Both Sides of the Fence – Hearts & Minds

Military doctrine or propaganda
Force alone is an insufficient objective
To win the hearts and minds of the populace.
We want to be loved and admired

There is a confusion here of meaning
Wining Hearts and Minds
Counterinsurgency strategy or social change
The H&M mantra is used indiscriminately
Rhetoric without understanding

“The ultimate victory will depend
On the hearts and minds of the people
Who actually live out there". Lyndon Johnson

“The answer lies not in pouring more troops
into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds
of the Malayan People" – General Templer (1952)

And the other tradition
Brown vs Board of Education -
“That may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
The irrevocability perhaps of past wrong
And a need to do better

A campaign for change, persuasion
Hearts and  Minds Network – Visit our website
Hearts and Minds, more than a bookstore - Unabashedly Christian
Hearts and Minds – Information for Change
The United States has great hopes
"Hearts and Minds" is a complete original graphic novella
And an Oscar wining documentary

What is essential here is making the population choose
"Enable” (persuade, coerce, co-opt) the population
To make an irrevocable choice
It is primarily through hearts that minds are won
Because they are given no choice

“If you grab the enemy by the balls,
His hearts and minds will follow” – General Westmoreland
Campaigning for Hearts and Minds will be indispensable
Hearts and minds working together
“Speak softly and carry a big stick” - Teddy Rossevelt

This heart-and-minds myth
Sorry, but winning means killing.
Wishful thinking about multilayered conflicts
Claiming a desire to win hearts and minds
Is either a numbing platitude
Or a euphemism for killing

That hearts and minds means
Being loved is bullshit
It’s a phase loved by headline editors
To attract our attention, it’s a slogan
"Buy War Bonds" or "Just Do It"

Bush uses it in the Brown vs Board sense
He only pretends to be militant
At heart he is no soldier
“We will strive to change hearts and minds
with compassion and decency”
“Their spirit lives on in the hearts and minds
of a new generation”
“We will work with decency and respect
To change hearts and minds, one person at a time”

Dick Cheney knows its military meaning well
He’s the one who has made it the metaphor
Of US imperialism our mantra: “we are in a struggle
For the ‘hearts and minds’ of people
In a troubled region of the world
The extremists ...are not really trying to win the hearts and minds,
But to paralyze them, to seize power by force,
To keep power by intimidation, and to build an empire by fear.”

But Dick, that is precisely what your  mantra
Means and you know it
You're talking out of both sides of his mouth again
The old them or us – the evil other
Do unto them befroe they do unto you
You old Cold Warrior

The dispassionate mind it seems
That makes decisions by weighing the evidence
And reasoning to the most valid conclusions –
bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work
          Or is allowed to work


QUOTE: A thousand trivialities push themselves to the front, our lying habits of everyday speech and thought are foremost telling us that ‘that’ is what ‘they’ want to hear – William Carlos Williams