In Europe, Propaganda Starts in Kindergarten; Threats Continue Throughout Life

Back in December, we brought you a report on a number of books in France that decried the (mainly anti-American) propaganda at work in France's school system (to which Jean-Paul Brighelli's The Cretin Factory has been added).

From Germany comes a report on a children's website that is anti-American through and through. Helles Köpfchen features a piece that rips into George W Bush over the Iraq war, a piece in which, unless I am mistaken, the name Saddam Hussein does not appear once!

And then there are the links: It features a link to the GeoLino website (sort of a National Geographic for Kids) which makes hay of the "fact" that "Bush has few friends". But it gets better: Helles Köpfchen links a piece on 9-11 that is titled "the WTC conspiracy" and containing "20 lessons from September 11", from questions about the identity of the hijackers becoming known so quickly to the use of Afghanistan for a pipeline.


Apart from that, German kids get their info from articles like Terminator Allows Tookie to Die, with photo captions such as The children's book author Stanley Williams, nicknamed Tookie, was executed on Tuesday at 9:01 am with a poison injection. That's right: the person executed was a children's book author!

In other words, kids in Europe are well on their way to a (mental) place where they distrust, fear, or scoff at America (while realizing that they themselves — conveniently enough — are the planet's wise and rational visionaries).

And to top it all, the leaders of Helles Köpfchen have been insulting the German blogs exposing this and threatening to fine one critic 5,000 euros every day for using their logo.

Head to Medienkritik for the appropriate links and to find where to contact the avant-garde visionaries involved in educating Germany's youth.

Update: In the Bush article, the Helles Köpfchen website make a big deal about the fact that "of course, we are grateful to the Americans for having (among other things) defeated Hitler" (followed by the ubiquitous "But"). However, as far as I can tell, the only allied soldiers that are ever identified in Ingo Fischer's Hitler article are the Soviets. Everybody else, the Americans, the English, etc (except for the paragraphs detailing the various declarations of war), etc, are only known collectively, consistently, and relatively anonymously as the Allies.