Hollywood plays a vital part in concocting the trigger-happy bogeyman Americans are always too eager to declare war upon, and to condition us into accepting their version of reality.

The bogeyman is dehumanized and made sub-human by the state’s propagandists, both essential elements in conditioning the populace into accepting destruction and murder of the enemy.

Now we have a newly minted enemy, the Arab bogeyman.

Years of conditioning by Hollywood vilifying Arabs had jump-started the American hatred of the Islamic culture, even before 9/11, planting the seeds of hatred and xenophobia that would fully sprout on the day catalyzing events unleashed a new American century and Americans were introduced to the dreaded Arab terrorist.

The dreaded Arab bogeyman, concocted as terrorist through years of state sponsored propaganda and manipulation, only fed into the historical hatred of people of color by xenophobic majorities.   more »

Memo to Democratic voters: If you missed Tuesday night's debate on MSNBC -- the most explosive event of this endless pre-primary season -- troll through YouTube, throw yourself on the mercy of friends with Tivo, stalk the network's Web site.

Do anything to watch the first hour plus the last 10 minutes of this fandango in Philly, this duel at Drexel, this Democratic donnybrook that may well define the race.

The tag-team questioning of Brian Williams and Tim Russert yielded not only heat (perhaps inevitable as we reach the highly combustible point in the campaign calendar) but also light.

Not only light interludes (Joe Biden's epic put-down of Rudy Giuliani: "There are only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11"), but also enlightening moments that illuminated the choices facing the Democrats.   more »

This is the tale of Bush’s vanishing power. He's so predictable! He needs a war, he desperately needs an enemy, and he wants to refurbish his vociferous threats against Evil. Who is Evil? It doesn’t matter. He has to prove he's still got the cojones.

Once upon a time it was Saddam Hussein and his unseen stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Today it is necessary to replace the headless Saddam, and nobody is a better choice than the president of Iran.

Bush is a weakening leader, a lame duck, as they say in the U.S. Each day is one day less in power. The best way to deal with Vanishing Power Syndrome is to manufacture a new Evil.

Who is better than Ahmadinejad? He looks like a perfect stereotype of a Washington-made Evil: he is from the Middle East, he is Muslim, his country has oil, he leads a nuclear program and he displays an aggressive rhetoric.   more »

The sex industry is assuming massive proportions in Southeast Asia. Economic incentives and hardships fuel the growth of the sex sector. Migrant women, children are particularly vulnerable to commercial sexual exploitation.

More recently, there are reports of a similar situation in Mayanmar. This has become linked to the West's sanctimony over the repressive regime in that country. The following article is an example of 'soft' propaganda against the regime.

The article fails to point out that child prostitution is common in Many SE Asian countries, as well as countries in the west.

Child prostitution risks growing as poverty and unemployment strain family income and contribute to the expanding ranks of street children who are an increasingly common sight on the streets of cities worldwide.

It is not just a phenomenon in Myanmar. Bear this in mind while reading the article.   more »

The implicit comparison of enemies in urban warfare, today largely Iraqis and Afghans, to animals that are hunted and killed as quarry. As Lethin had unabashedly noted, "We identified a need to ensure our marines were being the hunters ... Hunting is more than just the shooting. It's finding your game."

That military men might indulge in this sort of description was perhaps less than surprising, given the degree to which "hunting" the enemy has been on the lips of America's commander-in-chief.

George W Bush has, on many occasions, invoked the image: "We're hunting them down, one at a time" he likes to say of, for instance, al-Qaeda terrorists, or "we're smoking them out", as he said in November 2001.

In fact, the president needed no big-game hunters to coach him on his optics or anything else. He's talked incessantly of hunting humans - in speeches to American troops, at photo ops with foreign leaders, at family fundraisers, even in the midst of remarks about homeownership.

Nor is there anything new about Americans treating racial and ethnic enemies as the equivalent of animals to be abused or killed.   more »