Click here to access article by William Astore from TomDispatch. (Note: the article is prefaced by a commentary by Tom Engelhardt. You may want to skip this by scrolling down to Astore's article.
According to the website William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF).... "He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology."
This is a confession of how a US military officer broke through the shackles of brainwashing (see definition #2 here) that he received mostly effectively through futuristic science fiction films to see who the real bad guys are. His story also offers, in my opinion, another excellent illustration of the weakest link in the Empire's rule: the ordinary people they depend on to sustain their drive to dominate everyone on our planet with so many disastrous effects. Any genuine revolutionary movement must engage in efforts to convince people, especially in the critical area of law enforcement, of the unjust and immoral realities of ruling class governance.
Yes, there really is brainwashing, but not the fictional kind that our masters alleged was used by the Chinese and North Koreans (see definition #1 here) to explain away what our masters claimed were false testimonies of veterans who confessed about the US use of biological warfare (BW) against the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War. Of course the use of BW was a major war crime, and no doubt it has been dubbed the "forgotten war" because of this war crime not to mention all the other nefarious reasons for the US interference in another country's civil war. (Officially the UN fought this war, but at that time the UN was under the complete control of the US.) Our ruling masters made a massive effort to cover up their war crime by utilizing every medium of indoctrination at their disposal--corporate media, books and movies about "brainwashing", authority figures such as professors, threats to returning veterans who knew that we used BW, etc.
Fortunately after more than 50 years of this coverup of a major war crime, you can now learn the convincing truth by reading Dave Chaddock's This Must Be The Place in which he assembles a massive amount of information to conclusively prove that we, or rather, the US government did precisely that and lied about it.
Similarly Astore's story is another testimony of how people can break through their own brainwashing to realize who the really bad guys are--they have been us, as in "US of A".
