Hiroo Onoda, a former Japanese army intelligence officer who was stationed on Lubang Island in the Philippines at the end of World War II, wasn’t told of the end of the war, and then spent the next 29 years fighting people whom he thought were enemy soldiers or spies.
With a July 21 poll revealing that half the country still thinks Iraq had WMD, the Associated Press asks several experts why this myth persists. One answer: people tend to become “independent of reality.”
This is not without historical precendent. Pictured above is Hiroo Onoda, a former Japanese army officer who was stationed on a Phillipines island at the end of World War II and who kept on fighting until 1974 because no one told him the war had ended.
Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?
Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in
People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.
—Posted by Blair Golson.
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