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Thom Hartmann: (?)= unsure of spelling
Uh...just two quick stories I wanted to share with you because I...I realize how to many Americans, to those of us who grew up on Arnold Schwartznegger action movies...and, uh, you know, John Wayne type westerns, yah know when you stick your gun in the bad guys face and he breaks down and starts blubbering, "Yeah, I did it." Yah know, whatever.
It's actually Perry Mason who was the guy who was really successful. He used psychology. Here, this is again, an article by Steven Budianski (?) in the Atlantic monthly, this was a few years ago. And he's quoting a fellow by the name of Moran (?) who was considered THE most successful interrogator of Japanese prisoners of war during WWII. The MOST successful guy. He spoke Japanese, he lived in Japan, he knew the culture. And he said, this is a quote from him, the most successful interrogator of prisoners of World War II saved...maybe helped us win the war. Saved thousands of lives. He said, "The first and most important victory is getting into the mind and heart of the prisoner and achieving an intellectual and spiritual rapport with him." Get it.
About 15 years ago. We had, maybe it was 13 years ago, remember when Schindler's List came out, the movie? We were living Atlanta at the time, I was running an ad agency in Atlanta. And we had living with us a German exchange student, a young man by the name of Oliver. A very nice kid, I think he was about 15, 16 years old. He was about the same age as our son. And we took Oliver, who had been through the German public schools and was a high school student. We took him with us to see Schindler's List and about half way through the movie Oliver just breaks down.
And throughout the rest of the movie this kid, and I don't want to say tough football player. I mean he was a smart kid, he was also, he was a kind of All American German kid---if you know what I mean. This kid sobbed all the way through that movie and for an hour as we drove home, as we got to the house. And, and finally when he could get to talk about it...he said you know, "I knew we did that stuff. We learned that in school. But I didn't know we did that stuff; until I saw the movie. I didn't realize that it was people." I'm paraphrasing, you know, 15 year old memory, words to that affect. I remember when we lived in Germany we used to, we took our kids on, on day trips or we'd get a one week rail pass, or whatever and travel around Europe. It was, we had sold the business, it was a year off for us. And we went to Da Hao (?), the uh, the labor camp in Munich. Where Dr. Mengela (?)was performing his experiments on people.
And walking through Da Hao with our children, and looking at pictures of the people, stacked up, the bodies stacked up to be put in the crematorium and walking through the furnace. I wonder, not even if the day will come, but when the day will come. That a generation of Americans, perhaps not even born yet will walk through a museum at Baghram (?) air force base in Afghanistan, or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, or Guantanamo in Cuba, or perhaps one of the hidden sites inside the United States or in Poland or in Czechoslavakia and it will be our Da Hao.
And we will walk through those with our children saying, "Yes, this is what we did. This is what George Bush, Roberto Gonzalez, and Dick Cheney did. And we are ashamed." And if our children 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now will watch a movie about what happened. A Schindler's List, about what happened, about the 4.5 million Iraqi refugees, about children prostituting themselves because their parents are dead. And will break down in tears.
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