The Perfect Automatons

Bob Newman

Listening to the high school teacher’s indoctrination session, I was swept back into the 1980s and in my mind’s eye could see myself standing before the huddled, dazed, half frozen students deep in the forested mountains of Maine aboard the U.S. Navy’s remote and secretive Redington Training Facility. My uniform hat was adorned with a red and gold crest, in the middle of which was the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. Thinking for a moment at the time that I was a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, I considered how odd a job I had at the moment, playing the part of a communist military officer.

I was giving an indoctrination speech at one of the four Department of Defense Survival-Evasion-Resistance-Escape (SERE) schools, using classic propaganda as a means by which I hoped to achieve my goal of convincing some of the students that America was the aggressor in the Cold War and was an evil nation that had committed a great deal of genocide and other forms of hideous abuse on the poorer peoples of the world.

Returning to March 2006 and the comfortable confines of my library, I noted how Jay Bennish, a supposed geography teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, was using precisely the same indoctrination techniques on his students that I used nearly 20 years earlier, except I was teaching my students how to recognize and defend against propaganda as a tool of indoctrination, whereas Bennish was using the techniques to actually indoctrinate his students. Speaking as if what he was saying were undeniable facts, he accosted his students with demonstrable falsehoods, half truths, misinformation, disinformation and a smattering of truth to work over his mostly hapless charges.

But a noted difference was how I was feeling sorry for Bennish’s students and had not felt sorry for mine.

Why?

My students were in the practical application and testing phase of their training. They had already been taught how to recognize indoctrination techniques and were now expected to use those skills to defend themselves against this insidious process, which American military men first experienced as prisoners of war during the Korean War. And they were men, not children.

Conversely, Bennish’s students have not been trained to recognize the ruse and have not been given tools and techniques to ward off the tactic. Defenseless, most would be putty in the man’s hands. And they are children who tend to be naturally rebellious and believe anything their teacher says because they are taught from Day One that the teacher is always right. Perfect victims, in other words, which was what Bennish was counting on.

On the “Gunny Bob Show,” students at Overland High School and teachers there and at other schools called in to say how such goings on are commonplace in our schools. One teacher told of another teacher who attempts to indoctrinate his 3rd grade class with leftist thought.

Sean Allen, the student in Bennish’s world geography class who recorded the anti-America rant, said on FOX News Channel that Bennish’s class consists of 20% geography and 80% Bennish’s political opinions.

When I interviewed Cherry Creek School District public information officer (PIO) Tustin Amole, she assured me that the schools monitor classrooms and teachers to make sure they are teaching properly, sticking to the approved syllabus and not abusing their students. But she also said, “We can’t fix what we don’t know is broken.”

If the teachers were in fact being effectively monitored, the district would have known what Bennish was up to. The reality of the situation is that teachers are not being effectively monitored and now the district is scrambling for cover.

The children are not to blame here because as such, most don’t know any better. Bennish, his alleged supervisors at Overland High School, and Dr. Monte C. Moses, superintendent of Cherry Creek School District, are responsible for this abusive outrage. Overland High school principal Jana Frieler demonstrated reprehensible dereliction of duty in allowing Bennish to get away with such disgusting behavior. Moses failed to make sure Freiler was doing her job. The total lack of leadership demonstrated by Moses and Freiler reveals two people in charge who couldn’t lead a Marine private to a free six-pack of beer.

And all the while, the children pay the price.

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Bob Newman, a decorated, retired US Marine, is host of the “Gunny Bob Show” on Newsradio 850 KOA in Denver, and host of “Anger-Management Hour” on 630 KHOW, also in Denver. A ground-combat veteran, he is the director of international security & counterterrorism services for The GeoScope Group and is the military science & terrorism columnist for The Denver Daily News. He can be reached at bobnewman@clearchannel.com.

bobnewman@clearchannel.com