The Pledge to the Flag is bullcrap. Line by line analysis.

[AZLD4Candidate]

17. No, it was trumped up paranoia. Most people believe what communism says. It's those with

power that don't. Those with power, money, and influence learned after WW2. If the boogie man is a person (Hitler), people die and there is no boogieman. But if you make the boogieman a nebulous idea that can evolve and change with the times, you can have people believe anything especially when you put phobia-level fear into them.

Communism was a red herring and will always be a red herring. The war machine loved the profits of WW2 and needed that to continue but without the bloodshed. Communism became the things to fear and since it's an idea and not a person, it can last forever.

It was all propaganda by those who had the ability to push it. Hell, by 1960, Hitler's murdering buddy Francisco Franco was politically rehabilitated because he was anti-Communist.

We were taught that the communists had every intention of taking over the world, and the U.S. had to do everything in its power to keep that from happening. That included opposing communism in any country where it made an appearance and supporting those governments that opposed it, along with their leaders, no matter how authoritarian and undemocratic they might be in their own right. It was a very black and white point of view; communists were the "bad guys," and all others were seen as the "good guys," despite the fact that some of them were very bad indeed.

Two quotes about that:

Voltaire: Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Jean-Luc Picard: The road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think.

It wasn't until the Pentagon Papers where people really stopped believing everything the government said. Vietnam and all the lies with that starting with the Gulf of Tonkin made people realize the Cold War was built on fabrications.

Why do you think there has been a concerted effort since 1983 with the publication of that awful A Nation At Risk to destroy the arts and humanities? Arts make you feel empathy. Humanities make you see the world as it is, not as you want it to be.

Destroy critical thought, make jobs all about education, and you create good little worker bees that are just smart enough to do the jobs and work the machines and just dumb enough to accept the lousy pay, longer hours, horrible working condition, the end of overtime, the weakening of worker's comp law, the destruction of labor union, the vanishing pension that disappear when you go to collect, and the move to privatize Social Security and Medicare.

As my quote from Carlin says: It's a big club and you ain't in it. Well, that's what the Cold War was.

Fuck the pledge.