Propaganda as Entertainment

This is Steven Petrick posting.

I continue to be amazed at the things about the U.S. Military that I did not know which show up in TV shows.

Recently a TV show revealed that, apparently, U.S. military forces during Gulf War I (Desert Shield/Desert Storm) traveled with large quantities of chemical weapons. Further, we apparently penetrated well into Iraq during Gulf War I.

This has to be true, because the writers had a former U.S. colonel confess to the main characters of the show that his force was outnumbered by an Iraqi force, and to save it, he launched a surprise chemical assault on the Iraqi town the Iraqi force was in and killed them all, including all of the civilians.

I know there are a lot of writers for the entertainment media who hate the U.S. military, and a lot of producers and others who cheerfully go along with this concept. Plot-lines constantly appear that tar members of the U.S. military far more than reality.

Note, I am not saying that there have not been instances in the U.S. military where people have done the wrong thing, or even committed crimes (the recent completion of the trial of the man who killed 16 Iraqi citizens for example), but in our own entertainment U.S. military personnel are often the go-to people for villains, and there is no standard of reality, but these shows become fixated in the minds of people watching who do not know any better and it becomes a common knowledge that (as an example) U.S. troops used chemical weapons against Iraqis in the First Gulf War.