Students in the Military

I'm grading final essays right now and the one that really scared me was written by a student who is a cadet in the US Military. The topic of the essay is the Spanish-American war. The student in question paid no attention to anything we discussed in class and decided to regale me with the most egregious propaganda I have ever encountered. God, how are these poor kids brainwashed!

According to the student, the US entrance into the war between Cuba and Spain was beneficial to everybody. It was good for the Cubans because the US "helped" them gained independence. Of course, after the independence was gained, the US never left but it was simply because it was so obvious that the Cubans werent capable of running their own country. It was beneficial for Spain as well because the US helped to alleviate their burden of having to run a country located so far from Spain. Sadly, the Spanish people didn't recognize immediately that the US was only trying to help them by entering into a war with them. And that happened because the Spanish weren't very smart and didn't know what was good for them. I kid you not, all this was written by the student completely in earnest.

As to the historical facts that contradict his brainwashed world-view, he simply skips them. USS Maine somehow misteriously exploded all by itself. The Monroe Doctrine also mysteriously applies to the case of Spain's colonies, the colonies this country had possessed for centuries before the Monroe Doctrine was adopted.

In short, the entire essay is an example of a completely unbelievable instance of propaganda that has no interest in common sense, historic reality, and logic. It saddens me to think that everything we discussed in class during the semester, everything we read, everything we saw made no impression on this kid whatsoever. At the end of the course, he still reproduces the same ideological rubbish that he was fed by the people interested in sending him to die in the name of economic interests that are incomprehensible to him.

Lying Anti-Women Doctors

So instead of just plastering his walls with "I hate women and that's why I'm an anti-choicer", this doctor prefers to bully women who come to his office with these lying pictures created by fanatical women-hating anti-choicers and used by doctors who have no idea what it means to respect a patient.

The funniest thing is that these so-called doctors would not be able to make a living without women. They need us for their livelihood but they hate us all the same. They use these vile intimidation techniques in hopes that if you show these cartoonishly stupid pictures of fetuses - that have no connection with reality whatsoever - women would be bullied into feeling bad for controlling their own bodies.

I have no idea where this particular "doctor" was educated but he must have been a pretty sucky student. If he had actually tried absorbing the material offered to him, he would know that the stages of development of a fetus look like what you see in the picture to the right, and nothing like his garish cartoon.


Why don't we see this, a lot more realistic picture on the walls of our gynecologists' offices? Why should we be exposed to lies and humiliations when we go to a see a doctor? What would we think of a cardiologist who put up the following picture on his wall to illustrate what your heart looks like after a heart attack:

If we were confronted by this silly cartoon in a cardiologist's office, we'd say he is an illiterate quack, wouldn't we? So why should we hold Ob-Gyns to a different standard? Why should we be fed lies right in the doctor's office? Is it too much to expect that I doctor would come to work to treat patients, not to brainwash them?

If a doctor greets you wth lies the second you enter his office, how can you trust anything he says?

Why is it that women cannot be left in peace - without somebody rushing over to hector, brainwash, humiliate and patronize us - even we seek medical care?

A C-section Makes You a Failure

The "only-a-vaginal-birth-will-make-you-a-real-woman" discourse does everything it can to make women who have C-sections feel like something is wrong with them. One way to achieve that is to link the words "C-section" and "failure" in women's minds. Usually, it's done thorugh constant reiteration of "Don't think you are necessarily a failure for having a C-section!" In this way, the idea is planted in people's minds that having a C-section is somehow related to feeling as a failure. Women who would have never connected these things might start linking them in their minds after being brainwashed in this manner during their entire pregnancy.

Here is an example of this ideological device being used by the web-site called www.surgery.com, the motto of which is "Helping Surgery Patients every Day": "Undergoing a c-section may also inflict psychological distress on the mother, beyond hormonal mood swings and postpartum depression ("baby blues"). The woman may feel disappointment and a sense of failure for not experiencing a vaginal delivery." This, of course, is completely ridiculous. Why should a woman feel like a "failure" because of having a medical condition (such as, for example, a low placenta) that requires a C-section? What is so particularly fulfilling about a vaginal birth that a C-section cannot provide? Can't women who deliver vaginally have postpartum depressions? 

But nobody cares about the truth or the objective facts. The only goal of this idiotic propaganda is to create a connection between C-sections and a sense of failure in people's minds. This is absolutely disgusting.


P.S. The picture has nothing to do with the post but it's the building where I work and I love it so much that I wanted to put it here to offset the horrible impressions this disgusting brainwashing leaves in my mind.