"We all needed to learn to accept orders that made no sense."
Imposing domination make you feel unsafe
Here are a few excerpts from Thomas Karat’s SaltCube Analytics interview with Daneil Klein, former tank commander for Israel & the West Bank.
Psychological Programming: Breaking down the Self & Critical Thinking
Source: Thomas Karat: SaltCubeAnalytics
Going really going to the military was for me one of the most disillusioning aspects of the whole story. And for the first eight months, I was so gung-ho about the army. I was drinking the Kool-Aid at a whole another level. Straight to command school.
And after command school, I was sent straight to officer school. I was really, really in it.
Chapter 9: West Bank Reality: Checkpoints & Control
The first day where they sent me to officer school, I quit because we got a book and we were supposed to memorize all of the lists of the previous military commanders. All of this information that felt to me like propaganda. And why are we glorifying these generals? Why are we glorifying these commanders? What is the relevance of me knowing all of this military history?
Right? This is not what I, you know, I thought that this was supposed to be this, you know, modern project where we’re here for the safety of the Jewish people, but I realized that they were just feeding me all of this information in which I had to somehow imagine and believe that these commanders were somehow holier than the rest of us, right? So somehow aspirational.
1:04:46
But that started going deeper into how I recognized that they were programming us in the army from day one, which is my commanders were either my age or some of them were younger. But from the day you enter the military, they start breaking you down.
Breaking down self and ability to think critically
First of all, breaking down your sense of self and your ability to critically think and your ability to use judgment and your ability to to or your capacity I should say. They developed your capacity to not only hold absurdity but to follow through on orders that were absurd. And very often the orders and the things that you had to do were just so preposterous if you use common sense. But they were often given by people that were very clearly sadistic megalomaniacs in in you know in the real sense of the word. And so this starts from day one.
And we all needed to learn to accept that orders made no sense.
That this system didn’t have your best interest at heart. The system had the systems best interest at heart. And with all of that being said, you still needed to do what you needed to do. Asking questions, for the most part, was completely useless.
You just need to learn to go with the madness.
1:07:35
My actions of imposing domination made feel unsafe
sense of of unease. What I didn’t recognize at the time is that that sense of unease was was being you know I was being reflected back at myself. Right?
The idea that I was imposing on other people this sense of domination is of course what made me feel unsafe. Not that I was inherently unsafe but that my actions were creating the re were creating this this reality of unsafety.
And I couldn’t I put the name on it back then. I couldn’t recognize that what it is that I was doing was first of all my own unsafety that was being projected back at me because my actions were creating this.
There was always a sense of what does it mean to make your presence known to another person. And then I would start to look at the other pieces of it, which is I would see these pill boxes and then I would think back to the the images that I saw of the Holocaust and I realized these look this this all looks the same. It looks the same. Why do we have German shepherds? Didn’t Why do we have these German shepherd units walking along a fence with a pillbox and we’re asking people for their papers? Show me your papers. show me your papers.
And this doesn’t even take into account the deeper layers of taking their biometrics and hooking their biometrics up to the AI systems. I mean, these are the levels where it starts to get into the complete and total dystopia that we don’t even realize that we’re again that the cog is creating this this machine that can this laboratory that can be replicated just being in it. You do what you have to do. this is the mission, this is for our safety, we need to make our presence known. But through this experience, that’s when I started to kind of have this bigger picture of what was happening and what this looks like and putting the images side by side. I really remember looking at the pillbox, pulling up the picture, pulling it up in Germany and wondering what is happening here.
“The System has absolutely no interest in people that see through it and that don’t want to participate”
1:12:51 something interesting which is there was a deep fear for me when I when I initially told them that I’m not coming to reserve duty. Am I going to go to prison? How does this work? You’re now going up against the system.
But I actually learned that the system has absolutely no interest in people that see through it and that don’t want to participate. And once I told them, “Sorry, I’ll see you later,” they they just cut me loose. And there was absolutely no friction there.
QUESTIONS:
In addition to the military, have you experienced or heard of government, religious, or corporate environments that broke down or discouraged critical thinking? What would happen if 30% of employees turned on their critical thinking and shared their thoughts widely?
What if there were an invented “holiday”, like “Talk like a Pirate day”, named “Absurdity Day” in which people posted the ways life is absurd.
Elsewhere:
Thomas Karat: SaltCubeAnalytics Substack
Daniel Klein: personal site, book, donation