Dept. of Defense Mechanisms! Michael Pugliese
http://www.ieer.org/latest/nptq&a2.html
>...Question: I wanted to comment on the question of psychological
illusion of security and invulnerability that the national missile
defense gives us because I think it is very important to expose
and to make the unconscious conscious. Robert Jay Lifton is a
pioneer in this field. He's a psychiatrist and he did a lot of
work on nuclear illusions. These are ways of mystifying us into
thinking that things that are dangerous, are really good for
us, and are going to protect us. There is an illusion of safety,
an illusion that we can prepare, an illusion of stoicism.
I also have a colleague, Steven Kull, who wrote Minds at War. In the early 1980s, he interviewed high level officials on both sides. He said that nobody believed scientifically that Star Wars would work, but that
Reagan loved the idea so much because it really appealed to the American viscera. We were feeling so vulnerable and we just wanted more than anything to feel invulnerable, that we had this imaginary shield protecting us. It's very seductive and it's a way of psychologically seducing us into that. I think that it is important to expose that. Steven Kull also said that, instead of calling it the Department of Defense, we should call it the Department of Defense Mechanisms. I think there is a kind of mega-mission creed that we have these things and have them in place. It is harder to get out of it the longer we're in it. People don't like to feel they are being deceived or duped and we should think of psychological interventions, ways of looking at this, in addition to the facts, to interpret the facts.