Cute Naivité

The nationwide veterans’ advocacy organization the Circle of Friends for American Veterans announced today it is throwing its support behind the new movie “September Dawn” and urging the American public to go see it when it reaches the big screen on May 4th of this year.

Starring Academy Award winning actor Jon Voight, the film centers around the real life massacre of 120 men, women and children in Utah on September 11, 1857. The first known act of religious terrorism on U. S. soil was committed by a group of Mormons to a wagon train of settlers who were relocating to California.

“Individuals are not born terrorists,” says Major Brian Hampton, USAR (ret) President of the Circle of Friends. “People become terrorists because they are indoctrinated. We can win this war on terror by winning the ideological war through psychological operations that wins the battle of ideas, winning over the young people around the globe, reducing recruitment and retention of converts.”

Though trained and deployed to Vietnam to be a small unit infantry platoon leader, Hampton was assigned as Chief of Communications of the 4th Psychological Operations Group in Vietnam in 1969 because of an advanced degree in communications. The 4th PSYOP Group was widely credited with convincing 40,000 soldiers who were waging a civil war on their countrymen to lay down their arms and be re-assimilated into peaceful society.

Circle of Friends for American Veterans President, Brian Hampton is also publisher of the nationwide publication, the VETERANS’ VISION. In 2002, Hampton came out in his publication for replacing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein without military action, in an article entitled, “Toppling Saddam Without Casualties?!”(pdf) Hampton contends that psychological warfare which generates political destabilizing operations have been successful in such countries as Poland, East German Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and South Africa, among others.

The veterans’ organization believes the new film can be a catalyst to promote a timely dialogue on the nation’s strategy to combat religious intolerance and terrorism. The advocacy group believes that fanatical religious terrorism is fanned by proselytizing sects that indoctrinate new converts with misconceptions about groups of people.
The organization believes that effective mass communications can alter perceptions, which changes the reality of behavior.
-Excerpt & Violent Rehash of Press Release