That speech was powerful, I think more so because it was coming from someone who can back up his observations with his experience. It's difficult for the State to sanction killing and dying without othering the enemy.

Your point about psychological slavery reminds me of the blue-eyed/brown-eyed Jane Elliott experiment(the story begins at around 1 minute). Elliott, a school teacher, split the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed kids in order to teach them about discrimination. On day one, she told them that the brown-eyed people were inferior. On day two, she said the blue-eyed people were inferior. On both days, the "superior" kids were mean to the "inferior" ones. In the video, Elliott says that she learned more from the "superior" kids than the "inferior" kids because their personalities changed more. One aspect of the demonstration that I find particularly interesting is that even though the brown-eyed kids were treated inferiorly the first day and knew what that felt like, when things switched and they had the opportunity to be in power, they went along with the system and discriminated against the blue-eyed kids because it worked for them. Of course, things are more complicated outside of an elementary school classroom experiment, but the study does illustrate one variation of psychological slavery.

-- MichelleLuo - 12 Mar 2012