
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993                   TAG: 9305240243
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: C-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

ASSIGNING DEMONS OF THE DAY

I WOULD like to note a little-recognized strategy of our government and media: Tell the people whom to hate.

The public is instructed through magazines, television and newspapers that David Koresh was a demon, a child abuser and religious kook. (Federal offenses?) And had he been captured and imprisoned, we would all smile with relief.

Usually our assigned demons are foreign. Dutifully, we hated Germans and Japanese during World War II, then Koreans and Vietnamese. Later we obediently hated Castro, Marcos, Gadhafi, Hussein, Noriega and others, especially all Communists. Remember Reagan's phrase, "the Evil Empire"?

Now that we are not at war with a foreign enemy, Americans still require a demon to hate. Will we now use tanks to attack all cults that are suspected of child abuse and gun violations?

The effect of demon hatred is that it destabilizes the population, who then are unable to combine forces to act positively to solve domestic problems. These include gay-bashings and racial injustices, other results of internal hate programs learned within families from one generation to the next.

It is ironic that we are observing the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto disaster when Nazi tanks and artillery exterminated a community of more than 40,000 Jews. Those Germans learned their hate lessons well.

I am not optimistic that the surviving jailed Davidians will see freedom any time soon. The government is so powerful that the public will be instructed to wish the worse for them. DORIS G. WALLACE CHRISTIANSBURG

by CNB