students Being Indoctrinated in Minnesota's Top School District Teachers Are Abandoning Political Neutrality in Schools Not All Parents Want Their Children to be Social Justice Warriors
Sadly, Edina isn't alone. Across the country many schools are seeing similar activities taking place in the classroom. While some parents and taxpayers may approve or even seek out such ideologically driven education, it's highly doubtful that all parents and taxpayers want it for their local schools.

Further, imagine being a student with views that run contrary to those of your teacher. How hostile of a learning environment could it become?

Last November, Quinn Northup was a senior at Edina High School and a known Trump supporter when her world went a little crazy the day after the election.

"Teachers and students were openly weeping, some uncontrollably. There was hugging. People were offering words of comfort and support to one another.

'It's going to be okay...'

'Don't worry...'

'We will make it through this together...'

Northup, now a freshman at Pepperdine University, said it was perhaps the most morbid scene she'd witnessed in her young life. 'It felt like someone had died or something,' she says."

It got worse as the day went on. Quinn found herself taunted and verbally assaulted both in school and on social media. It was too much for her.

"'I had to have my mom come pick me up after third hour that day,' she said. 'I couldn't stand to walk around a school filled with both teachers and students crying and looking to me through their tears with hurtful eyes.'"

I don't blame her for ditching school. Is that really the kind of politically charged environment you would want to be in as a student? How much learning can happen when you're harassed by students and even some teachers, made to feel deplorable for your views?

Quinn Northup is hardly alone in her experiences in such an intolerant, hostile school environment. Across the country many students are also finding themselves taunted, threatened, and ostracized if they do not line up with the social justice ideology. It is truly shameful.

We were warned over 175 years ago that education could become a tool of indoctrination. Now it is undeniably being used as such. The question is what will we do about it?

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Indoctrination in American Schools: How bad is it?

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( The above image is that of a jacket worn by a teacher in a West Virginia public school.) The father of America's public education system, Horace Mann, famously quipped: " Men are cast-iron, but children are wax." Mann knew that education was never a "value-neutral" proposition.