War never changes Blog Post 5

 For government officials who will never have themselves or their family members boots in a war on foreign soil, war is good. At the same time for capitalist weapons and defense manufacturers who also will never have to be in a war on foreign soil war is good. So if war is good for the politicians and the rich it only makes sense that they would work so hard to silence the loud anti war voices of the populace. To do this they would employ many tactics aimed at making you change your stance on war with disinformation or be so ignorant to the facts of war that you don't question what they are doing.

One famous campaign the government had under the nixon administration was to associate certain groups of people with certain ideals. For instance John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon once famously said “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” This method of negative association is not as present today but what we see now is that those who support war are patriots who love their country and anyone who opposes hates the country. When you look at this past example of how far our government would go to silence the voices of those that would oppose them if only makes sense that they would continue to employ these methods to this day. In addition to that they would also have gotten better at hiding it from the public which is why it is so important that we have good journalist who can uncover these stories and put an end to the governments wrong doings

Sources

https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past-is-never-dead/drug-war-confessional

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2020/effect-war-economic-growth

https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterpham/2017/11/06/is-war-good-for-economies/?sh=1a12932b4d9d