More food for thought concerning American prejudices

A commenter to my last post brought up the American government's dehumanization campaign against the people of Germany and Japan ("huns" and "gooks"), which was used to prevent American soldiers from considering the humanity of the those they were sent to kill. It was successful to the point that the majority of America cheered when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, destroying millions of innocent Japanese civilians in the most horrific way. Similar propaganda helped to fuel the war machine during WWI, and the same tactics were again used when the U.S. was at war with Vietnam. Today it is the peoples of the Middle East who face a deliberate building up of prejudices and dehumanization, and the puppet mainstream media is focusing especially on Iran and Iranians at the moment.

A number of the people groups this propaganda has successfully turned American prejudices against have been dark skinned- easy targets, sadly, to racist tendencies. And yet the the degree to which the propaganda has worked, first against the Germans in WWI and WWII and now against Iranians, both of whom are in most cases not easily discernable by skin color as different from the average white American, to me shows how easily Americans can be led to grab onto prejudices and suspicions of other cultures/peoples, even without the skin color factor that usually helps such things along. It's quite scary, frankly.

And yet if Americans could be somehow be made to put aside pride in their own culture as superior to those of the rest of the world and actually be open to seeing the beauty and refinement of other cultures, how well would the propaganda work then? It would be much harder to dehumanize the everchanging "enemy" to anywhere near the same extent. But as things stand now, Americans are all too glad to embrace the idea of their own superiority and dismiss the rest of the world as less human or at least less deserving of happy, fulfilling lives. I think people in this country truly need a less nationalistic perspective before they destroy more of the world in their ignorance and overblown fears.